It’s no coincidence that questions about generative artificial intelligence are being directed specifically at Laika Entertainment: it’s natural to do so, because the stop-motion animated film, signed by Travis Knight and currently in our cinemas, was made without using it… and it is otherworldly, a milestone in taking the first step. Is another world possible? Interviewed by The Verge, Knight echoes what the character designer Thibault Leclercq had already told us in a masterclass a few days ago: we must start thinking about AI on a philosophical level, and ask ourselves if this is really the direction we want to go.
For Travis Knight, AI is Antithetical to Wildwood and Laika Entertainment’s Films
Years of work on sets and on highly articulated puppets, with elements of faces or bodies 3D-printed to be used even in a single frame: not that Wildwood: The Secrets of the Forbidden Forest rejects technology, but it has put it at the service of a work almost amanuensis, painstaking, contemplative and profoundly human. The director Travis Knight knows well how much these processes could be streamlined by Artificial Intelligence, but he simply cannot accept the concept: “It is antithetical to everything we are as a studio. […] Technology has meaning and value when you put it in the hands of an artist. When technology does the artist’s job, then the discourse changes. It is something I am firmly opposed to, because there is no humanity in what comes out of it.”
According to Knight, reusing the work of other artists, even if modified, robs the result of its soul and is also a form of theft. “AI is an extraordinary technology, for example in medicine and science, it can help humanity enormously, just as it can be devastating. I fear the latter outcome, I hope for the former, but people must become rightful custodians of this technology. And as human beings we have shown that we are not good at doing so. But I remain optimistic.”
If you are interested in even more articulated reflections on the topic, we invite you to refer to the second paragraph of our aforementioned article on the masterclass by the Wildwood character designer, and to the very interesting “compass” proposed by Steven Spielberg.
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