䷡ Insult

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

There must be better uses for a child? Maybe granting the overspecific request for a coloring page with both candy canes and a caterpillar.

This is not art. A page with this image printed is for daydreaming so long as you have crayons handy. Those already b-zombie infected use words like “fine motor development.”

What does art take? Daydreaming, fine motor development, and what’s this? James Gurney working on a page for “Dinotopia”? Let’s take a look.

What is he doing? Flagrantly copying bits of old paintings? How does that make you feel? Does Dinotopia become a bunch of derivative drible in your mind? My mind works differently. I value novelty less, sincerity more. Is he respecting elders? Don’t artists train by copying the old masters? Like writing fan-fiction? Perish the thought. I have darker ones: blue and black. Any good art is better than the artist, some spirit bestows it, a figurative muse, be glad they picked you. The jealous imitator wishes they had been picked, tries to take the muse. A lighter take: white and gold. The zealous imitator invites the muse to visit again thanking the old master for pointing the way.

My sister sent this to my family group chat on Valentine’s Day:

This is not art. It is a friendly gesture. It is cute. Watch closely. You can’t quite see, but from the hip movement: this cat has six legs! Horrific! Is it an insult to life itself?

You may have read that Hayao Miyazaki says AI is “an insult to life itself.” This is a lie or BS or I don’t know, when b-zombies are involved it’s hard to attribute intention, regardless it is obviously false. From what I gather, he said this around 2013, maybe later, appearing in a 2016 documentary “Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki.” Video generation like this cat, it’s complicated, but you could say, “by 2023, video generation started escaping the lab.” That’s a difference of a decade. Can you safely connect the new to the old? And even if AI is a rigid designator, what did Miyazaki have in mind?

It’s not a mystery. He explained in 2018.

When you hype up something like artificial intelligence in various ways, you realize that foolish things happen. At that time, I thought that an anarchic person like Kawakami doesn’t have restraint. For ordinary humans living on the ground, unpleasant things are unpleasant. That’s simply why I reacted.

Miyazaki was concerned about careless hyping humans not underlying tech.

Let me tell you the story how I see it. Not the real story, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they were thinking, but this story is consistent with the facts and conducive to my understanding.

Kawakami is excited, the master Miyazaki is planning a visit to his Dwango Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Miyazaki has expressed interest in the lab’s machine-learning locomotion technology. What should they demo?

Kawakami isn’t an animator, but he, like everyone else, has seen “Spirited Away.” No-Face is so unimaginable that even now the nuance of its symbolism remains beyond my ability to describe in words. Kawakami has seen “Princess Mononoke”. The Tatarigami boars are grotesque. Kawakami has seen but does not understand. Miyazaki seems to like monsters. The tech has produced monsterous movements. Show that! Kawakami demos his simulated monster without thinking to ask what the monster is for.

It’s moving using its head, but basically it doesn’t have things like pain sensation, and it doesn’t have the concept that the head is important, so it moves using the head like a normal foot. Because this movement is, in any case, really creepy, it might be usable for zombie game movements; if you use this kind of AI, you might be able to make creepy movement that humans can’t imagine.

This is a mistake. We all make mistakes. Miyazaki makes a mistake too.

Miyazaki is an animator, a kind of magician giving life to ink and paint. He thinks the movement demo is an animation. That it’s supposed to say something, mean something, like everything he animates. (The father in Totoro is my favorite. Watch closely, you’ll see a man barely managing his wife’s illness yet managing well enough that his daughters hardly notice. Proofreading, I have tears right now.) From that sensitive point of view, the video is upsetting.

Um, I have a friend with a physical disability. I used to see him every morning, though not recently. Even just giving him a high-five is hard. His muscles are stiffened. Thinking of him, I can’t watch this and regard it as interesting. The people making this are doing it without thinking at all about pain or anything like that. It’s extremely unpleasant, isn’t it. If you want to make something this creepy, then do it on your own. But I have absolutely no desire to connect this with our work. I feel, very strongly, that this is, in some way, an insult to life.

Kawakami begins to realize his mistake.

This is almost entirely just an experiment. It’s not really something we mean to put out into the world and do something with.

Miyazaki responds perhaps with acknowledgement, perhaps with bitterness.

Yes, I think I understand that very well.

How could the demo have gone better?

Demos are funny. Too much art in a demo distracts from the demonstration. Best for the subject of a demo be something light, prosaic, familiar, and short: focus on the technique.

Demos are the only short-form video I like. With others, I feel meaning is missing, not enough time, and even then showing one after another with no time to digest makes me sick. Explains why I have never installed TikTok or Instagram, daily delete Reels from my Facebook feed, and say No YouTube Shorts. I love YouTube otherwise. Even the recommendation algorithm recently has somehow favored upweighting excellent work with few views, and you’ll notice many short rainbow clips in this very letter.

Twitter is tricky since short-form video is good for tech demos, and I go there to see them. But demos are almost indistinguishable from slop. The Twitter algorithm knows me well. If I scroll for five minutes, I get pure cream. Super cool stuff everyday. But only five minutes worth, below that the cream starts going sour, after ten minutes? Horrors that might be usable for zombie game movements.

The original intent of the simulation was to model walking, but without the objective function of doing so in a dignified way, the model moved any old way. There are light, prosaic, familiar ways to be undignified. Kawakami’s team could have dressed the character as a cuddly clowning creature rolling around. That would have been honest. “Spirited Away” has all sorts of silly spirits. Making it a monster was the insult. Monsters are pitiful. Depictions deserve respect but that has nothing to do with computers or AI.

Miyazaki even tried computer animation in “Princess Mononoke.”

We tried to let the computer handle it, but it didn’t work out at all, so we all joined forces and created the monster. … I’m a very emotional person, and when I get enraged or furious, I feel like black insects crawl out of my pores. My staff are more peaceful, so it was difficult for them to imagine what it feels like to be taken over by uncontrollable rage.

Treating monsters with care and attention, it took a lot of work to get humans to do it right.

I believe that rage and violent aggression are essential parts of us as human beings, and I think it’s absolutely impossible to eliminate that impulse. The issue we confront as human beings is how to control and manage that impulse. I know that small children will watch this film, but I intentionally chose not to shield them from that very obvious and apparent reality.

Even after this whole Kawakami episode, Miyazaki came back to the computer to make a cuddly clowning creature, “Boro the Caterpillar.”

I have ideas I may not be able to draw by hand, and [CGI] may be a way to do it — that’s my hope. It’s a new technology.

I easily imagine a young Miyazaki now trying with care and dignity his hand at generative video. I can also imagine him being frustrated with tools lacking fine-detail refinement controls. Maybe. But maybe this Miyazaki does not exist, cannot, or should not.

According to his son Goro, Hayao Miyazaki represented rage and violent aggression and everything else with reverence that only he and others of his generation could.

“It’s not all sweet — there’s also a bitterness and things like that which are beautifully intertwined in the work,” he says, describing a “smell of death” that permeates the films. “That’s actually what makes the work so deep.”

For younger people who grew up in peacetime, “it is impossible to create something with the same sense, approach and attitude that my father’s generation had.”

Going forward I hope, I pray the stories will be different. Born from different experience and different intent.