“An insult to life itself”: Miyazaki critiques artificial intelligence animation

Wow, the designer even started crying in the video.

I do respect Miyazaki; his works being really wonderful storytelling. Still I feel like this was a bit of a "get off my lawn," moment. He's old and sees this new age and is either unsure or afraid of it.

Getting AIs to help with animation could be a huge cost incentive. We're a long way from that. This group's attempt shows that, but they also realize it could be used in zombie/monster style games (doom, resident evil, etc.)

He had some good points about pain and how the demo creatures might lack believability because their movements don't make as much sense. But instead of using that as an insult to fail, they should use it as criticism to try to make what they're doing better.

I hope they continue their work, inspite of his response. He was kinda being a dick.

It seems to me that there are several levels of misunderstanding here. And the most interesting part is when Suzuki asks "So, what is your goal?", and the engineer answers "Well, we would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do.". This is certainly a commendable goal. Then we cut to another sequence, where Miyazaki is drawing, and reflecting: "I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves..." It may or may not be so, but this is an interesting point to discuss. I can certainly understand how it could feel like it, but you'd have to study the motive for wanting to "replace" humans by machines, or just have machine perform like humans. One key misunderstanding in this exchange, and foremost on the part of the journalists reporting it (damn dumb journalists!), is that "This is a presentation of an artificial intelligence model which learned certain movements." Obviously, they didn't teach it to move, they had a certain model of the body, and let the AI loose, trying to learn by itself how to move. This is a classical application of genetic programming. See how some of those creatures look "creepy" too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgWQ-gPIvt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXTZHHQ7ZiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yci5FuI1ovk They obtained some creepy result, added a creepy texture and made it into a quick & dirty demo for "animating zombies". Clearly, the people who assisted to this demo didn't understand what it was. And the answer of the artist was the worst. Imagine assisting to Wright brothers' demo, and coming with: "I have a friend who is blind, this doesn't respect the pain and the suffering of those with vision disabilities who will never be able to pilot a plane." What a tool!