The AI-Brained Sickos Who Upscale Anime To 60 FPS Need To Be Stopped, Now More Than Ever

By Elijah Gonzalez | November 5, 2025 | 9:55am

Anime Features Artificial Intelligence

The AI-Brained Sickos Who Upscale Anime To 60 FPS Need To Be Stopped, Now More Than Ever

We’ve all been there. You’re eager to rewatch a clip from one of your favorite anime, whether it’s a catchy opening, an all-timer fight sequence, or a beautifully rendered moment of character development. You go to YouTube, type in a description, and without fully reading the title, click on what you assume is footage from the original source. But as you start watching, something is off.

You’re immediately barraged with a sense of the uncanny, like when you go to a Best Buy, look over at whatever blockbuster is playing on a giant 4K TV, and everything looks like a soap opera. You look down at the full title of the video, and it all makes sense: “4K + 60 fps.” The anime has been taken, shoved into frame interpolation technology, and spat out as a blurry 60 frames per second (FPS) nightmare with no sense of impact or timing.

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The reason why the video being at 60 frames per second should set off an alarm bell is because very little animation outside of video games is created at this frame rate. 24 frames per second has been the standard for movies since time immemorial—just to be clear, this means that there are 24 images shown in sequence each second to create a sense of motion. While 24 FPS was originally born out of necessity in the early days of film, it has since become the standard for scripted programs, both movies and television.

However, when it comes to animation, 24 FPS is more of an upper limit rather than something maintained throughout. Part of this comes from animation being an inherently time-intensive process—if animators had to render everything at 24 FPS, they would be allowed even less time outside of their dungeon-like studios. Because of this, some common alternatives are to animate at 12 FPS (commonly referred to as “on twos,” as in you’re holding each frame for the place of two frames if it were running at 24 FPS), 8 FPS (“on threes”), and 6 FPS (“on fours”). Each of these frame rates has a different look, ranging from smoother to choppier.

While it’s tempting to assume that 24 FPS will always look “better,” the reality is that it’s all a matter of context: maybe a violent scene would benefit from brutal, choppy animation at 8 or 6 FPS. Or vice versa, a scene of people elegantly dancing could potentially come across better with a smoother 12 or 24 FPS. The point is that frame rate in animation isn’t flat or constant, but something that changes based on the needs of a scene.

By contrast, when you see a 60 FPS AI-upscaled video on YouTube, this wasn’t an artistic decision made by the creator, but one made by tech fetishists (probably gamers) who don’t understand that “more” doesn’t mean “better” in the context of animation. Specifically, they likely took the original video source and plugged it into frame interpolation software that utilizes artificial intelligence to generate additional frames, which are inserted between the original ones. Unsurprisingly, this basically always looks like garbage.

Instead of the frame rate changing to punctuate specific actions, it’s all smoothed out into a steady, lifeless tedium. On top of this, this software is rarely able to actually do its job properly; most frame interpolation tech is designed for live-action (where it also looks bad unless used for things like sporting events). When it attempts to generate frames, especially on animation with lower frame rates, it creates images with a gross, smudged look that’s a blurry mess (see the image at the top of the article). The animator Noodle has a great video on the subject that showcases several examples.

While you may assume that this horrible 60 FPS trend is something new, born out of the current AI (fool’s) gold rush, it actually predates ChatGPT. Looking back, it was all a bit prescient. These uploaders who viewed themselves as “upgrading” works of animation by running them through frame interpolators offered a peek at our shitty present that’s defined by an even more aggressive disregard for creators and art in general. You can draw a clear line between those “remastering” these videos and the ChatGPT obsessives who view themselves as “creating” when the extent of their work entails typing into a prompt that generates images from stolen work.

Here, there’s no real consideration of aesthetic value or artistic intent, just using technology to brute-force something that can only actually be accomplished through the blood, sweat, and tears of real-life human artists—of course, admitting this would both take taste and the acknowledgement that an artist’s work is important and irreplaceable.

And while it would be nice if this mentality were entirely contained to anti-art Elon Musk fanboys on X, the unfortunate reality is that another group is also very interested in these tools aimed at undermining artists: blood sucking business executives. Anime industry powerhouse Toei Animation, which is behind One Piece and Dragon Ball, recently announced a plan to invest millions to expand into global markets. Unfortunately, there’s something buried in the several-page proposal: plans to invest millions in AI. Specifically, they intend to utilize AI to generate storyboards, backgrounds, in-between frames, and more.

Guess what “AI-generated in-between frames” means? It’s basically the same as frame interpolation. While dedicated animation software designed to generate in-between frames apparently tends to look “better” than the frame interpolation tech used by laymen who upload videos on YouTube, there’s obviously a whole boatload of familiar problems that stem from AI in general.

For starters, there are the environmental ramifications, with generative AI (or more specifically, the data centers where its calculations take place) consuming massive amounts of energy, leaving a carbon footprint equivalent to that of a small country at a time when we’re already hurtling towards climate disaster—if AI continues to proliferate, this will only get worse. Then there’s the issue of stolen information, where most Gen AI models are trained on data and artwork stolen from the Internet.

These are commonly talked about problems, but even if we ignore these—and also sideline the fact that AI is generally ill-suited for creating art—there’s another massive issue with anime companies relying on AI for in-between frames: in-between animation work is the gateway into the industry for most animators. Virtually all animators in the anime industry begin as in-between animators: this entails drawing what’s in between the most important frames of animation, which are called key frames.

If AI were to enter the picture, there would be even more competition among in-between animators. As it stands, the anime industry is already a nightmare, especially for up-and-comers: most in-between animators are forced to work for dirt cheap as freelancers, with very few full-time job positions available. Those who survive this way hope to eventually get a shot at key animation and maybe a salaried position.

Much like other examples of shortsightedness when it comes to AI, like how Google’s focus on providing AI-generated answers continues to strangle out many websites (which is where the information that powers AI comes from), if anime companies were to lean on AI for in-between work, it could undermine the industry in the long term. By removing the gateway where creatives gain the skills needed to handle key frames, animation direction, and more, the industry would be selling its future to save a few bucks.

While on the one hand, it seems impossible that these companies would do something so shortsighted—and I’m sure that some of them will refuse to—at the same time, with the corporate world’s fixation on the next quarterly earnings report, it’s easy to imagine many of them increasingly leaning into AI, strangling out the job of in-between animation until there’s an entire generation of underexperienced animators.

AI could bring about many hellish changes, including massive waves of unemployment and state-sanctioned killing machines. While not quite as consequential, you can add the death of anime as we know it to that list of possibilities.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.