AI Slop and Misreading Studio Ghibli

Some of us didn’t notice what was said in Studio Ghibli’s animated films. We watched Princess Mononoke and salivated over its breathtaking animation, more mesmerized by the colorful fantasy characters than listening to any important words they had to say. The battle between humanity and nature didn’t resonate. In 1999, I could hear snickers from children in the theater when Ashitaka’s arrow decapitates an attacking soldier, giddily surprised the cartoon they’d convinced their parents to let them see had such shocking violence. Did those kids remember the lesson of environmentalism or only the blood that painted their memories?

In 2016, Princess Mononoke director Hayao Miyazaki was shown a demonstration of artificial intelligence. A media company projected visuals of a CGI zombie programmed to learn its movements, making the undead creature walk using its head as a leg. While the company cited that this technology could be applied to zombie video games, all Miyazaki could think about was how inhuman this display was. When the presentation finished, he brought up a friend he knew with a muscle disability, and thinking of him while watching this footage made him utterly disgusted at what AI was being used for. He held nothing back when addressing the people who made this AI zombie. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my art at all,” stated Miyazaki at the meeting. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” With the developers openly admitting they wanted to program machines to draw pictures the same way as humans, Miyazaki would later remark, “I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

PJ Accetturo wrote on Reddit, “I’ve wanted to make a live action version of Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke for 20+ years now.” That dream could come true if PJ studied animation and live-action filmmaking to find the bleed of mediums. But Acceturo didn’t have faith in himself. He did, however, have $745 that he blew on generating an AI-created trailer for a live-action Princess Mononoke. He used the tech that Miyazaki had condemned to shit out a vile recreation of an animated film about environmentalism. Tone deaf doesn’t even begin to describe Acceturo’s misguided ambitions. In case you were wondering, Acceturo was aware of Miyazaki’s disdain for AI and didn’t care:

“I’m sure there will be some criticism of this. I’ve heard Miyazaki is anti-AI. That’s okay. I made this adaptation mostly for myself, because his work makes me want to create new worlds. We should look for ethical ways to explore AI tools to help empower artists to create.”

There is no such thing as an AI artist. AI is not a tool like a pencil, paintbrush, or digital artwork application akin to Blender. AI is designed only to replicate what has come before. It is guessing based on the past rather than inspiring for the future. AI is not creative. AI “artists” are not innovative, no matter how much they like to pretend they are. Miyazaki spent months working alongside animators to draw entire frames of Princess Mononoke, putting an incredible amount of work into creating one of the most impressive animated films ever. Accetturo spent $745 on plugging in some prompts to a machine to generate a worse version of something already made. PJ’s two-decade dream of a live-action Princess Mononoke should’ve stayed a dream forever. He’d be $745 richer and far less despised for dabbling in an insult to life.

Princess Mononoke is my favorite Studio Ghibli film. I’ve seen it in the theater multiple times, and I still get choked up by Joe Hisaishi’s emotionally moving score and the breathtaking forest animation. To see that world being mutated into the inhumanity of sloppy AI was disgusting. It looks as ugly as the intent behind making such a trailer. PJ didn’t understand Hayao Miyazaki or Princess Mononoke. AI artists don’t give a fuck about art. The “live-action Princess Mononoke trailer” is not a creative experiment. No AI user or AI-supporting producer is looking at this generated footage and thinking it’s a masterful work of art. All they see is a cheap product they spent so little producing. The bulk of PJ’s development process he listed on his Reddit post involved prompts he wrote and how much money he paid for each shot. I don’t get choked up watching PJ’s trailer. I feel nothing. Reading PJ’s process has all the passion of somebody telling you how many quarters they inserted in the coin pusher machine before it paid out.

PJ tried to play the victim in all this. He posted a cease and desist letter from Studio Ghibli while trying to make the case that AI artists need protection. Except the letter was fake, generated from AI in the same way PJ’s trailer was composed. The letter has several tells, with phony email addresses and phone numbers. Studio Ghibli also directly responded that they never sent such a letter. Did another AI user dupe PJ, or did he fake this letter to garner sympathy? Either way you look at it, it’s an example of how AI removes the authentic nature of everything.

AI “art” is not about creating but commodifying. The people using it don’t want to be the next Miyazaki; they want to be the next producer of that trend. There are only products for these people. They didn’t look at something like Spirited Away as a wondrous growing-up tale. They only saw the style and wanted to replicate it. Ghibli’s influence has been distorted into a filter that has gone so viral that The White House used it for a racist depiction of a woman from the Dominican Republic being arrested by American immigration. Miyazaki would have never made something so hideous. But thanks to disgusting advancements in technology like OpenAI, the spirited humanity of Studio Ghibli’s designs has been stolen and dressed up for a disgusting endeavor to further cruelty.

After watching the AI zombie showcase, Miyazaki remarked that people who developed this technology did not understand pain. The same can be said for these tech bro idiots who think they’re expanding the creative realm with their trashy pilfering of culture. They never understood what made Ghibli’s films work if they thought using AI was an acceptable alternative for creating their own designs and worlds. Miyazaki’s films are compelling because of how much detail and effort he placed in the individual drawings and stories. AI will never match Miyazaki’s filmmaking for only being a soulless husk of media, stumbling around using heads as legs.

If you really want to be the next Miyazaki, pick up a pencil and fucking draw!