We’re in a fight to be human
By now you’ve probably seen the immensely viral Miyazaki AI images. Millions of photos have been run through the machine that spits them out in the Studio Ghibli style, mimicking the beautiful art made famous by movies like Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service and so many more. The flood of these images began with people running seemingly innocuous photos of their friends through OpenAI’s program, but it culminated with the IDF and the White House posting in Miyazaki’s style for their twisted purposes:
In response to this trend several people have resurfaced a quote from Miyazaki himself, spoken after being shown a presentation featuring an AI-generated character. I’ll reproduce it in full here:
“Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability. It’s so hard for him just to do a high five; his arm with stiff muscle can’t reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is. I’m utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
The line that has been repeated again and again in recent days, and understandably so, is that this AI art is “an insult to life itself.” To know that the man whose style is being used and abused feels that way should, and has, caused some people to pause and reconsider the mindless conversion of images into his style. But there’s something much, much bigger than AI art being discussed here, and there’s something infinitely bigger at stake in our world. The conversation around AI art is just the beginning, Miyazaki is talking about what it means to be human, to be alive; he’s talking about the struggle of our time.
In a perfect world, AI might be just another tool. In this world, it’s denying a growing number of people the opportunity to be human. In decades and centuries past we’ve often tried to tease out what it means to be human via an examination of what differentiates us from animals. But today the ever sharpening dividing line is instead between human and machine, and if we continue down this AI path more and more people will be forced into mechanized lives while AI performs the tasks that human beings should be free to pursue. As many others have said: people should be able to make art, and machines should be performing menial tasks. But, in our upside-down world, we’re increasingly trending toward the opposite distribution of labor.
AI’s ability to make cute images is already leading bosses to replace some graphic designers, and other workers. And what happens when people lose their jobs? What happens when bosses replace a human being with a machine? The person who's out of a job needs another one, of course. And when the job taken by technological development, or really by the economic imperatives of capitalism, is a creative one, that worker will most likely need to resort to a less creative field to survive. AI, and its capacity to produce a mimicry of art, now means that numerous creative jobs will be replaced by machines, and the people who occupied those positions will have to get new jobs where they’re treated like imperfect robots, jobs that are increasingly intent on denying us our humanity. Whether it’s manufacturing or customer service, corporations are determined to systematize workers’ every motion, every word, and this country’s rightward lurch is largely about bosses wanting to deny us any hint of power on the job, too. The ruling class is intent on dehumanizing workers in every way possible.
Our willingness to accept this systemic dehumanization, to accept a world where we’re denied agency and creativity and told to follow formulas as though we were rudimentary computers rests increasingly on the threat of homelessness and starvation. Where American workers once chased the dangled carrot of the American Dream, and where millions of people once reached some strong semblance of that dream, with a house and two cars and a union job and a white picket fence, we are now increasingly being motivated by the stick. Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the ruling class all believe we’ve gotten too much, and that they (who have everything) haven’t gotten enough.
So now the super-rich and the fascist movement they’ve funded are moving to strip Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and every part of the safety net they can get their hands on. They’re trying to kill unions, starting with hundreds of thousands of federal government union jobs. They’re attacking public education from the top, moving to gut the entire federal Department of Education. There are multiple reasons for these moves, but one unifying motive for them is to render us vulnerable, to make the dehumanizing stick of poverty and precarity loom over our heads so that capitalists are able to drive us in any direction they choose. If they replace us with AI and we have nowhere to turn, they think we’ll just meekly return to dangerous factories and lithium mines and army recruitment stations.
But people who have tasted freedom and humanity don’t turn back that easily. Billionaires and fascists want us to be willing robots. They want us to ask no questions and raise no demands. They want us to ignore the mass dehumanization of migrants and queer folks and various scapegoats, so much so that we fail to see how we’re under attack too. They want us to nod numbly as our rights are rolled back and our lives are drained of creativity and power. They want us to accept a life of scrabbling like animals to survive while the ruling class gets art, the beauty of nature, the time for leisure — where only they get to enjoy their humanity, and everyone else gets drudgery and a formulaic existence.
We cannot accept this world they intend to force on us, where machines get to play with color and we become gray robots who work and consume and are alive without living. We cannot accept a world where billionaires and their fascist government get to treat us as nothing more than compliant citizen worker bees. This is the fork in the road that is being forced on us by the Robber Barons of Silicon Valley, the imperatives of capitalism, and the far-right. Down their path lies ever more fascism, automation, and massive, unfathomable wealth for the few with only a dying world for the many.
Down the other path, our path, lies real democracy, worker power, agency, creativity, and humanity. Down our path lies a life in color, a life where we are not units folded into the narrow constructs that govern the assembly line. Down our path lies time, the time to produce what we need with care and the time to sit on the porch or lounge in the creek, the time to let the sun and the water wash over you. Down our path are the simple joys of living. We have everything to fight for, everything, because losing this struggle means the steady stripping away of these joys, of our time, of our agency and dignity. Losing this struggle means a world where we do the work of machines, while machines do that which once let us be human.
Some resources to help you and others jump into this fight below:
Link for the April 5th Hands Off day of action: https://handsoff2025.com/
Link for the May 1st day of action: https://actionnetwork.org/events/ctu-national-call-for-may-day-2025
Keep taking down Tesla: https://www.teslatakedown.com/
And the latest mass federal union call below:
Readings that expand on some of the ideas discussed above: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-janet-biehl-the-murray-bookchin-reader
“Down our path lies time, the time to produce what we need with care and the time to sit on the porch or lounge in the creek, the time to let the sun and the water wash over you. Down our path are the simple joys of living. We have everything to fight for, everything, because losing this struggle means the steady stripping away of these joys, of our time, of our agency and dignity.”
Yes! This is what life can be, this is the world worth fighting for
I really appreciate the line you've drawn here between working in the arts and having a gainful union job. There's an important thread there that needs to be maintained and strengthened. As always, great work! Thank you for writing.