revisiting The Animator's Survival Kit after chatting with a pal about (it's the holy bible of animation that I've had on my shelf since college) and there's this one passage that stuck out to me and I feel has since only become more true in the years since this book was published and technology has advanced beyond what Richard Williams and Milt Kahl probably ever thought possible back in their day.
This sentiment comes up in drafting as well, where it might feel like you should 'rush' through the sketch to get to the 'good part' of rendering (the part that the viewer will actually see) a weak foundation can lead to a shoddy end result. Instead you should measure twice and cut once - spend more time in the sketch stage, and you'll have to spend less time interpreting rushed sketches or undoing mistakes in the rendering stage.
I wish I could say I follow this advice, but alas, I am a chronic rusher. It's a work in progress :')
But the immediate thing that came to mind upon re-reading that passage was our current climate surrounding AI art. The pervasive philosophy underlining the growing prevalence of generative AI and ChatGPT is that it 'saves time'. That it removes all the "busy work" and creates finished products within seconds that would take a human being days or weeks or months or even years to complete.
And yet, despite so many companies and AI tech bros jumping at the chance to believe this theory, committing to gutting their human teams in favor of robots, we're now seeing those same companies losing valuable assets - data, money, time - and scrambling to hire humans who can fix the problems caused by what they assumed would save them time and money.
It didn't, and if anything, it had the opposite effect - their lack of planning and foresight cost them more time and money than if they had just invested it properly in the first place into the more reliable systems that had been proven to work for decades. Or, at the very least, it just didn't save them as much time and money as they anticipated, because as it turns out, AI isn't a magic wand, and it does frequently require supervision and moderating to ensure it doesn't spit out the wrong information.
I think this all goes to show that the 'long short cut' method is one that's still relevant and yet has been largely forgotten in favor of our modern fast-paced world that's chasing the dragon of instant gratification.
The value of art has always hinged on the consumer, but now it's to such a degree that we've decided to cut out the artist entirely, instead giving generative AI and ChatGPT to the consumer so they can get what they want immediately, regardless of whether it's even usable or high-quality.
But the Disney renaissance films that we look back on so fondly as consumers would not have existed without the time and effort put into them.
The Mona Lisa was not painted in seconds, but rather several years of painstaking process.
The process is the result.
If you don't want to do lots of work, what are you doing in art?
If you can't appreciate the work and process that's involved in creating good art, what are you doing consuming it?
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