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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

The Miyzaki quote is out of context, he isn't talking about generative AI but rather a 2016 animation of a creepy zombie whose limbs are controlled by AI.

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While this is true, it's hard to imagine people spending years perfecting the style would be happy to see it copied effortlessly without any compensation while people who made the copying possible are rolling in cash.

This is not just about copyright infringement or plagiarism.

Automatically generating text, images and videos based on training data and a tiny prompt is fundamentally about taking someone's work and making money off of it without giving anything in return.

Don’t worry, I’m sure someone will roll up and claim that it’s just “democratization” of that style and the prompt authors exhibit as much creativity as the artists themselves.

Or they’ll claim it’s no different from a person looking at something and learning from it, implying that a multi-billion dollar company collating and labelling petabytes of data without permission to be used as the raw material to create their slop machine is no different from a human being being inspired by someone else’s art.

Luckily it doesn't actually copy the style at all.

No matter what text you put in the prompt you'll get /something/. Just because you put "studio ghibli anime" in the prompt doesn't mean you're going to actually get that out of it. It'll just be kind of yellow and blobby.

(Also, the style isn't from "people" but a specific guy named Yoshifumi Kondo who isn't around anymore.)

No, the zombie context is actually not that relevant, given he says "We as humans are losing faith in themselves" in response to the AI animation. He's clearly disgusted by the entire concept of machine generated art.

Being an animator I’d say that is not very surprising. But I don’t think the disgusting zombie thing is very indicative of it.

Also, he was calling them ableist because they said crawling was creepy but it reminded him of a disabled man he knew.

Though… I'm always surprised how respectful Westerners are about Miyazaki. Meanwhile you read other Japanese directors and they're saying all kinds of things about him.

In the full context, he is literally admonishing young developers who created ai and animation automation software as a possible alternative to handmade animation. He rips into them not only for their technical failure but for missing the point of what he does, which is human expression.

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