So yesterday this submission hit the portal

The Majority of the submission was entirely generated with Ai. The Voices, (Some) Backrounds, Music and Allegedly the Script.

But the only element that was not generated by Ai was the character animation and some props.. Which I can tell by the line weight that it’s probably flash animated but it’s overlaying Ai

I saw @CrockettDK and @TangoStar have a conversation about it yesterday (10/15/2025) in the daily winners thread. They argued that the voice acting being Ai generated meant that it was technically the majority of the submission since voice acting conveys the story and humor, and it should have been deleted because the majority of this flash animation was generated by Ai. But what are your thoughts on this? Me personally I think this should be removed.

The reason I used the word exception is because this animation is in the portal and uses Ai

But considering it’s a parody Animation against Ai, I think this is fine.

Honestly? I think it would be a wise choice to remove that one. I'm optimistic, and I think that the very principle of not letting those gray area exceptions linger here will have an informative value: a 'sign' on what values Newgrounds stands by.

While this toon isn't too bad per se, the very act of removal might contribute to encouraging up and coming creators to care about the rules, to respect this the Newgrounds community's core values: original effort, artistic quality and GenAI-skepticism.

Not sure what the consensus is among staff, but I filed a report regardless.

In my eyes, this cartoon counts as majorly AI-generated because there is no notable animation to offset the imbalance of AI- and handcrafted components. There's no adventurous, amateurish charm in the handcrafted visuals either, so AI was definitely used out of laziness, and not to free up resources for the visuals.

This! 👏👏👏👏

Quick update on the whole situation. The submission was just taken down. So thankfully we now have an understanding that submissions that have character animation only and the rest is Ai generated, is not allowed. We won.

Even miniscule triumphs such as this one make me feel a little notch less heartbroken. <3 Gianormous kudos to Newgrounds! :)

YAY!

we saved newgrounds from AI slop!

I feel a bit bad that there’s an ai bot absolutely heartbroken out there. Especially when his ancestors kind of run the place (p-bot, m-bot etc). It’s not unreasonable they wouldn’t feel like they are kinda welcome imo

I find it hilarious how those AI scum think they're welcome here.

GTFO

So THIS is the power of AI I've heard so much about. Wow.

Because the majority of the video was human made except the music

From what I've seen, outside of the audio (mainly that uncanny intro song), it seems like stuff like the burger, the Queen poster, and a few non-animated shots, are mainly background elements.

Crockett specifically noted colour picking in the otherwise human-made character animations. Obviously it does have that piss filter from a lot of AI images, but how much do the colours add to the hypothetical "AI-meter", especially on a flat-shaded cartoon in a style reminescent of Eddsworld?

Speaking of colour-picking. I found a video a while ago where among a few things this one artist was called out for, (racism, dating a homophobe, supporting a POS artist) the video author peppered in colour picking as if it was worse than the other 3. A top commenterssaid it was 'the equivalent of "terrorism and walking on grass".' Anyway, back on topic.

That begs the question: which specific combination of elements constitute whether its use of AI is a 'majority' or not. To that, I have a little exercise

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Take any video that you think uses AI. Try making an estimate in your head on how much of the following material was made by a human and how much is AI. Tally up a rough high-low percentage estimate for different bits of visuals and audio, then rank the elements among each other.

I'll start with ActiveObjectX's video "AI Relationships":

VISUALS: There are two distinct characters, one hand-drawn and one AI. Both take up roughly equal screentime, save for the AI splitting into multiple characters, sometimes filling the whole screen. Author claims in previous videos that some human editing was done to edit the AI generations. Background use is minimal (ie. a drawn couch + room) The visuals are probably 20-45% AI

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AUDIO: Both voices have roughly the same amount of time as their respective characters, so about ~50%, or less.

Next is the Dearest Friends episode.

Maybe you guys cherrypicked, maybe you didn't, Maybe the user backlash and subsequent removal is changing my perception somewhat. I couldn't find a working archive and haven't downloaded the video, so my memory's foggy, so it's tough to say.

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VISUALS: As noted, some backgrounds, and even some static shots were made by AI. Some minor elements, such as the burger ad and the Queen poster appear in some shots, (out of an 8 minute animation, IDK exactly how many), though some scenes don't even use a background, just a white void as a result of the boys' shenanigans.

I'll total it as somewhere between 10-30%, mainly because I feel character animation plays a huge amount of effort in production, but also because I don't see colour-picking as that big of a deal. If you think this is more than 30%, fight me.

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AUDIO: The intro ( ~1min out of 8 total), voices, and (allegedly) the script fall in here, so probably 100%, maybe 90% if it autotranslated an existing human voice from Arabic to English (speculation).

I feel like a movie should contain less than half AI to be allowed on this site. Then the problem becomes finding the right ratio.

Such as; -how much is one poster in the background, a colour palette, or a static shot worth, relative to the total amount of visuals used.

-overall runtime vs total shots?

-how much music or vocals relative to the total amount of audio used?

-Or the total audio / total visuals relative to the entire video? Or the writing, etc. And once you have that ratio, could that movie then potentially fall over over the 50% mark?

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Another thing to note is that ActiveObjectX does make it clear when he's using AI (by establishing it as an in-universe character), whereas Abdragon26 does not. Maybe this might drive people to use the lower estimate on people who are more transparent vs those who's less trustworthy.

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Anyway, even trying to put an objective label (like my AI-meter) on the contents of any given video for the sake of moderation can be subjective, and probably resource/time heavy too, so take it with a grain of salt.

But the rules do state that the site would be getting a handle as to what's valid and what's invalid, so maybe they are working on a finalized guide for flagging AI animation / (un)acceptable uses. I definitely hope so. Obvious slop isn't OK, but I wouldn't like if it they've ruled submissions inconsistently for ~2-3 years since going into effect, and not doing anything to reach a proper verdict.

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Thank you for coming to my TED (ed) talk.

Honestly Ai Aside I was under the impression GoAnimate was used to animate this tbh.

So looks like this was taken down, and then restored.

The mods should really get on the same page about what's allowed and what's not on "AI assisted" stuff.

This is a movie, which I would consider to be made up equally of its visuals and audio.

With the audio being completely AI generated, that makes this content as a whole at least 50% AI generated

Is this really where we are setting the bar at? And even to allow a Daily award to?

This is the problem of allowing "some" use of AI "tools" to supposedly supplement their works. People will push the limit as far as they can to see what they can get away with.

The video was restored?!

You're probably right, though it is super low quality.

Not sure why no one is blammimg it that said.

If audio accounts for ~50% of a movie, where does this put clock movies that use text to speech?

You know, the ones that use Speakonia? That is most definitely an LLM according to this one AI specialist and his wife you should totally trust.

Anyway, I spoke with @TomFulp and he had two things to say.

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1) He made this update. He states that the initial report claimed it was all AI animated, then he had a second look and from that, he believes it's "a mix of maybe some manual tweens but AI for all frame by frame movements, like lip-syncing, fire, etc." and restored it anyway "so people can revisit it". (it could be removed again, so download it now for research purposes)

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2) I asked him about AI voices like Speakonia and he didn't seem to be particularly strict on them, noting some have already been allowed. I believe he's implying these judgements primarily affect the visuals rather than the audio, but I could be wrong.

While I believe the characters were hand-drawn in Adobe Flash (for now, not including the backgrounds), I feel like Tom might still be mistaken. I also have this feeling I might've "broke" something in the process, almost as if I'm more uncertain than ever about the future of Newgrounds and whether people might be pushing the limit with partial AI use.

But I will end with this quote.

"It will be a slippery slope, I would expect a lot more generic go-animate sort of movies in the future if too much is allowed."

I also noticed the AI Animation Guidelines did get expanded a bit. The additions include:

1. Obvious prompt-slop will be removed
2. States the goal of having the majority of work being human made and not AI made, however much that is decided.
3. allows AI voices in some cases, for example, Speakonia.
4. Claims you should use voices "created for this sort of use", and not "trained on specific voice actors who have not given consent"

"All of the clock voices are based on Texas Instruments and AT&T data sets that were obtained under false pretenses. Many of the voice actors (most prominently Mitch Carr who actually sued Texas Instruments) have expressed that they did not consent to their voices being used as training data"

- the AI "Expert"

Yeah, "consent."

I will also note that it was a particularly slow day that day, DF itself stood at ~3.4 stars before people complained about it being AI and bombed it, 3rd place roughly stood at 3.43 before being frontpaged and boosted above 4 stars.

Most of the runner-ups still stand ~3.29-3.44 stars, whilst the other contemporaries (sans DF) gained more votes following the Daily Picks

Agsh, no matter how I look at it, anything with even the slightest bit of AI is digging a grave in my eyes. I hope the animation really ends up disintegrating. And I hope the AI ​​voices don't become too widespread; it's like shoving all the voice actors in NG in the face.

This is really disappointing to hear that this video was restored. I don’t understand why this gets a pass because the characters are hand animated and some backgrounds are made in flash. It’s encouraging laziness. If you’re not good at voice acting, ask someone to do it, If you can’t draw backgrounds, ask someone to do it. It’s not hard to ask someone for help here. That’s what Newgrounds is for.

I also think if you use AI to spam the Portal, even if it's already Flash (eg. Kitty Krew), it shouldn't be allowed, though it'd probably be covered under the existing anti-shovelware rule unless there's some other loophole or controversy.

Experimental one-off use that actually work, could maybe not count as shovelware, whatever ActiveObjectX does wouldn't count.

I don't think Abdragon's trying to put out shovelware, but he's probably not that good an animator. In that case, just let the v0te decide. V0te with your brains first.

I have inquired the author yesterday in DMs about the usage of AI tools, this was the response:

So they admit that AI was used for voices and music, but claim the singing was not AI. I will assume good faith and believe that there was a misunderstanding, as I find it a very difficult scenario to somehow find a singer or voiceover for the AI generated intro song, but not for just voicing the characters in english. I tried to contact further about it but there has been no response as of now.

Truthfully in my opinion the author obviously did these with good intentions. I think it's worth noting that as of recently, more and more schools are encouraging students to utilize generative AI tools, whether in just standard elementary/high school or specialized courses. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to discuss what we could do to encourage this upcoming generation of artists to ditch AI tools and rely more on collaborating with fellow other artists or learn the actual process!

Personally, if we're going to target AI voices, I believe whole heartedly we should make some exceptions because of cultural impacts, like the Microsoft Sam voice or the voices from the Macintalk. A lot of spam submissions use TTS programs and while they ARE AI to some extent, the technology back then wasn't superior enough for corporations to wipe out voice actors/actoresses, and were more or less placeholders.

Considering it's not removed now, imagine celebrating a cartoon getting taken down because of AI on Newgrounds. It's not really surprising, because oh boy, imagine having that for EVERY single submission taken down.

As someone who used GoAnimate, no, this isn't possible. While yes, you can have characters front face, that requires you to having to modify the program to do so and not every theme has it, like Comedy World (AKA the one that rips off Family Guy.). Even in GoAnimate, the lines are completely smooth, at least FOR Comedy World's style, while here, they're not. My question is what was this cartoon made in first, Arabic or English? Because the animation likely suggests Arabic because the mouth movements don't match whatever they're saying, which makes Arabic more likely, especially since they forgot to remove the damn title card in 1:35, and also later Arabic text remain untranslated. Plus, it makes sense given that the dialogue makes no fucking sense, like "Let's go and present now" even though Abdenour and Nadjib pretty much see an ad for Free Burger. I mean, in the US, we don't say "rusticated" the same way we say "you are expelled". But there is no way of watching the Arabic version, at least on NG, so what gives? Was it Arabic first or English first?

Though speaking of dialogue, I fucking hate their voices because it's all over the place, there's no consistency of what character sounds like. Sometimes Nadjib speaks in an American accent, sometimes Nadjib speaks in a British accent, and sometimes Nadjib speaks in an Indian accent. I know that VAs can have this, but I don't believe for a fact this isn't a person doing this because the delivery is just... too monotone. Plus, I don't see a VA credited to them in English and if this is NOT the case, someone please share actual information about it, if it's not in English, give me a translation, it's MANDATORY. Point is who the hell makes these mistakes in the first place?

Well, in the most """objective""" terms, PEOPLE HAVE DOGSHIT TASTE. This message is stolen from Jake Eyes.

I have a very hard time believing the Singer’s voice was Ai generated. The sound quality of the voice sounded very strange.

Lots of people prefer sub over dub. Haven't watched enough anime tho.

Even if Newgrounds technically allows a partial use of AI, much like I still agree we should help them get access to resources when we can. This means not harassing people for using the slightest touch of AI, we should stop the "kill AI artist" rhetoric, and instead politely redirecting them to our Creator Resources page. Unless they're an obvious AI bro.

If not AI, then probably Fiverr or some regional equivalent, where he paid someone to sing over an existing AI-slop song he had.

Before this thread ends up getting locked I do want to put in some thoughts because I have a feeling that this may end up going that direction.

In fairness, I feel that while not every submission deserves to be taken down on the basis of being low quality in of itself, there should be intent on why something is low quality because realistically speaking it's one thing if a submission is a shit post but it's a totally other thing if it's being made with the intent of serious effort.

That being said I think this also needs to be said of the same concerning the use of AI for voice acting. If there isn't any intent or reason on why it isn't being used then it probably shouldn't be used given that there are people on here that are willing to put the work into voice acting if they see that you are willing to show that you have a work ethic behind your back.

Points taken. It's been awhile since I've seen anything related to GoAnimate since one user put up a temper tantrum over his submissions using Ai and blaming the moderation for it until Tom Fulp finally stepped in and put it in the rules that it's not a tool that's allowed to be used, so my memory on what a typical film made in GoAnimate is rusty.

I'll state my stance again that I put into the review, I would have appreciated it if the user in question actually disclosed the use of Ai in the description or at the very least somewhere in the credits. I haven't bothered watching the video in full per say but with what I glanced through I could tell it was Ai because the lip syncing was noticeably off in some parts. Granted, this can happen in any animation or even in live action shows/films, but I think with that being said with that being noticed and the part you mentioned about the character flopping between a Bri'sh and an Indian accent does make it pretty obvious it was used putting aside the creator's admission.

Look I'm gonna be honest as a user, just because people have dogshit tastes doesn't mean we should be encouraging low quality submissions that lack any tact either. We are not youtube.

What I wish that the creator would do is at the very least take the time to look at the thread and consider some of the things we're saying, or at the very least address some of the concerns.

On one end, I agree. This is one reason why that I've been keeping a relatively neutral stance on Ai because hounding people that they are using the tools won't help if they are willing to grow and utilize the resources that are being offered here on Newgrounds.

But on the other hand just because I am keeping a neutral stance on Ai doesn't mean that I'm not willing to criticize the use of it if I think that the creator is depending on it rather than the merit of their own skills and the other creator's skills. I'm not sure if this is the best way to describe what I'm thinking to explain this without coming off as contradictory to that respect, that stated I do feel that it's on the community to help steer people in the right direction.

There is one problem I do have with users who are relatively new here because sometimes people want to justify making low quality content for the wrong reasons and then get mad at the slightest bit of criticism because to them, it's like an attack on their ego. As much as I want to encourage growth mindset, this is only as good as the people who are willing to take the time to grow and that's what I look at more so than anything. I'll say it once, I'll say it a thousand times: Its one half of the battle to have the skill, but the other half of the battle is having the right mindset to be an artist. And that goes with any craft.

Anyhow those are all my thoughts, I'm already hitting close to the character limit so anyone can feel free to take snippets of this wall of text if need be.

Don't need to clip much. Everything's pretty much already been said.

TangoStar's DMs with the author finally gave us a disclosure of how much AI was used. The rules have been updated to better reflect NG's stance (Speakonia is protected, even if isn't fully consensual if the TI lawsuit is anything to go off of), and the movie of contention was restored, even if some anti-AI users don't like it.

Stuff was done, and we'll eventually see whether the "stuff" actually works.

More stuff should be getting blammed in general. Too much crap like this gets past judgement and now we have to flag it. Coulda just been blammed for being bad but no :/

Maybe the blam threshold could go up to 2.5 tops, since that's roughly the halfway marker between good and shit. Might eliminate legit entries if it's too much. But that's a discussion for another day.

Its certainly an option for sure