Will AI Replace Background Artists?

8 min readAug 15, 2023

Introduction

Background artists play a critical role in the animation production pipeline. They are responsible for designing, creating, and bringing to life the environments and backgrounds that provide context for the characters and narratives. Backgrounds establish the mood, time period, and setting of the animated world. With the rise of AI tools that can generate art, there is an emerging question — could AI and automation replace the role of background artists? In this article, we delve deep into the possible effects of AI on the animation industry, particularly on background artists.

Will AI Replace Background Artists? AI vs Animation Industry

As technology continues to evolve, industries are seeking ways to leverage AI to streamline processes and enhance efficiency. The animation industry is no exception. The integration of AI in animation workflows has the potential to revolutionize how background art is created, but the question remains: Will AI entirely replace the role of background artists?

The Artistry of Background Artists

While AI can replicate patterns and generate visuals, it struggles to replicate the depth of human creativity and artistic intuition. Background artists bring a unique perspective and emotional resonance to their work, infusing scenes with ambiance and emotion. Their ability to capture subtle details and tell a story through visuals is an essential component of animation that AI may struggle to replicate.

The Vital Role of Background Artists

Defining the Background Artist

Background artists, also known as background designers or BG artists, are visual artists who specialize in creating backgrounds for animated productions.
They conceptualize, design, and paint the settings and environments that characters interact within. The background sets the tone and context.
Background artists work closely with directors and producers to ensure their designs align with the intended creative vision. Their work brings stories and characters to life.

Responsibilities and Skills

Developing the overall look, palette, lighting, and style for background environments
Designing specific locations like landscapes, cityscapes, building interiors, atmospheric skies
Researching reference materials to ensure historical/cultural accuracy
Mastering perspective, scale, and principles of lighting to create depth
Reviewing animatics and scripts to understand context and mood for each scene
Collaborating with other visual development artists and departments
Working digitally and/or in traditional media like paints, pencils, etc.

Importance to Animation Pipeline

Backgrounds provide crucial contextual and visual information for audiences
Sets tone, time period, location that supports narrative and character arcs
Guides animation of camera movements through establishing scaling and perspective
Influences performance of characters interacting with the environment
Creates immersive worlds that drive storytelling and emotional resonance

Without the incredible work of background artists, the stories, characters, and worlds of animation would feel hollow. Their art is what brings animated films to life.

How Might AI Replace Background Artists?

Advances in AI and generative art raise interesting questions around the potential for automating the role of background artists in animation. While AI is not yet advanced enough to fully replace humans, some of the more routine or mechanical aspects of background art could be augmented or replaced by AI.

AI-Assisted Concept Design

In the early concept phase, AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney can rapidly generate a wide range of stylistic iterations for environments based on text prompts. An artist could describe the mood and setting needed, and the AI could provide inspiration to jumpstart ideation.

Automating Basic Scene Rendering

For relatively simple, generic backgrounds like landscapes or basic interiors, AI systems may eventually be able to take rough layouts and automatically generate fully rendered scenes with proper lighting and textures.

Emulating Paint Styles

Neural networks can analyze tons of samples of physical paint textures and brush strokes to learn the style of a particular medium or artist. This could allow for AI painting that emulates physical media, saving digital artists time.

Streamlining Iterative Revisions

AI models might be useful for quickly experimenting with variations in lighting, camera angle, layout, color — allowing background artists to rapidly visualize options.

Assisting with Asset Creation

Trained systems could help assemble landscapes and environments from libraries of reusable assets like plants, buildings, props. This more procedural work could be automated.

Key Limitations of AI for Background Art

Despite the promise of AI in computer graphics, there are some fundamental limitations of automation for background art:

Lacks Creativity and intentionality

AI currently lacks true cognition — it cannot make intentional creative choices driven by meaning and purpose.
Composition, mood, narrative arc requires human creativity and storytelling skill developed through years of training and practice.

Struggles with abstraction and style

AI art is often very literal without deeper meaning. Background art depends on metaphors, symbols, and abstraction to convey ideas.
Distinct artistic styles like Miyazaki films or old Disney movies are hard to emulate without the human touch.

No understanding of context or characters

Backgrounds must fit seamlessly with the characters, story, and film arc. Humans inherently understand context and emotion.
AI has no sense of characters, intention, or stories — key for background art.

Rigidity compared to animators

Animators depend on backgrounds to be flexible as scenes iterate. AI art would be rigid and hard to tweak.
Stylized distortions in angles, lighting, scale must fit animation — difficult for AI.

While AI can help with defined mechanical tasks, truly immersive, emotive environments and backgrounds require human ingenuity, emotion, and storytelling ability.

Impact on Background Artists and Animation

It’s unlikely AI will fully automate background art in the foreseeable future. However, some routine tasks being augmented by AI may free up human background artists to focus on higher-level creative work. The impact on artists and the animation industry overall will depend on how AI is incorporated responsibly.

Job loss fears

Like any automation, AI does raise valid fears around job losses if taken to an extreme. Being aware of these concerns is important.
However, responsible AI integration that respects artists and enhances human creativity will likely not result in mass job loss.

Changing roles

Background artist roles may gradually shift from production grunt work to more ideation and creative oversight.
Workflow will evolve to incorporate AI into the human creative process rather than replacing it.

Democratization and accessibility

AI art tools could enable more people to participate in animation and game art. But steps should be taken to avoid exploitation.
For indie studios, AI may help level the playing field vs big players, enabling ambitious art direction on a budget.

Importance of judicious and ethical AI use

For responsible AI adoption, artists must drive implementations and stay central to the creative process.
Studies show AI art is best received when presented as a collaboration between human and machine. Transparency is key.

Navigating Ethical Considerations

As AI becomes more integrated into creative processes, ethical questions arise. Can AI truly replace the emotional depth and cultural understanding that background artists bring to their work? Additionally, concerns about job displacement loom large. While AI can enhance efficiency, the human touch remains invaluable, necessitating a careful consideration of the ethical implications of widespread AI adoption.

The Future of Background Art in Animation

Background art will continue to be a vital creative role in animation pipelines. While tasks will evolve, the human imagination, ingenuity for storytelling and skilled artistic craft will remain irreplaceable. Like any new tool adopted into production workflows, AI and automation must enhance and inspire human creativity rather than compromising it. The animation industry has a rich history of artistic innovation through both technology and skill. If workers and artists themselves guide responsible AI integration, background art has an exciting future ahead.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some examples of background art in animation?

Some iconic examples of background art in animation include the lush forest scenes of Princess Mononoke, the retro-future cities of The Jetsons, the coastal seaside town in Kiki’s Delivery Service, and the imaginative fantasy worlds in Alice in Wonderland. Background art brings all these memorable settings to life.

How does background art differ from concept art?

Concept art imagines specific characters, vehicles or items for a production, while background art focuses on environments, landscapes, and settings. Background art takes the overall look and feel of the concept art to create immersive spaces.

How time intensive is it to create background art manually?

It’s a very labor and time-intensive creative process. Artists must develop a unified vision for the color script, lighting, and style. Just designing and painting a single complex establishing shot backdrop can take weeks or months to finalize.

Why is background art important for animated stories?

The environments that characters inhabit provide crucial visual context and subtext for audiences. Backgrounds establish everything from time period, to mood, season, genre and aesthetic. This supports worldbuilding and storytelling.

What drawing and art skills do background artists need?

Background art relies on excelling at principles like lighting, perspective, composition, values, and color theory. Both digital and traditional media skills are useful. Background artists usually have strong fundamental art skills.

Could AI generated art ever match human creativity?

While AI can mimic styles, there are aspects of intentionality and emotional quality that seem fundamentally human. Much AI art today still appears derivative. We are still far from AI matching the depth of skill and purposeful vision of expert human artists.

Will AI completely replace background artists?

While AI has the potential to automate certain aspects of background creation, it is unlikely to entirely replace background artists. The artistic intuition and creativity that artists bring to their work are challenging for AI to replicate.

How can background artists leverage AI?

Background artists can leverage AI as a powerful tool for inspiration and reference. AI algorithms can analyze vast visual datasets, providing artists with a wealth of references to enhance their creative process.

What challenges does AI integration pose?

Integrating AI into the animation industry presents challenges such as the loss of human touch and the initial financial investment required for AI technology. Striking a balance between automation and creativity is a complex task.

What is the future of AI in animation?

AI's future in animation will likely involve a collaborative approach, where AI assists artists in their creative endeavors rather than replacing them. This partnership could lead to groundbreaking and visually stunning animations.

Conclusion

Background artists play an indispensable role in breathing life and imagination into the worlds of animated films and shows. Their art sets the stage for the stories and characters that audiences fall in love with. While emerging AI technologies hold promise for augmenting parts of the background art workflow, they cannot replace the creativity, intentionality, and skill behind truly vivid and immersive environments.

Responsible AI integration guided by artists themselves allows the human imagination to continue thriving. Animation has always pushed artistic possibilities through innovation. With care taken to put artists first, background art can evolve to incorporate the best of both human creativity and technological progress. The passion and artistic sensibility of background artists will continue bringing animated stories to life for future generations.