{"id":763140,"date":"2026-07-14T21:48:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T21:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/763140\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T21:48:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T21:48:13","slug":"yoshitaka-amano-is-more-centrist-on-ai-than-youd-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/763140\/","title":{"rendered":"Yoshitaka Amano Is More Centrist on AI Than You\u2019d Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yoshitaka Amano is a legendary creative<\/a> who makes bespoke human art<\/a>. So you might expect him to have strong feelings against AI, like Guillermo del Toro has expressed<\/a>. In a recent conversation with him, I found him to be more centrist on AI than I anticipated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amano is a veteran on the shortlist of “your artist’s favorite artist,” so you’d think his stance on AI would be nothing short of “fuck AI” for anyone audacious enough to ask him his take on it. At Anime Expo in early July, I spoke with him about ZAN<\/a>, an upcoming \u201ccompletely hand-drawn\u201d anime series based on his 2010 artbook<\/a> from his U.S.-based studio, Yoshitaka Amano Inc<\/a>. Also present were Yoshitaka Amano Inc. CEO Hiroaki Ikegami and secretary Shiho Kaneko.<\/p>\n

After watching ZAN\u2019s delightfully Toonami-ass trailer a day before our interview, I was struck by how it wasted absolutely no time establishing the project as a comfort to the afflicted and an affliction to those comfortable with AI in the arts by declaring it would take animation back to its roots through complete hand-drawn animation. So my penultimate question to the man many consider to be the quintessence of artistry\u2014making awe-inspiring artwork for Angel\u2019s Egg,<\/a> Vampire Hunter D,<\/a> and Final Fantasy<\/a>\u2014was to ask his thoughts on how AI has impacted his craft.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf AI makes everything, then that\u2019s fine. But it can\u2019t make zero-to-one,\u201d Amano said via a translator.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pulling at the thread a little bit further, Ikegami added that, although ZAN\u2019s pilot trailer prefaces its main creative overture as being completely hand-drawn<\/a>, the company may search for ways it could add digital animation to its production pipeline.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we use digital or AI, and it becomes better than hand-drawing, then [Amano]\u2019s yes to AI and digital. But he doesn\u2019t think so. Hand-drawn comes first,\u201d Ikegami added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ZAN\u00a9 Yoshitaka Amano \/ Yoshitaka Amano Inc. <\/p>\n

Amano expanded upon Ikegami\u2019s point, drawing an analogy to Disney\u2019s Snow White. In his analogy, he noted how Disney\u2019s implementation of rotoscope animation <\/a>to animate the titular princess and seven dwarfs yielded \u201crealistic human movement,\u201d thanks to its animators tracing live-action footage. For Amano, rotoscoping in the 1930s was not dissimilar to AI\u2019s implementation as an artistic tool.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAt that time, that was the latest digital production process,\u201d he said. \u201cAt this time too, the latest thing is AI and how we combine and deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I asked Amano how he reckons artists should \u201cdeal with it\u201d\u2014more specifically, if he views AI as a threat to human artists in animation or as a useful tool to bring animation to a new frontier as he inferred with the rotoscope as the digital art paradigm shift of the late 1930s\u2014his response was a middle-of-the-road refrain on GenAI.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is human-made, so we can deal with it. It depends on how you use it. All technology is made by humans. It becomes a weapon if you use it incorrectly; it becomes helpful if you use it correctly,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a follow-up to that follow-up, I asked Amano if he\u2019s used AI before and what concerns he has about artists using it as a tool.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big difference between AI and humans is that humans can create from scratch\u2014zero to one\u2014but AI, right now, can\u2019t create from scratch. But in the future, if AI could make zero-to-one, that might be a threat,\u201d he said, echoing his previous point. \u201cOnly two types of things exist in this world: human-made and nature-made. And in this space, these are all designed by humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ZAN\u00a9 Yoshitaka Amano \/ Yoshitaka Amano Inc. <\/p>\n

Amano assured me he isn\u2019t ignorant of AI concerns, especially in the United States, where he remarked that use is surprisingly rampant. This prompted me to give him an example of how Ghibli-style art was being used to send political messages that its original creators didn\u2019t endorse, and how Japanese organizations have called on Sam Altman\u2019s OpenAI not to train its models on their artwork<\/a>. Amano asked me, \u201cHave you interviewed those creators?\u201d Not sure if his question was posed as a gotcha or as a genuine inquiry, I responded that I had talked to people at Studio Ghibli about their work, but that my questions weren\u2019t specifically relating to AI.<\/p>\n

Although my interview with Ghibli vice president, Atsushi Okui, pertained to Princess Mononoke\u2019s 40th anniversary<\/a>, I told Amano I have interviewed many others who seem opposed to AI in the arts. Key among the folks I\u2019ve spoken to are the Look Back director Kiyotaka Oshiyama<\/a>, Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward<\/a>, Primal\u2019s Genndy Tartakovsky<\/a>, and The Ghost in the Shell director and character designer Mokochan and Shuhei Handa<\/a>. Those conversations resulted in them largely saying AI acts as a threat to their craft more so than as a boon. Here\u2019s exactly what they had to say:<\/p>\n

Oshiyama described AI as kind of being like a washing machine.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack then, people washed their clothes by hand. Now that the washing machine exists, telling people to go back to hand washing their laundry is out of the question. I wasn’t there at the time, but maybe some people complained about the jobs of hand-washing laundry being taken away by this machine. I completely agree that this AI technology, or this AI art, would take the jobs of people who work in the creative industry. I strongly believe it’s something to be talked about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But he, too, was a little less hostile to AI than some of his animator peers.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the other hand, as you said, the latter camp of people who say that creating AI art \u2018democratizes<\/a>,\u2019 makes it more available to the common people who can’t express their creativity through art\u2014I don’t want to take that away from them,\u201d he continued. \u201cWhen I made Look Back as a movie, the story itself is about the creative efforts of these artists and how their efforts bloom into creative art. It’s a story that portrays and celebrates the growth of art. I didn’t make this movie to deny the possibilities of people gaining creativity or the opinions of people who say that AI art enables them to grasp their creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tartakovsky told me that the cure for AI, and the way to destroy it, was to keep creating unique art.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI can copy, but can it create something truly original?\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanna push human creativity to a level where it can\u2019t be copied. And that means doing original things, pushing boundaries, and trying different things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mokochan and Shuhei didn\u2019t take a moral stance, but made it clear that \u201chuman made\u201d art was their preference.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the concepts of the original [Ghost in the Shell<\/a>] manga is about the mysterious part of the human being,\u201d Mokochan said. \u201cWe wanted to follow the same concept using the same method to show humanity by using hand-drawn art. We prefer to just use our arms to draw all of the animation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s because the main concept is about the human body, so that\u2019s why we prefer hand-drawn art over AI,\u201d Shuhei added.<\/p>\n

Out of all the animators that I spoke to about AI, Ward was the most pessimistic about what AI is going to do to animation as an industry. While he sees it as inevitable, it\u2019s also not a cheery prospect for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s gonna be heinous in many, many ways, and it\u2019s gonna destroy the industry\u2014but I think people are gonna like it, ultimately,\u201d he said. \u201cYeah, we\u2019re cooked. AI will be implemented at some point because it saves studios money. It just has to happen at some point.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ZAN\u00a9 Yoshitaka Amano \/ Yoshitaka Amano Inc. <\/p>\n

After highlighting Oshiyama\u2019s take, I also noted to Amano how MAPPA had made a statement about AI use in Chainsaw Man \u2014The Movie: Reze Arc<\/a>\u2019s post-credit scene, writing, \u201cNo part of this work may be used or reproduced for the purpose of training any artificial intelligence technologies or systems.\u201d But AI is something Amano, as well as Yoshitaka Amano Inc., aren\u2019t going to turn down the prospect of implementing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s really interested in making new stuff instead of past works,\u201d Kaneko said. \u201cSo if AI can read his past work and then create Amano-style art, then that\u2019s fine. He\u2019s only focusing on the new stuff in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yoshitaka Amano is a legendary creative who makes bespoke human art. So you might expect him to have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":763141,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-763140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763140\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/763141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}