Premise

This anime probably used AI images and that’s all I want to talk about.

Jel’s verdict: This anime probably used AI images and that’s all I want to talk about.

I guess it’s ironic that this show is about a rich asshole who hates humans and only trusts technology, but here we are. Several suspicious “illustrations” are used in lieu of actually animating the fight scenes, as well as a sort of Ashita no Joe dramatic effect when the narrator is speaking. Here’s the first example, which looks to me like they literally took the screenshot and told the AI to make it look like an anime painting:

The most frustrating thing is that you can’t 100% prove that these are AI, you just know it when you see it. There’s no data point that will act as the smoking gun and the anime studio is extremely unlikely to own up to anything. This has left the door open for some people to claim it’s “not” AI. The most common defense came from people citing the original mangaka, who tweeted about the illustrations being credited to an artist named Mizuno Uta.

If you read their actual tweet (apologies for linking Twitter) however, it sounds like they don’t really know what’s going on either and are just going by what it says in the credits. Just because someone was credited for making these doesn’t mean that no AI was used. Someone had to run the screenshot through the prompts and put a bunch of other visual effects on top of it. If I’m being really generous, maybe they did do the illustration in the tweet but the others were made to look like their style.

As a further bit of circumstantial evidence, the director has been accused of using AI images in their previous work, Fire Hunter. I’ve seen less substantial evidence on this one and don’t want to spend that much more time on this, but go look that up for more info. It also seems unusual to have this many “high quality”, detailed illustrations in one episode, in places where it would make sense to take shortcuts and save time/money on animation. Just more smoke that indicates fire to me.

I hate that we have to have this conversation. Even in the extremely unlikely chance these images are not AI generated in some way, that would just mean the series is getting its reputation unfairly dragged through the mud. There are no winners in this situation, except the rich assholes who hate humans so much that they would rather use this technology.

If you’re still not sure on this, I’ll leave you with a few more images and you can decide for yourself.