AIGC’s Impact on 2D Animation Professionals: Disruption, Opportunity, and Governance in a Reconfigured Production Chain

Abstract

Generative AI-often discussed in Chinese contexts as AIGC-has begun to reshape 2D animation work by lowering iteration costs in pre-production, accelerating parts of asset creation, and enabling rapid multi-variant marketing outputs. Yet these productivity gains come with uneven labor impacts and heightened governance constraints. Tasks that are modular, repetitive, and evaluable at the frame or asset level are more exposed to automation and price compression, while roles requiring narrative judgment, performance timing, and cross-shot consistency are more likely to be “augmented” rather than replaced. At the same time, legal and policy developments increasingly make provenance, authorship control, and training-data questions practical constraints on commercial deployment-especially for studios seeking copyright protection and low-risk distribution. Drawing on a production-chain (“task chain”) framework, this paper analyzes where AIGC substitutes, where it augments, why it can narrow entry-level pathways while increasing demand for supervisory and pipeline roles, and what new opportunity pathways are emerging. It argues that AIGC functions less as a single replacement technology than as a value reallocation engine: competitive advantage shifts toward professionals who can translate creative intent into controllable workflows, enforce consistency, and document compliant production.