Techart Conference

Mihaela Mihailova 

■ Abstract

Since the initial release of the DALL-E text-to-image model in 2021, generative AI tools have permeated every stage of digital animation production, from concept art and previsualization to editing and post-production work. My talk examines AI’s formal and ideological impact on the production, consumption, and study of animated media. It analyzes the emergent aesthetics of algorithmic animation through a close reading of AI-assisted films, online content, and gallery installations and their reception. It evaluates AI’s advantages and limitations as a production tool and its effects on animation labor, with particular attention to authorship and copyright concerns and the anti-AI labor movements of recent years. It also addresses cultural discourses surrounding AI’s rapid and largely unregulated entry into filmmaking, including public and industry debates on the quality, dubious ethics, and misleading marketing of automated animation. 

My talk argues that AI tools can be generative for animation artists and animation scholars through the questions they raise about intentionality, creative control, labor automation, and the value of craft in the algorithmic age. While espousing a critical, rather than a techno-optimistic, view of AI’s ongoing transformation of the various landscapes of global digital content, this presentation advocates for a nuanced evaluation of the artistic significance of AI’s incorporation into animation filmmaking.

■ Bio

Mihaela Mihailova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), winner of the Norman McLaren/Evelyn Lambart Award for Best Edited Collection in Animation. She has published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, [in]Transition, Flow, and Kino Kultura. She has also contributed chapters to Animating Film Theory (with John MacKay), Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function, The Animation Studies Reader, and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema. Dr. Mihailova serves as editor of the open-access journal Animation Studies (https://oldjournal.animationstudies.org/) and as president of the Society for Animation Studies. Her current book project, Synthetic Creativity: Deepfakes in Contemporary Media, was recently awarded an NEH grant.