AI Will Cut Animation Labor And Production Time By 90% Says Former Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg

Speaking at a Bloomberg New Economy panel in Singapore on Thursday, Quibi founder (and former Dreamworks Animation CEO) Jeffrey Katzenberg needed fewer than three minutes to give voice to animation industry artists’ worst fears.

During the panel, Katzenberg was asked about the impact of AI on production and he predicted that within the next three years, a world-class animated film won’t require 90% of the time or labor that it would have back when he was making animated features.

“In the good old days, when I made an animated movie, it took 500 artists five years to make a world-class animated movie,” he said. “I think it won’t take 10% of that. Literally, I don’t think it will take 10% of that three years from now.”

The executive said that from his point of view, “I don’t know of an industry that will be more impacted than any aspect of media entertainment creation.”

Echoing a popular sentiment in almost any conversation about AI and entertainment production, Katzenberg said the technology will eventually be just another tool in an artist’s kit.

“We went from a pen to a paintbrush, a printing press, a still camera, a movie camera,” he argued. “These are things that expanded creativity and all sorts of storytelling in extraordinary ways… I think of AI as a creative tool… a new paintbrush or a new camera that has so much opportunity around it.”

According to the executive, AI will democratize the creative process and facilitate storytelling opportunities that were never previously available to most artists.

“I think, on the one hand, it will be disruptive and commoditize things that are very inaccessible for artists and storytellers today,” he said.

Asked about inspiration and where stories will come from, Katzenberg explained, “I think that is still gonna come from creativity. Of individual creativity… You can have access to all of this knowledge; it’s your ability to prompt it that actually produces a result. So prompting is, in fact, going to be a creative commodity across many different aspects of storytelling.”