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Jorge R. Gutierrez, the animator behind the beloved animated film “The Book of Life,” is enraging his fans after seemingly selling out to AI.
At a conference held by Amazon MGM Studios on Wednesday, he unloaded a gushing encomium to the tech after announcing that he’d be working with the Amazon studio to create an AI-generated animated series called “Punky Duck.” (A shared still from the series is littered with hallucinations and nonsensical words, like a concert poster that says “Satorsay IUCT7AX – 0 PM.)
Further raising eyebrows, Gutierrez made an utterly bizarre analogy to explain why he had come to love using machine-amalgamated imagery. Per ToonHive, he enthused that animating with AI was like “having sex and then they hand you the baby” — in what may very well be the last attention-getting image he ever produces if he continues to let AI do his job for him.
Gutierrez’s point: you can skip over the actual creative process that goes into art and get instant results. Never mind the figurative pregnancy, in his analogy, when the idea is actually incubated and given life.
“I’m used to two years for a pilot, and something like this… it feels like the most rebellious, punk rock thing you can do right now is to make something this fast,” he said of AI, as quoted by IndieWire. “For someone like me who’s used to waiting so long, this has been a life-changer.”
As a rule, if something has to be described as “punk rock,” it’s not, in fact, “punk rock.” That aside, it’s a revealing insight from Gutierrez, epitomizing the logic of shameless AI boosters who think a machine can replace an artist. The truth is that art is inseparable from the labor that produces it, and any attempt to take that labor out of the equation will produce something hollow. The “I hate writing, but I love having written” crowd can embrace AI all they want, but there is no “having written” with the tech. It’s just doing the work for you. AI takes the labor we loathe out of the process, sure, but also the opportunity to stamp actual intent.
All in a way of saying, sure. Typing a prompt into an AI model is sex, somehow, and the uncanny, and hallucination-mangled images its spits out is just like a precious baby.
Getting ahead of the backlash, Gutierrez made another questionable statement.
“I understand a lot of you are happy for me and a lot of you are really angry at me for experimenting with AI at Amazon,” he tweeted Thursday morning. “I’m going to leave the comments open so you can get it all out and hopefully feel better.”
“Any death threats will be reported,” he said, in a dramatic escalation, before randomly namedropping his wife and son. “Come at me all you want and need, just leave my family alone.”
We didn’t see any death threats. Actually, what we saw was far more gutting: legions fans thoughtfully articulating why Gutierrez had completely let them down, heavily laden with word “disappointed.”
There isn’t “really anything to ‘get out,’” one fan wrote. “this [isn’t] the kind of thing you can just do and wait for it to blow over. [It’s] a betrayal, and even if the anger subsides, [people aren’t] going to trust you anymore.”
“Disappointment is an understatement,” another wrote. “It goes against why we tell stories, why we motivate and move people. You discarded something priceless.”
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