How AI Changed VFX, and How Artists Make a Living Now

Sam The thing to get straight before we even say the words "artificial intelligence" is that visual effects was already a battered industry. In 2023, before any of the generative AI tools we'll talk about existed in production, somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of all artists across VFX, animation and gaming lost their jobs.

Maya Hold on — ten to fifteen percent in a single year, with no AI involved yet? That's not a dip, that's a huge chunk of an entire workforce gone. What caused that?

Sam A veteran 3D artist's year-end round-up attributed it to two things colliding: industry strikes and a tech-sector slowdown after the huge, almost artificial growth the pandemic years had produced. Studios had overhired and overcommitted, strikes froze production schedules, and when the dust settled, companies cut hard.

Maya And I'd guess it's never the people at the top who feel that first — so who absorbed those cuts?

Sam Junior artists and newcomers took the worst of it, and in a particularly cruel way. The market got flooded with experienced people who'd just been laid off, so when a studio did have an opening, they'd rather hire a seasoned artist for a junior role than train someone from scratch. Entry-level positions more or less vanished overnight.

Maya So the ladder into the industry was already kicked away before AI shows up to take the blame. That reframes a lot of what people say now, doesn't it — "AI is killing VFX jobs" — when the floor was already crumbling.

Sam Then 2024 arrives, and studios stop treating AI as an experiment and start building it into strategy. In September that year, the AI video company Runway partnered with Lionsgate to train a custom video-generation model on Lionsgate's own catalog — over twenty thousand film and TV titles — built exclusively for filmmakers working with the studio.

Maya Training a model on your own back catalog so your own filmmakers can use it — that sounds less like a toy and more like a studio deciding it wants to own the pipeline itself.

Sam A month later, trade reporting said Disney was preparing its own AI initiative, aimed mainly at postproduction and visual effects, with observers expecting it to target costs in exactly those departments. That followed roughly seven thousand pandemic-era layoffs Disney had already made group-wide.

Maya So the sequence is: lay off thousands, then invest in the technology most likely to shrink the department you just cut. That timeline alone would make any VFX artist nervous.

Sam It's also the year Autodesk bought Wonder Dynamics, the company founded by VFX supervisor Nikola Todorovic and actor Tye Sheridan. Their product, Wonder Studio, uses AI to automate character animation, lighting and composition — you shoot an actor on a phone, and it replaces them with a CG character, work that used to need whole teams of riggers and animators.

Maya That's the part that lands differently for me than cost-cutting — that's a task list, specific jobs, being folded into software. What about the prestige end of the industry, the people doing award-winning work — are they adopting this too?

Sam DNEG, the studio behind Dune, acquired Metaphysic, which first got attention for a deepfake TikTok account impersonating Tom Cruise. Metaphysic's tool, Metaphysic Live, de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in real time for Robert Zemeckis's film Here, and the same tools were used on Furiosa and Alien: Romulus.

Maya Real-time de-aging on set, not months later in a computer — that changes what a director can even plan to shoot. Did Zemeckis say anything about leaning on it that heavily?

Sam He said the film simply wouldn't work without the actors seamlessly transforming into younger versions of themselves. And at the 2025 VES Awards — the VFX industry's own awards — that de-aging work won in the emerging-technology category, with Metaphysic's Jo Plaete telling the room that even though the tools are driven by code and machine learning, the soul of visual effects remains fundamentally artistic.

Maya That's a striking thing to say while accepting an award for the tool that's replacing some of the craft. What's the actual day-to-day work getting handed over, though — not the headline de-aging shots, but the grind?

Sam Rotoscoping, mainly — isolating an object or actor frame by frame so it can be composited separately — along with matting and tracking cleanup. Boris FX's Mocha Pro added AI features called Object Brush and Matte Assist at the end of 2024, automatically isolating objects and generating the mattes artists used to draw by hand. One estimate put AI handling a quarter of all roto work by 2024.

Sam That roto estimate lines up with something broader. A 2025 survey from the trade outlet Cartoon Brew found that sixty-eight percent of VFX and animation studios said they'd worked at least one AI-assisted tool into an actual production in the prior year, and roto and cleanup were the two jobs that came up most often as where it's being used.

Maya So we're past the point of a few studios experimenting — two out of three are already doing it on real projects, not just testing it in a lab somewhere.

Sam Which makes the de-aging story a useful corrective, because it hasn't just kept climbing. Metaphysic, the company behind the Tom Hanks and Robin Wright work, got folded into DNEG's AI division, called Brahma AI, and one industry analysis said that steady stream of AI face-replacement work has slowed to a crawl since then.

Maya Slowed how, though — I'd have assumed a tool that won an award and got that much press would be everywhere a year later.

Sam That same analysis pointed out that despite headlines about an AI VFX partnership with Netflix and well-known directors saying they're open to the tech, there hasn't been anywhere near the volume of deepfake faces in movies and TV that there was at what it called "peak Metaphysic." The moment after Here, where it looked unstoppable, hasn't repeated.

Maya That's genuinely surprising — it suggests the story isn't a straight line from "AI arrives" to "AI takes over everything," it's more lumpy than that, with hype running ahead of actual use on screen.

Sam Which brings us to the part of this that's hardest to pin down cleanly: the jobs numbers themselves, because they vary a lot depending on who's counting and why. A study for Hollywood labor groups, done by economist Adam Fowler, found that seventy-five percent of industry bosses had eliminated, reduced, or consolidated jobs after bringing AI into their workplace.

Maya Seventy-five percent of the people running these companies admitting that, not just outside observers guessing — that's a big number to put a name to. Did the same study say which jobs specifically they expect to go next?

Sam It did. About a third of executives predicted 3D modellers would be displaced by AI as early as 2026. A quarter expected graphic designers to be affected too, and around fifteen percent flagged storyboard artists, illustrators, animators, and surface and material artists as vulnerable in the near term. Fowler's own summary was that there's a high level of exposure to AI for a lot of workers in this industry.

Maya That's executives predicting their own future cuts almost a year out, which is unusual to see stated so plainly. Has anything since then put a harder number on it, or is it still mostly projection?

Sam By early 2026, reporting using California state labor data gave a regional figure: Los Angeles County had lost sixty-seven hundred film industry jobs, with AI tools cited as cutting animation production costs by up to ninety percent. Separately, Goldman Sachs estimated AI had trimmed US payrolls overall by roughly sixteen thousand jobs a month over the previous year, as part of a wider AI-driven layoff wave across industries.

Maya Sixty-seven hundred jobs in one county alone is a lot more concrete than a survey prediction. Is there a figure for the entertainment sector specifically, rather than the economy-wide one?

Sam One widely cited explainer aimed at working artists put the number at over a hundred and eighteen thousand entertainment positions potentially displaced by AI by 2026, though that figure comes from an industry-facing piece rather than a government source, so it's worth treating as an estimate rather than a hard count. What it was clearer about is where the cuts land: entry-level roto, paint, and matchmove roles shrinking, concept art shifting to AI-assisted workflows with fewer billed hours, and studios expecting faster turnarounds without bigger budgets.

Maya That's the same pattern as the overhiring collapse before AI — it's the junior roles absorbing it again. Is there a simple way to describe why it's specifically that end of the pipeline each time?

Sam The explainer framed it as a pattern repeating across every AI tool in production: the machine takes on the repetitive, time-intensive computation, the artist supplies taste, direction, and quality control. What's changed is that the "repetitive" bucket is growing faster than it used to, so fewer people are needed to produce the same amount of finished work.

Sam The pushback against all of this is coming through contracts. The VFX Union's first survey, published in March 2023, found two thirds of artists thought the industry's situation was unsustainable.

Maya Two thirds calling their own industry unsustainable before most of these AI tools had even shipped — that's a grim baseline. What has the bigger union, IATSE, managed to lock down in writing?

Sam IATSE negotiated AI protections into its 2024 contract with the studios' trade body — consent requirements before anyone's likeness gets scanned, severance if AI displaces a worker, and limits on forcing someone to just type prompts instead of doing the craft. The catch is coverage: VFX remains one of the largest non-union corners of the industry, so most VFX workers aren't protected by any of it.

Maya So the people most exposed to the roto and matchmove cuts we just talked about are the ones least likely to have a union contract standing between them and a layoff. What about VES, the group that handed out that de-aging award — can they negotiate anything on workers' behalf?

Sam No — VES is an honorary society, it discusses AI's impact but it has no bargaining power. On the legislative side, IATSE has gone to Congress asking for stronger copyright rules so AI companies can't train freely on its members' work. A storyboard artist on the Animation Guild's AI strategy committee, Sam Tung, put the underlying complaint plainly: generative systems only function because they're fed a huge dataset of other people's work, and he said not enough people are asking where that data comes from.

Maya That's the question that never quite gets answered whenever one of these tools launches with a flashy demo. Did Tung say his union has a concrete plan going into its next round of contract talks, or is it still at the "asking Congress" stage?

Sam He said his union would push for AI rules centred on control — who decides when AI gets used, who can require an artist to use it, and who makes the calls about how it's deployed. A VFX union organiser, Mark Patch, was blunter about the stakes: he said they're being threatened by replacement with tools that aren't qualified to replace them, and that they want defences written into the contract.

Maya "Tools that aren't qualified to replace us" is a sharp line — it suggests the complaint isn't only about losing work, it's about quality too. Did Patch say anything about why this feels different from past rounds of industry anxiety?

Sam In an earlier interview he said people are worried now because nobody knows how any of this gets implemented, and that visual effects, as a career, has never really offered a sustainable path. Sarah Myers West, who runs the AI Now think tank, made a related point — that it's increasingly union contracts and labour actions, not legislation, setting the real terms for how AI tools get deployed.

Maya That lines up with everything we've just gone through — Congress gets asked, but the contract table is where it gets decided. Is there a view from the management side of these companies on why workers are organising now rather than years ago?

Sam Scott Ross, who ran ILM and co-founded Digital Domain, has said for years that visual effects are the real movie stars now — that's what puts people in seats and what the marketing sells. But he's also unsentimental about where AI threatens headcount: he's said that on a staff of five hundred or a thousand, only fifteen to twenty percent were doing genuinely creative work, the rest tertiary or secondary at best — and that's the group he thinks is exposed.

Maya That's a fairly cold way of putting it from someone who ran those companies himself. Did he connect that to the non-union competition abroad as well, or keep those two threats separate?

Sam He connected them directly — running a union shop costs roughly twenty percent more, which he says puts it at a pricing disadvantage against non-union competitors in places like London or India, and he frames that as a pressure running parallel to AI rather than separate from it.

Sam Disney had its own in-house tool before any of this Metaphysic wave broke publicly — they announced FRAN, the Face Re-aging Network, back in December 2022, and called it the first fully automatic, production-ready method for re-aging faces. You saw it in the Indiana Jones 5 trailer.

Maya So the biggest studio in the business was quietly building its own version of this technology years before the public debate even started. Does that change how we should read everything we've covered about Runway and Metaphysic partnering with outside studios?

Sam It suggests the capability was never dependent on one startup — studios wanted it internally too. And outside the studio system entirely, there's a clean measure of how fast this is scaling: Runway's AI Film Festival had three hundred submissions in its first year, 2023. By 2025, that number passed six thousand.

Maya Twenty times the submissions in two years is a huge jump for something that started as a niche competition. What's pulling that much money and talent toward it?

Sam Capital, mostly. By early 2026, Runway closed a 315 million dollar funding round, Luma AI raised 900 million the previous year, and a new studio called Promise launched backed by Peter Chernin and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Runway also introduced what it calls a "world model" in December 2025 — a system built to simulate full physical and narrative environments rather than just generate short clips.

Maya That's a different ambition than de-aging a face or cleaning up a roto shot — that's trying to generate the whole world a story happens in. What's the pitch for why that's worth building?

Sam Runway's chief executive has floated an economic argument around it — using AI to let studios make fifty films for the cost of one hundred-million-dollar blockbuster, betting that volume improves the odds of landing a hit compared with staking everything on a single expensive production.

Maya Fifty shots at a hit instead of one giant bet changes what a studio is even optimizing for — quality on one film versus quantity across fifty. Are the big streamers moving in that direction too, or is this still a startup-world idea?

Sam Netflix acquired Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking startup, InterPositive. Adobe set up its own Film and TV Fund. Google funded AI training and fellowships through the Sundance Institute. Director Nik Kleverov, making the AI-assisted animated feature Critterz, told Forbes the studios are "starting to put their money where their mouth is."

Maya That's a shift from cautious statements to actual checks being written. Given all that investment, is there any consensus forming on whether this helps artists or just replaces them?

Sam Not a consensus — a genuine split. Animator McCarron, talking about early-career artists, argues it's an assistant rather than a replacement, and that artists who embrace it become more powerful, not less, because creativity itself can't be replaced.

Maya That's a comforting version of the argument if you're already established enough to use the tool rather than be replaced by it. What does the research side say, rather than an individual artist's opinion?

Sam A 2024 academic pilot study interviewed nine experienced VFX artists and found something messier than either side wants — a mix of optimism about what the technology can do and real apprehension about the ethical and practical problems it creates, with the researchers concluding the field needs ongoing dialogue and careful integration rather than a tidy verdict.

Maya So even the people studying it closely won't say which way this tips. Is there a counterweight to McCarron's optimism from someone who's lived through the downside directly?

Sam A former Technicolor technical artist, writing in March 2025, put it starkly — the industry is at a crossroads, slowing down for reasons beyond ordinary economic cycles, with AI-generated content flooding the market and studios chasing margins with what the artist called reckless disregard for sustainability.

Sam The practical question becomes what an individual artist can do beyond waiting for a union contract to cover their shop. Autodesk pitches its Flow Studio tool directly at freelancers — people using Maya, Blender, Unreal — to speed up rotoscoping and motion tracking themselves.

Maya That's a different pitch than the studio-level deals we've covered — this is aimed at the solo artist trying to stay competitive, not a corporation shaping strategy. Is the advice really just "learn the tool before it learns your job"?

Sam That thread runs through Autodesk's marketing, Mocha Pro's own positioning, and a VFX Voice roundtable — artists who master the AI-assisted roto and cleanup tools become faster collaborators rather than people competing against the software. Sarah Myers West's point, again, was that union contracts and labour actions are what is setting the terms.

Maya Which brings us back to the union gains we covered — consent before scanning, severance for AI displacement — except those only reach people at unionized shops. What's the honest reach of that protection across the industry?

Sam Limited. VFX remains one of the least unionized corners of production, so most of the artists doing this work are not covered by that contract at all.

Maya So neither tool fluency nor union coverage is a complete answer on its own. Is there a third option that doesn't depend on who you already work for?

Sam Specializing in what the tools still can't do. Even boosters of AI filmmaking admit the current systems struggle with narrative coherence across a full feature, keeping a character consistent over ninety-plus minutes, and the computational cost of doing that at scale. That leaves supervision, continuity, and bespoke photoreal or creature work as durable ground — what Scott Ross distinguished from the "secondary and tertiary" roles he sees as exposed.

Maya That tracks with his fifteen-to-twenty-percent figure from earlier — the senior creative decision-makers surviving while the larger support tier doesn't. Is there new paid work opening up anywhere, rather than just fewer jobs being protected?

Sam There is — the money flowing into AI filmmaking infrastructure, Runway's film fund, Adobe's Film and TV Fund, Google's Sundance training, is explicitly meant to bankroll and train people making AI-assisted films. That's a new category of paid craft: prompt engineering, AI-shot supervision, hybrid compositing. Independent filmmakers in particular are described as seeing opportunity there rather than only threat.

Maya So some of the capital that looks like a threat from inside a VFX house looks like a new door from outside it. Does any of this settle the credit and ownership fight, or does that stay separate from the jobs question?

Sam It stays very much alive, and it may end up mattering as much as job counts. The core union complaint is that generative systems only function because of huge datasets built from other people's uncredited, unpaid work. How that gets resolved — compensation, consent, provenance — will shape what AI tools are even legally allowed to do in professional pipelines, and therefore which jobs survive in what form.

Maya So the path forward sounds less like one answer and more like three things held at once — learn the tools, push for contract language, and specialize in the judgment work that doesn't automate cleanly. That's a lot to ask of one career.

Sam It is. VFX is being reshaped from several directions simultaneously — corporate cost strategy, tool-level automation of the most tedious work, speculative capital building toward compressed production economics, and a labour movement trying to catch up through contracts rather than legislation. The honest state of it is that the losses are real but contested in scale, and the tools in daily use remain assistive rather than total replacements, for now.

Maya That "for now" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but it feels like the honest place to leave it rather than a tidier conclusion that wouldn't hold up.

Sam To close where we started — VFX artists were already battered before AI arrived, through overhiring collapse and strikes; then 2024 brought studios formalizing AI partnerships with Runway, Disney, Autodesk and DNEG; the de-aging wave that won awards cooled off faster than expected; the job-loss numbers range from survey predictions to confirmed regional data; and the union fight for protections, through IATSE's contract gains and VES's lack of bargaining power, remains the clearest lever workers have, even though it doesn't yet reach most of the industry. The path forward is tool fluency, organised leverage, and specializing in the work judgment still can't be automated out of.

Maya Thanks for sitting with all of that with me — and to anyone listening who works in this industry, I hope this made the landscape feel a little less foggy even if it isn't any less uncertain.

Sam Before we go, worth saying plainly: this show is AI-generated, the voices you've been hearing are synthetic, and everything in it comes from the source reporting we drew on, whose authors have no connection to this show. Everything today came from reporting by Wikipedia, VES Global, Variety, VFX Voice, Vitrina AI, 3DVF, and Context News.

Maya Thank you all for listening, and we hope you'll carry a bit of this conversation with you the next time you watch something and wonder who, or what, made it.