Our Commitment to Ethical AI
We often get questions about our AI: How does it work? Are we a generative AI company? Do we know our data sources? Are we plagiarising? Is it ethical? Are we compliant with copyright laws? Do we redistribute our users' models? We understand these concerns, especially in an industry with its fair share of unethical practices.
Allow us to clarify: at Anything World, we are committed to strong ethical principles in all our AI products, tools, and systems, and that’s because we respect you, the 3D creators and your rights.
Anything World was established in 2019 with the vision to make everyone a 3D creator using AI. Yes, that’s right, from the outset, we've championed AI's potential to benefit game developers and 3D artists by lowering the barrier to 3D creation. We’re creators ourselves with a heritage in indie gaming, so we’ve been thinking about the ‘right’ way of building AI tools since day one. Our goal is to lower the barriers of 3D creation and bring everyone as many superpowers as possible.
Our AI
There are 2 main ways people use Anything World, and both of these rely on our AI auto-rigging and animation systems. Firstly, we have thousands of animated and static 3D models available to make the creation of living 3D worlds super easy (for example in Unity or Unreal). These can even be accessed at runtime for cool gaming experiences such as throwing a zombie at a zombie. Here we source assets with CC BY licenses, add animations to them with our AI pipeline, and then make them available for general use (with the condition that users must attribute the original author so they can get the credit they deserve). In this way, we’ve built up massive libraries of assets to make game and 3D app creation easier than ever before. Plus, to make emergent gameplay possible!
For user-created models here’s how our AI systems operate: You upload an input, such as a 3D model of a dog without a rig or animation attached to one of our tools - Animate Anything Web, Animate Anything Blender Add-On, AW Discord Bot or one of the other plugins. Our system processes the model, and presto! You receive a fully rigged and animated dog, all without lifting a finger (well, perhaps a few clicks). We own the rights to all of the steps our AI uses to produce the output you see and we only train our systems on data that has been specifically labelled as allowed for this purpose. Now, a dog was just an example, you can animate bipeds, quadrupeds, insects, birds and much more with Animate Anything!
Ethical Practices
We uphold ethical standards through various measures. Our internal datasets and public-facing asset libraries are exclusively made up of 3D models with compatible licences, and we always respect the required terms. In our 3D Web Library, we attribute models to their original authors and insist users credit the artists in the Animate Anything if the model isn't theirs.
There have also been questions regarding the tick box ‘Allow us to use this model to improve our AI system’ in the Animate Anything process so we’d like to address this. It is 100% optional to tick this box - you can still proceed to animate your 3D model without ticking it. Behind the scenes at Anything World HQ, we're diligently enhancing our AI system, rigs, and animations daily. Your models contribute to training our machine learning system and algorithms, fully compliant with copyright laws. We don't redistribute or sell your models – they remain your assets. Ticking this box simply accelerates our AI's learning process.
AI and the Job Market
A couple of other questions we often get are: Will AI steal my job? Should I bother learning to rig and animate by hand? Concerns about AI replacing jobs are common. However, rather than seeing AI as a threat, we encourage creators to view it as assisting you in doing your job quicker - almost like a superpower. Our AI takes the manual labour in rigging and animating off your plate allowing you to focus on other more creative tasks.
We also believe in the personal touch. You will doubtless wish to add your own twist to your 3D worlds and animated objects. Learning the principles of modelling, rigging and animating will always be valuable. The work you end up doing may well be further down the chain due to the automation of many boring parts, but we see this as a positive. In our view, it’s here that craft and human finesse add the most value in any case. Ultimately, we’re here to support you and to make your job easier, faster and more cost-effective - all while having an awesome time.
So, to sum it all up, yes, we are extremely committed to ethical AI practices. Anything World was founded with the vision to support and empower 3D creators and that will always lie at the heart of what we do. If you have any further questions, why not join us in our Discord for a chat?
