A prestigious French animation school – and one of the world’s leading institutions of its kind – has admitted to students using artificial intelligence to create visuals for an art project.
Gobelins Paris, a visual arts institution renowned for its 2D, 3D and motion design courses for animation, recently saw several of its students launch the website YANJIN, which was built to promote an art project. The project primarily features an interactive children’s book Entre tes mains: À l’École des Lilas, which aims to teach children aged seven to 10 about bullying.
As such, several visual designs are displayed on the site to give audiences a feel for the book’s creative direction.
Gobelins Paris used AI
Shortly after the website was live, French artists on social media caught on to YANJIN. KDA, a 2D artist and illustrator, pointed out a heavily suspicious detail in a drawing of a French flag, suggesting that the design might have been created with AI:
It should be noted that the YANJIN project is not directly affiliated with Gobelins. Students who started the project clarified that it was kickstarted as part of a “Project Management Degree in Communication and Graphic Industries” rather than the brainchild of the school itself.
However, this did not spare the project management students from online criticism. On X, several posts condemning YANJIN have gone viral, with artists expressing anger and disappointment at Gobelins’ endorsement of the project.
“… utter disrespect to your students and the legacy of great effort and art that has passed through their halls. Actually shocked by this,” wrote Nicholas Kole, a concept artist who worked on popular video games Spyro and Crash Bandicoot.
Founded in 1957, Gobelins Paris has been described as the “Harvard of animation”. Notable alumni include Pierre Coffin, co-director of box-office phenomenons Despicable Me (2010) and Minions (2015), and Simon Otto, who was head of animation for DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon (2010). No wonder people are upset!
Midjourney course
Online punters also found that Gobelins was offering a short fortnight course on how to use popular AI art generator Midjourney. The course name, which roughly translates to “Midjourney: Create illustrations with AI”, costs 950 Euros (AU$1,570) for nine hours of classes. It will run for two weeks (September 11-25).
“This training, made of three workshops, will allow you to familiarise yourself with Midjourney generative artificial intelligence in order to design illustrations,” the course’s description reads.
RaphDeee, a Twitch streamer and concept artist who worked on cult video game classic Assassin’s Creed, mocked the course on X: “Writing a prompt and pressing [a] random button requires teaching…”
After much backlash on social media, Gobelins issued a statement on X and Instagram admitting that “several visuals” were “created with the help of AI”. The institution also explained that it had been “unaware of recent controversies associating AI with practices that threaten authentic artistic creation”.
Gobelins also clarified that the visuals “are in no way the work of animation students or graphic design students at GOBELINS, but prototypes designed by students who are destined for project management in the publishing world”.
The Chainsaw has reached out to Gobelins Paris for comment.
