Fun fact: the fucking loser that made this got bullied so hard he deleted everything related to this off his social media accounts.
Also I agree with the fella that says we need to being back tarring and feathering, exclusively for techbros
Article source: https://www.thewrap.com/ai-princess-mononoke-remake-trailer-slammed-online/
“I strongly feel that [artificial intelligence] is an insult to life itself,” the original’s legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki has previously said
A “Princess Mononoke” film created using so-called generative AI was slammed by fans on social media after its release earlier this week.
“One day we’ll wake up, and there won’t be any more Princess Mononoke, Gravity Falls, Avatar or animated films like Wolf Children or Arcane… just AI-generated soulless garbage,” wrote @goroweko on X, formerly Twitter. “I don’t want that so bad.”
The AI-generated remake goes up against the original “shot-for-shot” and was created by AI entrepreneur PJ Acetturo, combining AI-generated CGI shots that match the fim. The result is a “crime” that turns “a 15-year-old Japanese girl into a white woman with a smoky eye and bikini tan lines” and “‘is enough for me to think we should bring back tarring and feathering,” literary agent Roma Panganiban wrote on X.
Acetturo has made it clear he’s proud of his production, no matter what reaction it’s received. “I’ve wanted to make a live action version of Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke for 20+ years now. I spent $745 in Kling credits to show you a glimpse of the future of filmmaking,” he wrote on X.
The AI filmmaker added that he was “being interviewed on the BBC today about my films” and “Clients are reaching out like crazy.”
He was challenged in the BBC segment, with one of the British network’s contributors noting that it seemed that there was something lacking in AI-created content.
“I’m sure there will be some criticism of this. I’ve heard Miyazaki is anti-AI. That’s okay,” the filmmaker wrote online. “I made this adaptation mostly for myself, because his work makes me want to create new worlds. We should look for ethical ways to explore AI tools to help empower artists to create.”
He posted a side-by-side comparison of his trailer with the beautifully crafted original:
The Mononoke trailer is a shot-for-shot remake of the trailer. This film has been in my head for two decades. I love this world so much.
I hope this meager adaptation inspires others to further explore their favorite worlds. Here's the side by side comparison: pic.twitter.com/eDu8ASOBU6
— PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) October 3, 2024 His statements were called out as problematic by actor Swann Grey, who tweeted in response, “‘I’ve heard Miyazaki is anti-AI. That’s okay.’ … Excuse you? To say that in the same breath as the word ‘ethical’? And to call a shot-for-shot remake ‘creating a new world’? Zero creativity, zero respect, and zero concept of what art is. You’re not an artist — you’re a fraud.”
Miyazaki himself has stated, when presented with an example of the use of AI in animation, that “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
I agreed with the tweet that said Miyazaki should be legally allowed to kill this guy
Miyazaki should be legally allowed to kill whoever he wants. I trust him
I spent $745 in Kling credits
What the fuck do these words even mean. What are Kling credits?
made this adaptation mostly for myself
You didn't make this. You put what amounts to an expensive filter over someone else's art. You didn't make this any more than I made the Mona Lisa by loading it in MS and hitting "invert colours". It's an embarrassment that you should have kept to yourself.
Before anyone calls me a hypocrite for being pro-piracy, but anti-"AI" art: Piracy isn't claiming someone elses work as their own, it's sharing that work with others for free. Most importantly, piracy doesn't deface art or try to replace art with something soulless.
Art (real art) at it's core, is an extension of the artists soul. It is personal. It comes from the unique perspective of another human being. Could a true AI make art? Absolutely, if it could express it's own perspective. Algorithmically generated art is not that, it is the defacing of the personal experience.
You didn't make this. You put what amounts to an expensive filter over someone else's art. You didn't make this animy more than I made the Mona Lisa by loading it in MS and hitting "invert colours". It's an embarrassment that you should have kept to yourself.
ShowLmao this rules.
See, this is what generated images should be used for. Silly fun, nothing commercial or claiming to be art.
afaik Teenage Stepdad's stuff isn't AI, the artist does it by hand which makes it even better.
Was that who'd tracked down the actual 1990's software that was used to make the covers in the first place? I remember seeing a video showcasing that, which was a sort of img2img interpolation software that would blend and stretch the pictures based on something kind of like UV mapping with textures.
What the fuck do these words even mean. What are Kling credits?
"Kling" is a Chinese text-to-video model, like Microsoft's "SORA," except Kling has gone from a sort of open-beta test period for Chinese users to a commercial product available globally while Microsoft is still sitting on SORA for reasons.
From that I infer "Kling credits" are just an account balance with the company that owns it. Which is what really makes this so funny: this guy was literally just paying to pull a gacha lever over and over for short clips until he got ones that met his standards, he did nothing but pay a company to have a datacenter reroll a text-to-video prompt over and over while he barked and clapped like a seal.
reasonably and responsibly applied, could be fine tools
What cases would you say they become fine tools?
I've used it a bit locally. I have an indulgent GPU and it's the only thing that really heats it up to like 100c or more. It's more strnuous thanganing, but you usually do it in short bursts-- generate a handful of pulls, then triage and enhance the ones you like.
I've been one of the loudest critics of the planet-burning proliferation of treat printers and I personally am fine with PC-scale LLM applications like that.
oof how embarassing, you just told on yourself for being one of the loudest speakers and without investigation
it's only the training that is energy-intensive, running the LLM can be done locally
what you're saying is like "I'm cool with people cycling bicycles; I oppose bicycles being built because it's too energy-intensive"
They make better and faster placeholder art for game prototypes than scribbling in MS Paint.
I remember back when AI image generators first were a thing, before the consensus really settled and before "AI art" got that layer of toxic slime on it from the sort of people who became obsessed with it, there were a lot of artists saying "Hey maybe if people can explain what they want to the robot, I can skip the part of my commission process where I try to get the client to actually explain what they want." So ultimately I'm okay with uses of AI images that lead to a real artist replacing it.
prototyping, experimenting, inspirational impulse through stimulus, utilization of components, editing in mixed media, disabled people being able to engage in creative expression they'd otherwise struggle to fulfill, all sorts of things.
There's examples where procedurally generated things, as component parts of a greater composition, would be a welcome labor-saving device.
Language learning when you lack partners to speak with or just as supplemental practice. It's hit and miss like everything else right now, but you can speak at ChatGPT and have it reply in another language, ask it to correct your pronunciation, etc. It's a new voice feature where it talks back to you. I can see it being a primary teaching tool if the accuracy ever reached a consistently reliable threshold.
Unfortunately, they are primarily owned and operated and speculated upon, right now, by tools.
I almost feel like it's some small relief that the people most enthusiastic about them are so dull and tasteless. Because while the tech is fascinating and way more powerful than the passive treatboxes that are driving the most buzz would suggest, once it starts getting integrated into animation pipelines and special effects it's going to devastate huge swathes of already undercompensated highly skilled labor in ways that don't have to happen, that shouldn't happen, but will inevitably happen because of capitalist control over studios. Although considering they're talking about replacing storyboarders with txt2img generators maybe that fear is a little overblown too, since that's exactly the sort of role you'd need to start off and guide a generator in a controlled and consistent fashion imo.
I'm just envisioning a future of animation where everything is like some too smooth, bendy and janky AI slop churned out as cheaply as possible like a second coming of Hanna Barbara's mid century bottom of the barrel slop.
And they're gonna make it look like pixar slop too, because causality has been replaced with dramatic irony and so a computer that can make mid 2000s CGI images is somehow the most amazing thing for them.
Which is what really makes this so funny: this guy was literally just paying to pull a gacha lever over and over for short clips until he got ones that met his standards
spoiler'd gif
Show
Art (real art) at it's core, is an extension of the artists soul. It is personal. It comes from the unique perspective of another human being. Could a true AI make art? Absolutely, if it could express it's own perspective. Algorithmically generated art is not that, it is the defacing of the personal experience.
the 'AI-art' models don't do it on their own, they necessarily require a unique perspective of another human being or a few and (sometimes more sometimes less) creative trial-and-error constructing and formulating of artistic ideas for the medium through prompts, edits, multiple layered passes, etc. It's not a particularly fulfilling medium or process to me personally, but there is an active undeniable component of human perspective being applied in creative ways. Bad art, lazy derivative art, and plagiarism has always existed; and has always been recognized as such by the critical observer. Same with direct forgeries. The means of them being made easier to create and being socially and societally problematic for the climate or the job market doesn't change what the thing "is." Nor does the tools used becoming "smarter."
I've been a studied-and-practiced artist most of my life in many mediums and forms, traditional and digital, visual and musical and textual and spoken, you name it. The term of "art" is not as restrictive as you think it is. And speaking about "real art" smacks of a self-importance; because there is no definition of "real" vs "fake" art that you can create that doesn't dissipate when you zoom in on any of its delineations. A banana taped to a wall is "real art" in the context of its creation and purpose. The artist didn't make the tape; they didn't build the building and erect the wall --- nor finish and paint the wall to which it is taped. They also didn't grow the banana or transport it to the store to be bought. What makes this different, materially, not just how you personally "feel" about what it 'does to "real art?" Is photography art? They're often only capturing what is already there; and a lot of photography these days is done digitally with all sorts of AI focus, recognition, and lighting tools. Is someone using AI face-recognition fuzzy select tool to crop something in a digital artwork or photo edit 'no longer making art' because they didn't do the work themselves? If they use a machine-learning tweening process in an animation? What if they print an AI-art image and then do hand-work on it, or use components of it in another piece? You run into a Ship-of-Theseus problem --- when does it stop and start being "art?" At what point does "not real art" become "real art" and vice versa?
I make art and I also have known a lot of artists over the years. imo artists in general have an over-inflated and even mythologized sense of themselves and what they do, and I've felt they demonstrate it when they fight to distinguish some core spiritualistic difference between what they do and what others do (often doing petty-bourgeois cudgeling of other laborers). And with these machine learning models too, people are using tools which are already among the countless "AI" tools of more-or-less complexity already widespread used in digital painting, animation, modeling, music production, in both digital photography and photo editing, in both digital videography and video editing, and even to some degree in writing (predictive texts, spellcheck, formatting suggestions,) etc; and even these image models tools themselves at their current stage "learn" really not all that much different from people on a fundamental level, as any artist who has seriously studied and understands how they work could tell you if they're being honest with themselves.
Artists don't try to depict an image from what they "know," they do repetition after repetition of what they actually see in reference (including from other people, and from other artworks copying their favorite artists over and over regardless of what that artist wants) drawing humans and objects and representations of them over and over in different angles, and lightings, and stances, styles, and in their individual parts and aspects (including angle, shapes, planes, etc.) over and over and over etc. to train themselves to break down and be able to reproduce and utilize these things and aspects of things in their different variables, angles, forms in different contexts, to be able to reproduce and utilize these objects or aspects when and where they are called for ie. "prompted" (as an internally-driven prompt or an external commission request) from the agglomerated experience. People who draw what they "know" are going to make things worse than even the wonkiest image model lol. That's the first thing you learn is to not draw what you "know," draw what you see. Nobody learned how to do perspective drawing by drawing what we think proper perspective looks like. We had to break it down into formulaic and often binary constructs and rules and then do mass-repetition for various objects in various perspectives to begin to slowly make them more and more after endless repetition align with the actual proper perspective. The biggest difference between us and these particular tools is just that we have the ability for fluidly abstracting conceptions-of-objects external of their visual presence; where a machine learning image model doesn't; though even that can be approximated with tagging systems and metadata on the training data. Again, not particularly fulfilling for me personally, and there are other (much more material and important) implications and issues with its current applications and ownership and consumption in our current societal organization; but that doesn't change what it is or what it does or the relationship to art.
Artists complaining about this as some soul-doom insult to "real art" are, in my opinion as an artist, engaging in petty-bourgeois self-obsession; because automation has been destroying working class relations to their labor for like a decade and a half causing all the same disgust and panic and collapse of self-sense and self-worth and philosophical dread and alienation as well as removing peoples material wages they need to live for 15-20 years. And people have been organizing and rallying around fighting it or working at challenging its material and social implications and the question of its ownership; but petty bourgeois artists as intelligentsia didn't care because it was only the "unskilled blue collar peons unlike my called-from-high spark of divinity ~craft~."
I can't tell you how many times I've heard from artists of all kinds "yeah machines can do A B and C jobs but they'll never be able to xyz" But now artists are facing a material and philosophical undermining on many fronts just like all laborers have been from automation for 15-20 years and maybe once the ego-shattering ends they can realize they have to throw in with the workers as workers and stop over-inflating their importance. I'm an artist, but this stuff is to me not much different than any worker watching a machine do any job they dedicated their life to perfecting, but it does it in a fraction of the time and gets better and better at it but without any of the "soul" (which begs the question, what is the "soul," in what I do, and was there one? hence the spiraling philosophical horror). In fact, this exact phenomenon is a tale as old as John Henry.
What is the "soul"
As I said "It is personal. It comes from the unique perspective of another human being."
I am not talking about something metaphysical. I am talking about the unique art styles people have because we all experience "what we see" differently. What colours we choose to emphasise, what physical characteristics we choose to emphasise. It's always slightly different from one person to the next because we all experience life in a different way.
Is photography art? They're often only capturing what is already there; and a lot of photography these days is done digitally with all sorts of AI focus, recognition, and lighting tools.
Yes it is art. What is the photographer choosing to emphasise? What tools are they choosing to use?
Creative works are people expressing their experiences. That's why Roger Waters singing about his "wall" will always feel less shallow that McDonalds singing that they're lovin' it. Yes, art when it's "a job" involves a lot of simply following rules and skills learned, like any other marketable skill, but that's a different kind of art that quite frankly, most people find a little hollow.
This sort of paint by numbers stuff is why people are getting sick of Marvel movies. Because we can tell the people making it are just meeting quotas. That's the kind of shit the corporations funding AI want to replicate.
As far as ego is concerned, that's a whole other kettle of fish. Yes, sure, that exists in every craft. A lot of it seems to stem from it being something that most poor people don't have time to do, but that's a capitalism problem, not the fault of art. But honestly on the other side of the coin, there are a lot of poor artists out there and art/artists on the are whole also massively undervalued by our society "Oh, let me guess you have an art degree? Heh, should have studied something more useful. You'll be poor forever."
Art is undervalued, like all all labor, by the ruling class, which is why artists frustrate them so much and they are so keen to automate art, so they can produce art to sell cheaper and make a lot of profit. They will, and it will probably dominate the commercial world if it ends up becoming cheaper than hiring artists and the capitalism hasen't completely collapsed by then.
But it will suck and be samey and it will be missing something. Because it will be algorithmiclly generated collage scraped from already existing content, without the personal context, by a machine that doesn't have any perspective, personal experiences or attachment to what it is making.
Artists complaining about this as some soul-doom insult to "real art" are, in my opinion as an artist, engaging in petty-bourgeois self-obsession
Also, I get frustrated with the idea that anything other than a surface appreciation of art is the same kind of snobbery we see in "exclusive" art scene of the upper class.
No, appreciating the creativity and meaning the artists put into a low budget, small team indie movie or game isn't fucking bourgeois. Finding meaning in art and creating folk heros is something peasants have done since humans could think.
This shit sucks no matter what but doing this to Miyazaki and Ghibli when Miyazaki has made it clear how disgusting he finds all this is beyond the pale. The man made a death threat to Harvey Weinstein if Weinstein cut anything from Mononoke Hime - Miyazaki sent him a sword and a note with two words; "No Cuts".
I hope he never sees this trash.
Also shouldn't it be the other way round? Let AI and robots do all the "boring" and "gross" tasks necessary for survival and modern civilization to exist like plumbing, so that people can spend their time being creative and learning new things?
This is what China is doing. Apparently, they're already experimenting with AI in mining and port operations. Meanwhile, the US is using AI to proletarianize various members of artisans (artists) and the labor aristocracy (software developers).
And people who want to play devil's advocate for the AI treat-bros wonder why us artists are so hostile to them.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I have to ask, what exactly did the guy who did this like about the movie examining what we've lost in our struggle over nature?
He spent over $745 in Kling credits, he's a small business baby!
Rich asshole... saying "original...do not steal?"
All 'entrepreneurs' are fraudster capitalists; computer geek ones aren't worth any more or less derision. I never don't laugh and have an urge to bully someone when I hear 'entrepreneur' what a self-indulgent thing for a capitalist rebrand as and call themselves
I watched it, it’s as as you’d imagine. Besides the usual AI slop problems (uncanny valley, sex kitten waifus, weird artifacts, disproportionate elements), it’s just completely devoid of the bright, vibrant colors of Miyazaki. It’s got that obnoxiously too dark color palette of a bad late aughts action film.
The AI filmmaker added
Kind of wild that the substance of this article is how this guy is definitively not making "art" and yet the author still insists on calling him a filmmaker. He didn't even make a full length film, it was a trailer.
E) I suppose it's possible this "AI Entrepeneur" has made other, full length, projects in the past. Perhaps the author could have included this information prior to labelling him a filmmaker. I don't care enough to investigate further.
I mean, not everyone can be artists (as someone who likes art myself... don't do it often enough though). I get that. And also sometimes generating something is just the quickest and easiest way (for instance, when making a D&D chara or something and wanting visuals).
People making AI-generated "art" and getting high off their own farts while adding nothing of substance, monetizing "their" work while exploiting actual artists' labor (art) is another thing entirely, of course. But other than that personally I do think it is a good thing that means of creation or generation- it can be debated if it's "art" or not- are becoming accessible, both for those who aren't artistically inclined, or for the simple convenience of the fact- the real issues are the capitalist system this all is occurring within, and the disregard for artists' rights to their labor (though death of the author/artist and the whole "once it's released into the wild..." is also a thing, personally I think the ethics outside of capital are murky and a recognition of who created what, when outside private use, is at least the most basic decency/dignity)
To play devil's advocate, if they can solve the efficiency problems, I can see a place for image/video/text decoration as a "intentionally not from scratch/tool assisted" form of creativity.
If you take several model kits and assemble the parts into something new, it's an accepted genre of project. Often, it produces a higher grade finished product than if someone with modest talents started with raw balsa, brass, and plastic stock, so it's a fair choice for people who have skill or resource constraints. They got what they wanted, through effort of their own.
I wonder if we could get AI tools that offered a similar experience. It feels like the current tools tend to be very brute-force gacha-oriented-- if you don't like this picture, make futile attempts to reword the prompt and generate 30 more-- rather than iterative tools to improve and personalize and perhaps reinject soul.
Perhaps part of that is by keeping it random it helps to keep it legally murky. It might look vaguely like a frame of $media_property, but it's a made of a thousand shards of different training materials so tiny as to deny anyone a strong footing to sue.
A trailer is certainly not a film so that's a silly false label for sure. If they had made a full length film and it were 'AI-film maker', as in a maker of an 'AI-film' as a descriptive term it would make more sense.
but "art" is not as restrictive of a term as you think it is; and I say this as a lifelong artist of most-my-life study and practice. Artists tend to have big egos and inflate their own sense of self importance and what they do. And to be real I do get a little schadenfreude of the petty bourgeois despair and philosophical crises and material reckoning by all these "automation may take those UNSKILLED LOWER jobs done by the UNWASHED BLUE COLLAR WAGE SLAVES but it will never happen to my god-endowed higher-calling spark of divinity skill!!" petty bourgeois artists who I have heard in my circles for a decade and a half; who never gave any kind of a shit and in many cases applauded at the technological innovations and lower prices while automation has been destroying working class relations to their labor for nearly two decades; causing all the same and no-less-real-and-impactful disgust and panic and collapse of self-sense and self-worth and philosophical dread and alienation and material wage-loss they need to live.
Maybe once the ego-shattering ends they can realize they have to throw in with the workers as workers to seize the means of automated and traditional production and stop over-inflating their self-importance to where the discourse is about the very unserious "what real art really is" (while countless kinds of 'AI'/'smart tools' have been used in major digital mediums for a very very long time, no less) rather than the much more material and important issues of energy consumption and climate, ownership, laborers being automated out of jobs that has been happening and growing for 15-20 years, etc.
I'm an artist and art has been a fundamental part of my life for most of it, and these models can be fun in some ways but not really my thing; isn't really a fulfilling process for me; but this stuff is to me not any different than any worker watching a machine do any job they dedicated their life to perfecting, but it does it in a fraction of the time and gets better and better at it but "without any of the 'soul'" (which begs the question, what is the "soul," in what I do, and was there one? hence the spiraling philosophical revulsion.") In fact, this exact phenomenon is a tale as old as John Henry.
I made a more cohesive comment on it here https://hexbear.net/comment/5477155
Kind of wild that the substance of this article is how this guy is definitively not making "art" and yet the author still insists on calling him a filmmaker
Capital recognizes capital, grift and ""art"" recognizes grift/""art""
He spent $745! Somehow that matters! I would so shoot that guy with a bow and arrow drawn by a demon arm that decapitates him
I missed it by like 20 minutes when it originally went on twitter, does anyone have the shotforshot comparisson? Im curious and obviously not having a bad enough day as it stands
Haha wow thats shite! Thanks and sorry for wasting your time lol
Wow, that's worse than I expected!
I mean it's actually almost exactly what I expected, but I was expecting San to be a generic anime waifu, not that plus also constantly falling out of her skimpy wolf dress.
no shot for shot but here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lsmMSpcVos
People weren't kidding that looks like shit LMAO. It looks like Machinima YouTube videos from the mid 2000s with a contrast and desaturation filter slapped on top.
For $700, you could have bought 3D film software and made something better from scratch, but that would mean developing a useful skill.
Everytime I see you reply to something like this I feel guilty for not taking the time to look myself, thank you comrade
hey you're good comrade! i post this stuff cuz i realize sometimes other people can't find it! it's oftentimes not meant maliciously just like "eyo fam here's the nightmare material you were looking for"
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
He is not a "filmmaker" a couple of 14 year olds with a phone camera are more "filmmakers" than this douchebag. He put $700 in a slot machine in order to get a worse version of something he already has.
The real scary thing here is it only cost him $700 for a couple of minutes of footage. Considering how expensive filmmaking is, you could "make" an AI "film" for easily less than 6 figures, so at some point, some techbro is going to swindle some Hollywood bigwig and we'll have an AI feature length film that does fine at the box office, mostly as a curiosity, but because they don't need to hire actors or crew, it makes a huge profit, and the industry shifts to one somehow even less creative than it already is.