(Yicai Global) April 6 -- Rapid development of artificial intelligence-powered painting tools is having an impact in the game industry, with many key animators losing their jobs recently. 

“There were continuous layoffs in the first three months of this year and now about 30 percent of the staff have been discharged,” Wang Si, director of special effects at a company that provides out-sourcing services for games, told Yicai Global yesterday. A large proportion of the people who lost their jobs were key animators, Wang said, adding that the situation now is “basically stable.”

One game industry insider sent a post on social media about an animation company with 50 employees that has been “downgraded” from producing original animation to merely enhancing pictures created by AI. The company now gets more than 100 pictures of characters generated by AI in a day and has to enhance them. 

“AI can indeed improve the efficiency of key animators by almost 50 percent as the first half of the work is done by AI and animators complete the remaining half by polishing as per customers’ requirements,” Wang noted, adding that AI-generated pictures can sometimes be used directly without any modification. 

“Pessimistically speaking, in a few more years jobs for key animators may disappear,” Wang said. “Maybe modelers will start to be dismissed in half a year,” he added. 

Last month, Huang Yimeng, founder of Shanghai-based game developer XD, said on Twitter that he had spoken with two game development companies that have been reducing their reliance on outsourcing firms. One of them has ended its partnership with a company providing key animation services, while the second stopped working with outsourcing translators. “AI has begun to impact the jobs of many people,” Huang said.

According to a game industry veteran known as Qiang Zi, AI-powered painting tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have developed so fast that they are almost equivalent to the level of human animators who are professionally trained and have years of experience. 

With the assistance of painting and animation done by AI, game developers’ costs have been greatly reduced. Qiang told Yicai Global the company he works for is also promoting a work model in which the outsourcing service providers improve pictures generated by AI. The outsourcing companies used to charge at least CNY8,000 (USD1,163) for drawing a character, but now the cost can be trimmed to about CNY2,000 (USD291) thanks to the input of AI. 

Some art designers at game developers told Yicai Global that the real reason for the layoffs is that the industry has been hit by the suspension of game license issuance in China last year. But they conceded that AI is one of the ways companies can reduce their costs. 

There are also some in the industry that oppose the use of AI animation. Paizo, the highly regarded US publisher of role-playing games, recently required that any work submitted to the company should be done by human artists instead of being generated by AI.  

However, such principles may not be able to prevail against the cost benefits from AI, said Wang, adding that half of his company’s graphics are fully completed by AI, while the remaining portion is revised by painting artists. 

“Instead of disagreeing, maybe it’s better to co-exist with AI and then master as well utilize it,” Wand said. “People who oppose AI all the time will definitely be left behind.”

Editors: Liao Shumin, Tom Litting