
“An insult to life itself”: Miyazaki critiques artificial intelligence animation - buzzy_hacker
http://qz.com/859454/the-director-of-spirited-away-says-animation-made-by-artificial-intelligence-is-an-insult-to-life-itself/
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djsumdog
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.

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informatimago
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=JBgG_VSP7f8)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgWQ-
gPIvt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgWQ-gPIvt4)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXTZHHQ7ZiQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXTZHHQ7ZiQ)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yci5FuI1ovk](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!

