Ghibli’s Toshio Suzuki not impressed by generative AI images, Hayao Miyazaki thinks even less of them

As usual, Miyazaki doesn’t have time for anything that runs counter to his artistic principles .

Almost as soon as generative AI image-making applications became something that the public had easy access to, “Ghibli-style AI illustrations” started getting shoveled into online spaces.

Longtime fans of Ghibli that appreciate the studio’s human ethos in making art ground their teeth in frustration, while unconcerned technophiles were happy to have a way to avoid the thought and effort involved in the creative process and skip right to having a free facsimile of the basest elements of Ghibli aesthetics.

Studio Ghibli itself was pretty quiet on the whole subject, but company cofounder and longtime anime film producer Toshio Suzuki recently shared his thoughts on the use of AI to copy the Ghibli art style, and, in a sense, also shared how fellow Ghibli co-founder and director Hayao Miyazaki feels about it.

“When [Ghibli-style AI images] first started showing up online, I got asked about it a lot,” says Suzuki.

“But I figured everyone would get tired of them pretty quickly.

Sure enough, that’s what’s happened.” Whether the loss of interest is quite as universal as Suzuki says could be debated, but postings of Ghibli-style AI images do seem to grab less attention these days.

The ability of AI to generate images is no longer a novelty in and of itself, the obvious aping of the Ghibli house style rubs many of the more passionate fans of the studio the wrong way.

But with AI capabilities continuing to advance, is Suzuki worried about it being used to create not just still images, but animation as well? Not particularly.

“AI can create certain types of animation, but people with a moderate amount of intelligence can see right through it.

There’s not really much point to it.

It’s not interesting or compelling .” OK, so Suzuki clearly isn’t impressed or worried about generative AI.

How, though, does Miyazaki, someone equally famous for his creative and curmudgeonly sensitivities, feel? Suzuki says “Miya-san doesn’t know what generative AI is in the first place.” That might be a bit of a hyperbole on Suzuki’s part.

At the very least, from a linguistic standpoint, “generative AI” is pretty straightforward, and despite his luddite leanings, Miyazaki must at least be aware that computers can now be used to generate images, so Suzuki’s comment might be a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that the director has such little interest in generative AI that he has no knowledge of it beyond the basic concept.