Disaster Hayao Miyazaki, Who Said AI Is ‘Insult to Life Itself,” Reduced to AI-Generated Meme by OpenAI

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On Tuesday, OpenAI updated ChatGPT with new AI image generation capabilities that make it especially good at recreating specific visual styles. People trying the new feature immediately flooded social media with images in the style of Studio Ghibli and Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, who famously called artificial intelligence “an insult to life itself.”
Miyazaki’s quote comes from a 2016 documentary in which he’s shown a demo of a 3D model whose movements are animated with AI as opposed to manually, by a human, as is usually the case in 3D animated videos or video games.
“Thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting,” Miyazaki says after seeing the demo, saying it reminds him of a friend with a disability. “Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
ChatGPT’s new AI image generation capabilities are not substantively different from what many other AI image generators can already do. There are many AI image generation models on Civitai, for example, that are trained on Studio Ghibli movies and are good at imitating them. This is one thing generative AI is inarguably good at: copying the work of human artists, be they visual artists, musicians, or writers.
ChatGPT’s Ghibli moment is notable, however, because it’s extremely viral—even OpenAI founder Sam Altman has changed his X profile picture to a Ghiblified version of himself—and because it shows how far OpenAI, the company that started the current generative AI boom, and one that artists and publishers are currently suing for infringing on their copyrighted work, is willing to go in terms stealing from artists and content guardrails on its AI tools.
“Our goal is to give users as much creative freedom as possible,” an OpenAI spokesperson told 404 Media in an email. “We continue to prevent generations in the style of individual living artists, but we do permit broader studio styles—which people have used to generate and share some truly delightful and inspired original fan creations. We’re always learning from real world use and feedback and we’ll keep refining our policies as we go.”
Some of these “truly delightful and inspired original fan creations” allow users to use studio Ghibli’s style to recreate the assassination of JFK, an infamous example of censorship of Stalin’s image in the Soviet Union, or the moment U.S. forces captured Sadam Hussain in Iraq.
Our testing showed ChatGPT would also generate famous and graphic war photographs in the style of Ghibli movies, including “napalm girl” and “Saigon Execution.”
Previously, OpenAI was known for having very aggressive guardrails that prevented people from generating images featuring any real people, even historical figures. For example, in 2023, we reported that its AI image generation tool DALL E prevented people from generating images of Julius Caesar. The viral Ghibli images show the company’s position on this has clearly changed.
OpenAI told us that it is not blocking the model’s capability to depict adult public figures, but that they “implement the same safeguards we employ for editing images of photorealistic uploads of people. This is to enable helpful and beneficial uses in areas like education, historical, and satirical speech.”
Despite the lawsuits, outrage, and general resistance from artists, generative AI is already working its way into the workflows of many creative fields, including anime. Animation, which requires meticulous drawing of thousands and thousands of frames is famously grueling work, and some anime studios are already incorporating generative AI into their process to help with that workload. This, however, is not the same thing is the wholesale lifting of someone else’s style, and a model’s ability to copy the look of Spirited Away does not at all indicate its ability to create a work of art of that caliber.
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Thread for more examples of what this is talking about.
 
A human wants to spend as little time painting something as possible, so the details and attention is centered around what you're trying to convey. Your eyes are naturally drawn to the points of interest that the other human felt the need to invest his time into making.
I'm late but this isn't why those techniques exist. If anything one of the most common pitfalls of being an artist is spending too long fussing with something you've made because "it has to be perfect."
 
Ghibli was already losing it's sense of prestige with its recent movies and constant "anime but good" faggot trends, the AI shit is just a nail in the coffin that the style now has no value. If any retard can piss out a ghibli, then ghibli is pretty useless.
 
But when do we get AI art copying Beksinski? In fact I wanna see Ghibli movies Beksinskified.
 
AI easily does a better job that 99% of "professional" artists, though I doubt it will ever do as good as job as the top 1%.
See I disagree with this, I think someone can easily train an AI to mass produce the “top 1%” of artists. In fact, I’m willing to bet there already is an AI doing that. If every art style can be digested and broken down into an algorithm, then there is no reason why this isn’t already the case. Of course, we artists did this to ourselves. There’s something poetic about it.
 
The Hayao Miyazaki AI has some interesting features.

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It feels no pain and uses its head like a leg.
 
See I disagree with this, I think someone can easily train an AI to mass produce the “top 1%” of artists. In fact, I’m willing to bet there already is an AI doing that. If every art style can be digested and broken down into an algorithm, then there is no reason why this isn’t already the case. Of course, we artists did this to ourselves. There’s something poetic about it.
Maybe in the future (though doubtful). AI works by having millions of examples. You just don't have enough good works to show AI what to do to make a top class quality art as the million of mediocre art will bring it's ability down.
 
I always wonder if Miyazaki and Kon were ever friends? I hope he's not friends with Lasseter still. At least I think it was him doing the godawful intro on the Spirited Away DVD.
 
That's just good parenting.
iirc that was a somewhat complicated thing
Goro was looking to get into the dad's business, Hayao knew he wasn't ready for primetime.
Studio picked Goro to direct Tales of Earthsea (based on the Ursula K Legwin novel), and sure enough Goro _wasn't_ ready for primetime
iirc at the premier the author said something to the effect of "it is a very nice movie that has little to do with my book"
but yeah Miyazaki's basically always been bitter and hated everything, iirc part of it goes with him being a marxist, like actual "I feel strongly about the proletariat" not "I want free shit". To the point that iirc in interviews he said how he was conflicted about writing Nausicaa as a princess.
He's kind of a weird dude but sometimes the chips on his shoulders make sense, like his hatred of video games because they made nausicaa into a game where you fly around shooting the bugs.
 
For those too lazy to click on the video, this was type of imagery that Miyazaki was calling "an insult to life itself":

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So, some animators showed an old man a clip of a grotesque deformed zombie creature while making creepy comments like "It's using its head for a foot!" and "It can't feel pain!" He told them "Fuck off, you goddamn creeps" which is a perfectly understandable thing to do. But ten years later people are still using the out-of-context quote to represent his thoughts on AI in general.

Most anti-AI fanatics (and I mean the fanatics, not just people with concerns) seems to be troons or furries or both, so I guess they need to push the optics of having a whimsical old Japanese man on their side who's as irrationally dedicated to anti-AI raging as they are.
 
Unfortunately, when a lot of people think of "art" they think about prestige positions like "film director" or "magic card illustrator" or something like that, and they associate it with some loudmouths with gay opinions because of that. So it's kind of a losing battle trying to convince these people that everything they interact with will be shittified over time when all the nameless artists in the creative departments are dismissed and replaced with computer.
That’s already happened and it’s why normies are so indifferent.

Artists should have suddenly cared about art when all the ridiculous race/sexuality swaps, mountain-fisted political sermons, endless reboots, historical revisionism, and nonsensical decisions entered the scene. Instead, they happily made themselves corpo tools because corps spoke their beliefs to them, and now those same corps are gearing up to fuck them too.

Normies are watching it burn and having fun, because there’s nothing they could do to stop artists and corps destroying what they love then, and there’s nothing they can do now.
 
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