As Laika debuts its latest stop-motion animation, Travis Knight is standing firmly against generative AI.
The Wildwood director and Laika CEO explained that GenAI “is antithetical to everything that we are at this studio,” also emphasizing that he hopes people “see the danger” in the technology’s potential as much as the “value.”
“But all of these things have meaning and value when you put them in the hands of an artist,” he told The Verge. “When the technology is doing the work of the artist, that’s a different proposition. And that’s something that I am steadfastly against, because there is no humanity in what comes out of the other side of that.
Knight continued, “When you’ve ingested the material that an artist has actually created, and then regurgitate it in a different way, there’s no soul, there’s no spirit, there’s no humanity behind it. That’s theft.”
While he conceded that “AI is extraordinary technology” that could reap great benefits in medicine and science and “benefit humanity tremendously,” he also sees “a world where they can be devastating.”
“I fear for the latter, I hope for the former, but it requires people to be good stewards of this technology,” he explained. “As a group of humans we have not shown generally that we’re good at that. But I’m ever an optimist, and I hope that collectively we can see the value in the technology and use it responsibly, and see the danger in the technology and push back against it.”
Knight’s comments come amid ongoing concerns around AI’s plagiarism of copyrighted materials and the threat it poses to jobs in Hollywood and beyond, as well as recent warnings from those working in AI that continued progress could “cause a billion deaths.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order last month to fast-track stringent oversight and control of AI. Convening “a group of world-leading experts” within the next 60 days, the order lays out a discussion of “safety plans” and “an emergency shutoff, or ‘kill switch,’ for frontier models.”
On a federal level, Trump has brushed off concerns about AI as “a hoax,” insisting the U.S. government “already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power” over AI companies.