An Insult To Life Itself: Some Thoughts on Hayao Miyzaki and GenAI I saw a
Tumblr post that directed an important perspective on the issue of genAI to my attention and thought to share it here. With the Studio Ghibli AI image generator becoming popular, I wanted to let my fellow anti-genAI folk know that the Miyazaki quote “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself” originated from a 2016 documentary
“Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki” which was created before consumer LLMs and text-to-image generators became commonplace. Then-President of Kadokawa Corporation Kawakami Nobuo demonstrated procedural animation applied to zombies to move in a grotesque, inhuman fashion, notably using its head as a limb, saying, “[The zombie has] no sense of pain, no idea that the head is important. It uses the head as if it were just an ordinary leg.” He wanted to illustrate to Miyazaki how “Using artificial intelligence enables a kind of horror beyond human imagination.” To which Miyazaki replied,
“Every morning, I used to see a friend who’s disabled. He would walk up to me. One leg’s turned outward, so it’s hard for him to walk. Even a high-five is hard for him. His stiff hand and mine touch. I think of him, and can’t say I like this. Whoever made it gives no thought to pain. It’s very unpleasant. You can make horrible things if you want, but I want nothing to do with it. It’s an awful insult to life.”
The President seemed confused by this reaction, thinking that Miyazaki was just unimpressed by a possible perceived poor quality, but Miyazaki confirms to him in few words that the quality isn’t the issue, it’s the lack of a human perspective on how disability affects people.
The Tumblr post by Mamoru says that Miyazaki’s “insult to life” comment was not about AI, but that it was about ableism, likely meaning that portraying the zombie’s disabled body to shock the viewer is ableist. Miyazaki seeing a disabled body be used for horror and done by a machine no less saw an utter lack of humanity. Mamoru said that Miyazaki’s response was just about ableism and explicitly not about AI, but considering the issue I believe that Miyazaki’s response acknowledged a worrying combination of a lack of humanity for disabled people uniquely and disturbingly mixed with the uncaring, unthinking automation of a computer.
Mamoru was right in pointing out that when anti-genAI people use the “insult to life” quote they are likely unknowingly and woefully missing important context that gives a layer of profundity to the argument against AI images. Though I think they mean to say that this quote isn’t about AI and that it’s specifically about just ableism so therefore it shouldn’t be used as a response to pro-genAI people. I disagree. The automation of a lack of humanity can very much apply to current genAI issues like deepfake porn (automated uncaring about the rights and agency of the deepfake victim), art being used as training data non-consensually (automated uncaring about the ownership rights of artists), and instant gratification (automated uncaring about developing a skill). It all is an insult to life itself.
Additionally, though procedural animation and genAI are not the same kind of AI, the themes of Miyzaki’s response apply to genAI without contradiction.
Mamoru said that Miyazaki did make a comment on (what would become) text-to-image AI generators. Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki sitting next to Miyazaki asks, “What’s your ultimate goal?” and the demonstrator replies, “A machine that draws pictures like humans do.” The documentary cuts to a new scene where Miyazaki says, “I fear the end of the world is near. Humans have lost confidence in themselves.” It then cuts to a scene where Miyazaki is working on a particularly complex and time-consuming hand-drawn animation.
This all makes the proliferation of the new Studio Ghibli AI image generator all the more bitter. The worst offender I’ve found being the Trump administration. The official White House Twitter account posted a Ghibli-style AI generated image of an ICE agent arresting a sobbing Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, an illegal immigrant previously convicted for trafficking fentanyl. Disguised ICE agents have kidnapped Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student who is currently being held in detention in Basile, Louisiana over 1,400 miles away from her home in Boston, Massachusetts for the act of having co-written a pro-Palestine op-ed calling for her college to divest from companies with ties to Israel and recognize the Palestinian genocide. The Secretary of State launched an AI-led effort called “Catch and Revoke” to scrape the Internet for “pro-Hamas” visa holders and deport them. Beyond this, Republican politicians and Israel supporters have propagandized AI-generated images and videos of
Hamas militants leading queer prisoners during a pride parade,
of Elon Musk in front of a DOGE podium used as proof that DOGE existed before the 2024 election despite the fact it was created in January 2025,
of Kamala Harris as a Communist and a fake Harris campaign video,
an image of Trump with a king’s crown captioned “LONG LIVE THE KING”, and more. I’ve seen posts around the Internet characterizing AI-generated images as “the current aesthetic of fascism” and, seeing how automated uncaring lack of humanity and conservatism go hand in hand, I can’t help but agree.
#GenAI #AI #Miyazaki #StudioGhibli #Ghibli #HayaoMiyazaki 
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“Miyazaki ha ragione”
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