You're right, but projects like this do make me think AI handling inbetweens well enough to replace animators is where we'll end up eventually and that it's probably not far off.
I don't want to burst your bubble, but it might happen anyway.
The artwork is inside a scene, SD does not understand that scene. The artwork has spatial and human readable emotional relationships. SD does not understand those relationships.
SD can maybe create morphs between frames, as a lateral move between two pieces of generated information, but it will never know how to connect up those images in a manner that satisfies the human requirement of creating a good image.
We already have mathematical tools for interpolating between frames. They are wholly unsatisfying for creating novel artworks. Adding SD to that stack doesn't magically solve that problem.
Your dream idea of killing the inbetween with mathematics would require automating what an artist does by hand to construct and bend space-time upon a blank piece of paper. Describing what an artist does takes time. CTRL+Paint does a good job. With mapping out every possible emotional/visual interpretation of those shapes, between the two frames and allowing the user to pick the resulting outcome.
That is the "tea, earl grey, hot" star trek replicator for art inbetweens. SD is just another tool for filling in gaps with random spam. The real value in this, is that there's a hoarde of young people who want SD and it's outcome. The real art will continue unphased, using SD as a tool, where it fits.
> but it will never know how to connect up those images in a manner that satisfies the human requirement of creating a good image.
A few years ago I heard people saying the same thing about going from a piece of text to a picture that "satisfies the human requirement of creating a good image"
Inbetweening is not going to be the obstacle that these AI approaches are finally going to be unable to manage.
Yeah, never say never. If AI can replace artists, it can replace animators, it can replace programmers, and ultimately it can replace humanity altogether.
I think we all knew this in the abstract but the pace is a bit faster than anybody expects.
