Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't drawing inbetweens one of the ways a lot of animators break into the industry? Key animation is usually an expert position for lead animators, but how will anyone become a key animator without being able to learn the process?
Who does that style animation today? It seems so much of it is 3D animated with a cell style render. I'm not an anime fan, so maybe somebody is still doing cell based animation, but that would blow my mind. So breaking into the industry seems very strange to me.
AI isn't simply a tool like Photoshop or Blender, which augment an artist's existing skill. AI is designed to simulate and replace human creativity in the same way automation replaced physical human labor elsewhere. That's a fundamental difference. Replace physical animation with cel animation and the skill and talent of the animators still matter, even translated to another paradigm. Replace a human artist with AI, and the value of their talent is just gone. Even if the AI is trained on that specific artist's work, it can't grow and expand its horizons the way that human artist can, it can only iterate on what data the model already makes available, and express generalities based on that.
And why bother have human beings involved at all when you can just train an AI to do the whole thing? The whole business case for AI is devaluing the market value of human creative/knowledge based labor or automating it away altogether.