Imagine an animated character that embodies deep fake and perfects itself as a doppelgänger, with each iterative regenerative interaction, to the point of harvesting thousands of data points emulating your emotional responses. The empathetic avatar then takes on a new life, where the real and virtual edge closer to singularity. Merging fact and fiction. Taking on critical judgement and choice decisions – overriding human logic in favour of advanced machines. Now, add to it a layer of cyborg neura-link capabilities that rides on Emotional AI and advanced empathetic algorithms that take cues from vocalisations, body language, iris movement, facial expressions, dwell time and emotional responses to a spectrum of content from violence to love. The result is a complex matrix – a cyber maya web, indistinguishable from reality – the implications of which are exponentially mindboggling – fascinating and fearsome at once!
While a World Economic Forum 2025 study drawn from 1,000 companies across 22 industry sectors projects AI-induced transformation of 86 per cent of operations, a PwC 2025 Global Artificial Intelligence Study points to a $15.7 trillion contribution to the global economy by 2030, with China leading the GDP growth by a huge 26 per cent.
Even as originality, artistic integrity and technical adaptations take centrestage in concerned dialogues amid policy makers and programmers, ‘animation’ has already crossed multiple paradigm shifts in the last decade and is now heading to an App driven explosion of OpenAI-aided content adaptation, rendering and delivery across platforms seamlessly with just a click of a button. Tech has permeated the creation and transmission of Art in inextricable and intricate ways beyond the wildest imagination of Russell Kirsch, the creator of the first black and white digital pixel image in 1957. Animation in the multiverse is already redefining realities and stretching the elasticity of hyper engagement of senses that transcend traditional boundaries.
One of the first shifts in visual content generation is happening with nonlinear renditions and character attributions. It is a process of multiplying several artistic expressions guided by the viewer. While much of the action is prevalent in the video-gaming industry, it is making its presence felt in fantasy fiction impacting lighting, texture, expression, imbued with countless filters that control backgrounds and subjects in myriad spatial auto-generated ecosystems without iterative expensive renderings. A painting can begin morphing, talking and intelligently responding to haptics and voice commands or mimic facial expressions with stylistic alterations to the work of art within seconds.
The second notable shift is in advanced hardware and chip technology that has propelled Nvidia to a global juggernaut only to face new challenges from China’s DeepSeek that retrained the V3 with a cost differential factor from $100 million (OpenAI GPT4) to just $6 million. Its edge draws on Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices to deploy fast embedded data processors bringing AI directly to these devices, instead of a cloud or data centre. This speeds up the AI pipeline and clones repositories for real-time decision-making and autonomous machine adaptations using MoE (Mixtur-of-Experts) and MLA (Multi-head Latent Attention) models.
India is poised for an accelerated growth in AI driven user-apps with its current evaluation of $2.4 billion this year to over $15 billion by 2030. This arc would be spurred by demand for new content in gaming, world’s largest under 35 population base, affordable tech manpower that created masterpieces like the popular Hollywood blockbuster film Narnia (animated entirely in India), technological edge, App-enabled digital effects on mobile devices and government support for the creative industry. India’s VFX and Gaming industry employs over 100,000 professionals with their numbers projected to soar to 500,000 by 2030 with rising viewer tides spurred by giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime tapping into an already hooked viewership of 600 million.
The challenge of course, would be in the realm of laws governing copyrights, deployment of block-chain for transparency and defining the increasingly blurred lines between original and layered animated content and untangling its mutating avatars that could be dizzyingly deceptive. A bigger challenge would be the enforcement of these laws that require a different level of informed cyber policing that is hard to keep track of in the light of ever-increasing artistic content deluge. What adds to the complexity would be to identify the sequential source of the sheer volume of creative infringements.
Until such a time, let’s enjoy the magic of the Science of Art – a mirage manifested from the purer days of the classical Shanti Niketan to the contemporary JJ School of Arts, where paint and pencil once danced with paper.