AI is now “non-optional” for creators but studios must decide their ethics and boundaries before they plug it into pipelines, industry leaders have warned.
Speaking on a panel about Keeping Things Creative in an AI World, Dr Florian Block, R&D Lead for AI and Immersive at dock10, told the audience that sitting out the technology is no longer realistic. “Whether you’re a sceptic or you’re someone who’s excited, you really need to use it,” he said. “There’s no way you can compete without it.”
Block was joined on stage at the Manchester Animation Festival by consultant and former Aardman Animations Executive Creative Director Daniel Efergan, and Vasil Shotarov, Lead R&D Engineer at Blue Zoo, in a session chaired by Alexandra Balazs, Managing Director at Prolific North.
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Efergan said the AI debate in animation “starts as a morally and legally complex conversation”, from the training data used to build models through to questions of copyright and IP. He warned that both complacency and blind adoption carry risks. “If you do nothing, that’s a really bad idea,” he said. “If you throw yourself in blindly without an anchor of what’s really important to you, it’s also quite dangerous.”
Efergan urged studios to work out their values first, then build AI policies around them – and pushed back hard on the idea that AI should replace the creative process. “There is something terrifying about ‘prompt equals animation’,” he said, arguing instead for “lots of interesting inputs” that produce “lots of useful bits”, with human storytellers still at the centre.
Shotarov outlined Blue Zoo’s decision to draw a “very clear divide” between production and experimentation, saying the studio currently does not use AI in production at all. One of his non-negotiables is that artists must not be forced onto AI tools.
He contrasted AI with core software like Maya. “We should not be doing the same thing with AI because it’s not something essential to the pipeline that we can’t otherwise get,” he said. “It’s one part of the toolset artists have in their hands.”
Shotarov also highlighted a perceived trade-off between apparent efficiency and creative control, warning that high-end AI work often relies on “an insane amount of cherry-picking” and can leave artists cleaning up outputs instead of making decisive creative choices.
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Block framed the core problem as one of control and granularity. Current systems, he said, often jump from “zero to 100” in one step, rather than allowing directors to decide exactly where in the creative “branching tree” AI should intervene.
All three panellists pointed to the same direction of travel that AI should be used as a co-pilot rather than the pilot – powerful in automating drudge work and opening new workflows, but only sustainable if artists, not algorithms, remain in charge of the story.
Manchester Animation Festival, which was held November 9-13, is the UK’s largest festival dedicated to the animated art form hosted at HOME in Manchester city centre.
