Hayao Miyazaki Tells Video Game Makers What He Thinks of Their Characters Made with Artificial Intelligence: “I’m Utterly Disgusted. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

I actu­al­ly lost a smidge of respect for Miyaza­ki when I saw this. What they dis­cov­ered was fair­ly inter­est­ing and almost cer­tain­ly cre­at­ed with­out the intent to be grotesque. Even if this kind of ani­ma­tion were only used in a typ­i­cal zom­bie hor­ror game, there is no harm there. Some of those games are great.

Miyaza­ki seems to cal­cu­late his words to hurt the stu­den­t’s feel­ings. He asks “So, what’s your goal” as if all research needs a goal. As an artist, he should know bet­ter.

While Miyaza­k­i’s films do focus on pos­i­tive, life-affirm­ing themes, there’s still no short­age of the grotesque in his work. From bub­bling, mis­shapen demons to heroes who decap­i­tate human ene­mies with arrows. I won­der if any­one in his life ever told him to ‘stop draw­ing those awful mon­sters’?

Of course it needs a goal! Every step, every breath has goal. And a research does­n’t need one?! It sounds like you think an artist does­n’t need a goal in his work. Very,very wrong answer. As an artist, I can’t go on with­out my own per­son­al goal. Every line, every shade of colour is a point­less mas­tur­ba­tion if you don’t have a goal. I don’t know much about Miyaza­ki but I began to respect him. He did­n’t want to hurt any­one, he was hon­est. You only hurt some­one when you are not hon­est with that per­son. I did­n’t find this ani­ma­tion fas­ci­nat­ing, I felt myself like a kid who watch­es suf­fer­ing ani­mals or pulling out bugs legs and watch them try­ing to escape. Ter­ri­bly dis­turb­ing. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. These guys for­got about their respon­si­bil­i­ty.

I can appre­ci­ate both points of view. But I feel kin­ship with Miyaza­ki. Not because the com­put­ers can only cre­ate mon­sters. But because the rea­son automa­tion exists is so we have time to cre­ate, which is the essence of life. The idea of automat­ing art seems even more mon­strous than the crea­tures. The only rea­son to do this is to reduce labour costs. On that basis, we’re like­ly to auto­mate life so we have more time for work. It seems per­fect that mon­strous, non­liv­ing labour cre­ates mon­sters.

In addi­tion to my com­ment above, I do under­stand where Miyaza­ki is com­ing from — and his rea­sons are total­ly valid. That meet­ing was pret­ty intense.haha

To be hon­est, at first I was baf­fled at Hayao Miyaza­k­i’s state­ment, because I thought he’s dis­lik­ing the con­cept of AI in itself.

But after watch­ing the video I can under­stand he’s sim­ply com­ing from a very per­son­al place, and he knows it. None of his words sound like an objec­tive state­ment, and he does­n’t try to paint them as such.

He did­n’t put the cre­ator down, he stat­ed his per­son­al opin­ion, which hap­pened to be a very neg­a­tive one, and that’s it.
Even his tone of voice does­n’t sound like he’s bash­ing them, despite his strong words. He sounds more sad than any­thing else.

He even said “If you wan­na do creepy stuff, go ahead and do this, but this exper­i­ment makes me think of this, this, and that, and that’s the rea­son why I would­n’t like to see it in my movies.” To which I could only say “It’s cool. I under­stand”, even if I’d debate him he feels like this only because the AI was put inside of a human mod­el, and his uncan­ny val­ley instincts kicked in. Sure as hell mine did. If the AI would be put inside of a, let’s say, spi­der-like mod­el, the impres­sion would be com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent.

And I speak this from a per­spec­tive of a per­son who actu­al­ly finds this AI sim­u­la­tion inter­est­ing, and hav­ing in fact noth­ing to do with life, just cod­ing. I don’t asso­ciate life with aware­ness (like plants and microbes are as legit life­forms as humans to me), so why would I asso­ciate intel­li­gence (even as prim­i­tive one as this AI) or even self-aware­ness with life. That’s dumb. The life as we know it is just a by-prod­uct of a dead mat­ter ‑the samo one that formed rocks and stars — that hap­pened to com­bine in miri­ad dif­fer­ent ways.
It’s spe­cial in it’s exis­tence, but it’s noth­ing divine with exclu­sive rights.
So I find it real­ly cool this thing learned how to move by itself.

So, tl;dr …I get both sides, and Hayao Miyaza­ki is still cool in my mind. All in all, he just seemed like a nor­mal per­son to me here.

It is so SO INAPPROPRIATE to pro­mote a “zom­bie sim­u­la­tor” to a man who’s life’s work is about the LIBERATION of the soul from the hor­rors of man’s nature.

While I admire the inge­nu­ity, SO INAPPROPRIATE.

This comes from a gamer.