Animation Magazine article

Educating Artists about AI in Animation
By Ellen Wolff, March 6, 2025
How five higher education courses in different universities are teaching students about new applications of artificial intelligence in their fields.

Every week now, we hear tales of how artificial intelligence will transform different aspects of society. “Disruptive” seems to be the description du jour. What does that mean for educators in the arts?Teachers have an understandable aversion to using AI tools that were built on prior creative works without permission. Fortunately, toolmakers are emerging who assert that their tools are being trained on ethical sources. Although AI platforms of questionable origin continue to proliferate, enough reliable choices exist to reassure schools that some tools are ready for class time. And prominent colleges are responding by experimenting with them in varied and interesting ways.

California Institute of the ArtsDouglas Goodwin is an interdisciplinary artist who’s taught at CalArts in Santa Clarita for over 18 years. This year, he’s teaching 16 Masters-level students “AI for Experimental Animation,” which includes working with AI for writing, previsualization, frame interpolation, motion capture and tracking.It’s actually Goodwin’s second time teaching this course. His inaugural class had both graduate and undergraduate students, and it attracted a long waiting list for this year. “We went from a novelty that was sort of fun, and the students did lots of small creative experiments,” he recalls. “They said, ‘This is cool, but I don’t see a lot here for me yet.’ But this year, we’ve moved on to work that they did resonate with. It was a big change.”

Some students saw the tools’ potential to accelerate their workflows or help bring things into their process that they didn’t have. “What I find most annoying is that these tools don’t isolate parts of an image or do simple green screen kinds of things. They’re designed to make finished images, and artists don’t want that.”

Goodwin is introducing his class to a variety of AI tools. “I definitely use Photoshop to show them the way Adobe is thinking about AI.” He points to their beta tools for wire cleanup, and notes they take a very conversative position about their ethical use. Goodwin also has a subscription to Runway and uses it quite a bit. “Runway saw the wisdom of giving credits to my students,” he observes. At a time when subscription prices for AI tools can be daunting, that’s no small matter.

Goodwin is a strong proponent of open-source tools like ComfyUI, a node-based application for creating images, video and audio that was released by GitHub two years ago. “It’s all free,” he says. “We have AI that can define a character in an image so you can do a kind of automatic green screen. They can have the character removed from the background, and they can change that to a moonscape. If they don’t want the moonscape, but just the little green men — they can pull them out and resynthesize them to look like chocolate chip cookies. That’s all available.”Also on his class menu is the image translation tool Pix2Pix, which allows students to generate an image in their Cintiq sketches. “They can work with a database of handbags or cats or flowers and get imagery projected onto unusual surfaces,” explains Goodwin. “It’s a great way to noodle because it’s fast, and they find weird associations that they wouldn’t have found otherwise.”