We’ve all seen the movies such as Marvel’s Iron Man where Tony Stark tells his AI Jarvis to do things for him. His ability to speak so naturally and have his commands understood is something that many tech companies are striving to achieve, and it looks like researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence might be on their way.
Together with the North American University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, these researchers have managed to successfully train an AI to automatically animate completely brand new episodes of The Flintstones, a cartoon that has not seen a new episode in at least 50 years, and all of this is done simply by telling the AI what they wanted through a script.
Imagine if you were overseeing a new episode of The Flintstones and you had a team of animators at your command, and you would describe to them a scene that you would want them to animate. You would describe the character’s expressions, what’s around them, their actions, and so on, which is exactly what the researchers have done except that it has been accomplished using AI.
Now the good news for animators is that it does not look like their jobs are in jeopardy anytime soon because as you can see in the video above, it’s hardly the best animation we’ve seen. However it’s still impressive that they have managed to come this far. More details on their research can be found here.
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