Two Years Ago, AI Made Will Smith Eat Spaghetti. Today It Makes Anime.
Let's start with the baseline. Two years ago, the most famous example of AI-generated video was Will Smith eating spaghetti — a grotesque, melting, deeply cursed clip that circulated as a meme because it was so thoroughly wrong. Wrong hands, wrong proportions, wrong pasta physics, wrong everything. That was state of the art. That was two years ago. In a presentation published March 20 [1], data scientist and generative AI researcher Ilia Kipniss walked through the current state of AI-generated animation — and the gap between then and now is the kind of technological leap that only sounds exaggerated until you watch the actual videos. What he showed isn't cursed. It's genuinely good. In some cases, it's better than what traditional studios were producing on mid-tier budgets. The centerpiece example is a creator who goes by Skyebrows — a British computer graphics artist who's been in the industry professionally since 2010. He published a music video called "Breathing Elon's Musk": a fully animated, comic-style piece featuring rockets, Tesla robots, a cast of recognizable faces, and visual quality that genuinely resembles a well-budgeted Japanese animation production. According to Kipniss, that video would have cost north of $100,000 to produce using traditional methods. Skyebrows made it with Grok Imagine, alone, in approximately two weeks.
Here's why the technical side of this matters. The old 80s and 90s style of anime — the highly detailed, hand-drawn, line-heavy aesthetic that defined series like Akira and Ghost in the Shell — essentially died because it was too expensive to sustain. As Kipniss notes in his presentation [1], you can see the individual hand-drawn details: the scrapes on a character's leg, the careful linework, the texture that made early anime look so distinctive. That style didn't vanish because audiences stopped wanting it. It vanished because the economics broke. The more cost-effective, smoother computer graphics aesthetic replaced it not because it was better, but because it was cheaper. Grok Imagine can regenerate that aesthetic on demand. One of the examples Kipniss showed was produced by a YouTube channel with fewer than 200 subscribers — not an established studio, not a professional team. A single person recreating 80s cyberpunk anime so convincingly that it includes the VHS flicker artifacts that give old cassette transfers their characteristic look. Complete with AI-generated music. The full tool stack used by Skyebrows and other creators: Grok Imagine for image/video generation, Suno for AI music composition, CapCut or Capus for video assembly, Audacity for audio cleanup. Every piece of that stack is accessible to anyone with a consumer internet connection [1].
