Niko Pueringer

Niko Pueringer co-founded Corridor Digital with Sam Gorski, his filmmaking partner since the two started making effects-driven student films in junior high in Stillwater, Minnesota. They moved to Los Angeles in 2008 and built Corridor into one of YouTube’s defining VFX studios. Within the crew, Pueringer is the machine-learning tinkerer — the one who assembles the pipelines behind the channel’s AI experiments.

Defending the AI anime

In February 2023 Pueringer co-wrote and directed “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors,” which used a Stable Diffusion model fine-tuned on frames from Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust to restyle green-screen footage as anime. When animators — including critics like Steven Zapata — condemned the technique as theft, Pueringer became the studio’s chief defender, telling Kotaku the team was “figuring out how we can use [our] own art with these tools to speed up the process” and writing on Reddit that change is frightening “especially if it feels like your passion or livelihood is on the line.”

For the August 2023 sequel he answered the strongest criticism head-on: the new model was trained on original character art made for the project by an artist friend, with a model-sheet workflow borrowed from traditional animation, and the whole pipeline was published as a tutorial. By 2024 he had become a sought-after voice on generative AI in production, telling the Hollywood Professional Association that AI “is ultimately just another tool in the toolbox” — and that the creativity, writing, directing, and acting are “all things that you don’t use AI for.”