There are certain people within each creative industry that everyone looks to for an opinion. In the world of animation, Hayao Miyazaki is one of those people. The co-founder of Studio Ghibli has hand drawn some of the most memorable animated movies coming out of Japan over the past four decades, including My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and Ponyo to name but a few.
If you happen to work in the field of artificial intelligence, especially related to animation, Miyazaki probably isn't a fan. Recode brought our attention to a recent AI demo he attended, and it didn't end well.
The demo in question was created by Japanese telecommunications and media company Dwango. It consisted of animations that were created by an AI using a human form. The result is quite disturbing, with the AI opting to use the character's head as a leg and having the model crawl around. It's suggested by Nobuo Kawakami, chairman of Dwango and speaker during the presentation, that this would work well for a "zombie video game."
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Miyazaki isn't impressed, in fact he's "utterly disgusted" by the sight of these animations and states he'd "never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all." Afterwards, away from the presentation, he adds, "We humans are losing faith in ourselves."
If you consider the situation as a whole, Miyazaki's reaction to the animations makes perfect sense. This is a man who has spent his entire working life creating believable characters through hand animation. It's painstaking work. And yet, here's a company showing him humans performing weird, inhuman animations in 3D. He would never make a piece of work that would use such animations.
The fault here lies completely with Dwango. It's unclear why this presentation happened, but Miyazaki is the wrong person to show this technology to. The AI doesn't seem very advanced and has yet to perfect even basic human movement. It may in the future, but even then, Miyazaki won't be the target audience. Games companies and 3D animation studios are.