Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki Calls AI CG Animation "An Insult To Life Itself"

Megalith

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Anime was a mistake! AI CG is a mistake! The legendary artist clearly wants nothing to do with animation created by artificial intelligence.

The AI CG animation produced a humanoid figure who looks horribly disfigured and can only move its body using its head. The lumbering, zombie-esque create was pitched for possible horror projects, but Miyazaki said he would have nothing to do with it. The critical animator was quick to dress down the presentation team. Miyazaki said he could not support an unfeeling, mechanized method of animation that doesn’t account for human pain. The artist was particularly incensed because a close friend of his has a disability, and Miyazaki felt like animators may left people like his friends down should the experiment be used. “I am utterly disgusted,” he told the room, summing up his feelings about the entire presentation.
 
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Look, they just need to un-cancel the new Silent Hill, add in these things, dress em up, and blam - there you go, best SH movie yet.

;)
 
"This is an insult to life itself" haha. They made two main mistakes: presenting it to someone who was never going to be excited by it in a million years, and also it looks like the technology itself sucks. If they had a demo where they'd built an AI with realistic biomechanical physics, and it had managed to develop something close to regular bipedal walking without any guidance then that would be pretty cool. That just looked like a load of completely random movements applied to a ragdoll.
 
How did the AI come up with that tripod moving carcass after observing a humanoid model?
 
The link in the OP goes to the demo that's being talked about, but the front page article has an embedded video of the Assassin's Creed movie trailer. I was watching the trailer wondering where this horrible AI CG was...

Edit: never mind, after reloading the front page it seems to have been fixed.
 
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It seems a bit snobbish, but considering the animation he's produced, I'm not going to go against his opinion on this.
 
HM makes a point. I am all for people doing things, even when AI or robots can do the same task more efficiently; if this is what he meant by the end of times, then yes, welcome to the Matrix. However, to claim that it is a lack of faith in ourselves that motivates this, well, I would argue that the opposite is true; the hubris in creation of an AI is astounding - perhaps akin to and as close as we may ever come - to creating life. This may then be the end that HM refers to.
 
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I can't find him saying Anime was a mistake in this, He also doesn't say AI CG is a mistake he says this is poop basically. Also any link to the full video this comes from? I can understand what he means by reaching the end of times but still the context is a bit out and I'd only be guessing.

My thought is that sure it's labor intensive and takes a lot of time buy that is the beauty in creation of animation. Why would you want to create a machine to do this work as you do? It's not just work it's an expression from the soul. So to have a soulless machine express something it doesn't understand to you is useless. If it does come up with something that moves you, that was not the true intent, that is what you're making out of it.
 
How did the AI come up with that tripod moving carcass after observing a humanoid model?

Trained it with video solely sourced from closing time on saint patricks day at the bar?

Dunno.

A lot of the AI people seems to have a much, much different definition of abject failure than the majority of the population.
 
This reminds me of when I tried to get my anime and manga devouring friend to watch RWBY. She just flat out refused to watch it because it wasn't in the Asian style enough for her tastes.
 
Wow, you could feel the crushing in that video. The presenters were visibly shaken by hearing Miyazaki say what he said. I deeply respect Miyazaki. He does not do this stuff for the money or for the fame.
 
The movements of the creature were actually very cool in a creepy way. Imagine their technology working with an array of different corpses some of which are missing various limbs all shuffling after you in their own ways. These animators can definitely license their technology to game makers.
 
Actually, after thinking about this for a bit. I think I kind of see where Miyazaki is coming from.
The creature was just following a movement algorithm with no regard to its own pain, and broken parts. The creature had no other thoughts, no distractions, no twitches or any other slight inefficiencies. It never moved its head around to look at anything, it never even made a scowl. It's the details that make the creature live and this example had none of them.
 
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I understand why they translate it to life itself, but what he actually said was that his father has a disease that makes it impossible for him to even lift his hand enough to give him a high five, and that the project he funded was a mockery of his life's work. That when people felt that an unthinking machine could bring life to then the part is cut off, the looks on their face is because they showed that they did not understand their discipline while wanting to replace the people working in it. There is a lot of cultural things that are simply not going to make any sense to any one who has not taken time to learn about that culture.

I always wonder if people really think before they spread video's like this with out any cultural footnotes. That is not on [H]ardocp they simply pointed to a story in English on a website that may not have actually understand just how much that video probably destroyed those guy's lives. No matter how skilled they are, I would guess they likely lost all their funding over it, Not because it offended something but because they showed they did not respect their own culture. One of the biggest things in Japanese culture is building an understanding of what it is you are doing, then attempting to master it before you change it.

The technology was to have a computer to learn to move without seeing a how real person moves, while trying to move a complex design. It ignores all the concepts of simple shapes suggesting motion, to teach people how objects in nature move. Traditional animations learn on flip books. You draw several books where you try to draw the motion from one frame to the next and then holding it in one hand using your thumb to control the speed of the pages twisting by it have the images move by your eyes. They move by fast enough if you did it right it looks like motion. After you have made a number of them, and some people figure out the concepts faster you learn to draw the poses of the character then go back and add in frames in between to get the spacing and the motion from one frame to the next. The animation is simply random motion with no attempt to animate the legs as if they are part of the same object just dragged along the ground. When I person walks they are falling forward. You lift one foot and swing it forward then proceed to fall forward to it and once you are standing on that foot you lift your second foot and swing it forward. Your whole body is used to balance as you walk forward and come to a stop.

A good way to test this is to run as fast as you can with you center of gravity about a foot to two feet in front of you by leaning over and pushing off as you run. The odds are you will fall over many times trying this until you learn to push with the balls of your feet using your calves to drive your body forward off the balls of your feet then having the ball of your leading foot hit and pull you forward. If you get shin splits don't blame they hurt, but most people walk flat footed and never develop or strengthen their calves which is why when little kids kick them they laugh as the person calves have no strength. I did this to mess with a kid head who was kicking other kids in the calves. I got him to walk around on the balls of his feet, by showing I could walk around bare foot on the balls of my feet and laughing when he could not. He parents did not complain because he stopped kicking people in the calves. But the point is the human body while being complex is a simply set of opposing muscles that pull in turn. They use electrical current to tighten and release. The animation of something dragging and twitching causing a person to think it is creepy because the motion is not what they learned by watching as kids. Kids crawl at first because their muscles are not strong enough and they have not learned to move them all at the same time. Zombie flicks usually are about dead things reanimating and chasing people but being too slow to catch people. Then resident evil aka bio hazard had zombies as people bitten by a virus that over writes some of their nervous system so they only act as yonge or demons possessing bodies that move as it controlled like puppets.

The point is the motion is only creepy because it is moving while not doing all the steps. It teaches the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, while attempting to build something that can take the jobs that are done correctly and to high level of skill and tries to replace them with something that is not even close to good enough but does not require a human to do the work. Ah most of the people who real are going to miss half the cultural references. But many will at least understand the jobs being lost.
 
Some things just need to be hand crafted. Not because machines can make a better product, but people making things has always been part of our creativity as human beings. No current machine has creativity, no machine can dream. This may happen someday, and it probably will, given that nature seems to always fill a vacuum.

But while mass produced things are the mainstay of our economy, and allow people to live a luxurious lifestyle, it will always be hand made things that have the most value.
 
Some things just need to be hand crafted. Not because machines can make a better product, but people making things has always been part of our creativity as human beings. No current machine has creativity, no machine can dream. This may happen someday, and it probably will, given that nature seems to always fill a vacuum.

But while mass produced things are the mainstay of our economy, and allow people to live a luxurious lifestyle, it will always be hand made things that have the most value.


The irony is that I want a machine to be able to do what we do, so that instead of a series of algorithms creating no mans sky, we can a series of advanced and creative AIs creating mass effect at the scale of no mans sky, with orders of magnitude more depth and detailed narrative and complex plots and environments, but expanded out far beyond what human teams can accomplish in X amount of time.
 
The irony is that I want a machine to be able to do what we do, so that instead of a series of algorithms creating no mans sky, we can a series of advanced and creative AIs creating mass effect at the scale of no mans sky, with orders of magnitude more depth and detailed narrative and complex plots and environments, but expanded out far beyond what human teams can accomplish in X amount of time.

What you want, and what is missing from AIs, is the ability to generate style. In all of the procedurally generated games I've seen, the humans have to supply the style that the algorithm puts out. An infinite amount of content in the same style gets boring sooner or later. An infinite amount of Mass Effect would be no better than an infinite amount of No Man's Sky.
 
I felt really bad for the programmers not having the foresight to see this coming. You don't demonstrate your boiler-plate code, tutorial-level experiment, and literal abomination to one of the most profilic persons in a professional field. Jesus Christ.
 
They literally said it has no concept of pain. Not a minute later he insults them greatly by saying this is a work of someone who has no idea what pain is. I get his point. But he is old and it shows. Poor guys

I love his movies, I really do.
 
There's a place for everything. Say you had a game or movie with a virus that infects a body, technological or biological, takes over the lower nervous system or creates its own in the body and animates the corps in whatever way it can to get locomotion. This would be that. Those stories have been written, too. Dude was a little pretentious.
 
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