The problem of denying animators necessary fundamental experiences by automating the opportunities to learn that experience away with AI is the same problem either way. You can't just arbitrarily remove human skill and effort from the creative process and expect the end result to be more efficient and of equal or greater quality, anymore than you can expect the quality of a codebase to always improve by removing lines of code. The problem here isn't explicitly that inbetweeners exist, it's that animators aren't being paid commensurate to their Abilities.
AI isn't simply a tool like Photoshop or Blender, which augment an artist's existing skill. AI is designed to simulate and replace human creativity in the same way automation replaced physical human labor elsewhere. That's a fundamental difference. Replace physical animation with cel animation and the skill and talent of the animators still matter, even translated to another paradigm. Replace a human artist with AI, and the value of their talent is just gone. Even if the AI is trained on that specific artist's work, it can't grow and expand its horizons the way that human artist can, it can only iterate on what data the model already makes available, and express generalities based on that.
And why bother have human beings involved at all when you can just train an AI to do the whole thing? The whole business case for AI is devaluing the market value of human creative/knowledge based labor or automating it away altogether.
I never suggested using AI. You've confused the topic. I simply asked who was animated with hand drawn cells. Switching to a 3D animated but cell rendered output has nothing to do with AI. Just look at Beauty and the Beast. Look at Archer. Look at so many anime titles. Hand drawn/painted cells was just not practical, and the whole industry changed.
AI isn't simply a tool like Photoshop or Blender, which augment an artist's existing skill. AI is designed to simulate and replace human creativity in the same way automation replaced physical human labor elsewhere. That's a fundamental difference. Replace physical animation with cel animation and the skill and talent of the animators still matter, even translated to another paradigm. Replace a human artist with AI, and the value of their talent is just gone. Even if the AI is trained on that specific artist's work, it can't grow and expand its horizons the way that human artist can, it can only iterate on what data the model already makes available, and express generalities based on that.
And why bother have human beings involved at all when you can just train an AI to do the whole thing? The whole business case for AI is devaluing the market value of human creative/knowledge based labor or automating it away altogether.