Alright, so every time AI comes up, people seem to go straight to AI is bad or AI is good.
But I feel like there’s a missing piece in this discussion… where do we actually draw the line? How much AI use is too much before it becomes a problem?
I started thinking about this while working on an animation. So far, everything I’ve done is completely by hand—frame by frame—but I’ve been playing around with an AI-generated sound effect. I needed a very specific sound: a chicken screaming. Turns out, that’s not something you find a lot of. There are some, but not enough variety for what I need.
I figured out that if I took a human scream and put it through an AI voice program, I could tweak it into something that sounded exactly like a chicken screaming. It worked perfectly, but I hesitated because, well… it’s AI.
To me, this seems like a fair use of AI. I still had to find and edit the scream myself—it’s not like AI did all the work. And really, haven’t people been doing similar things for years? Like putting robotic filters on voices? But at the same time, AI has a bad reputation, and I get why.
One argument against this is that I could just hire a voice actor. And honestly, I would if I had the money. But I’m a student, and that’s just not possible right now. If I could, I definitely would—actors bring something unique that AI can’t. They interpret scripts in unexpected ways, make little mistakes that actually add personality. AI just can’t do that.
But this whole thing made me wonder… where is the line? AI auto-coloring animations, using ChatGPT to get feedback on a novel, AI cutting out images—these all seem like tools that help rather than replace humans. But some people would say that’s still too much, while others would say, why not use AI for everything? What do you think?