Hayao Miyazaki has been at the helm of Studio Ghibli, the legendary Japanese animation studio, in one way or another for 40 years – now serving as honorary chairman and continuing to direct feature films. Over the last few decades, he’s seen a dramatic change in culture and technology while sticking to his traditionalist guns.

The death of creativity

Miyazaki is known for aggressively high standards and a dedication to the craft of animation.

For years, he has overseen teams of artists hand-painting beautiful visuals from films such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away frame by frame. His reaction to learning that artists on his team were experimenting with AI was pretty much as you’d expect.

Filmed speaking to his team during the filming of the 2016 documentary Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki, the animator was unequivocal in his condemnation of the use of AI for an experiment during the production of the short film Boro the Caterpillar.

Rage against the machine

Miyazaki shared his thoughts in this documentary a year before Google released the seminal paper on the transformer architecture that now underpins today’s dominant AI models – and six years before OpenAI first launched ChatGPT.

Despite airing his views so bluntly, nearly a decade on, OpenAI’s image generator became embroiled in controversy when thousands of people took part in a viral craze that involved generating Ghibli-esque graphics within seconds.

The trend raised serious concerns about the role that AI plays in the modern creative landscape. While it was used primarily for fun in this instance, it’s easy to see how executives may see the time-saving potential of automation tools and the allure of removing the blood, sweat, and toil that humans put into their creative endeavors.