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Pete Docter, co-chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios, spoke about a variety of topics, including the upcoming Toy Story 5, in a new interview publishe by The Hollywood Reporter.
Among the most interesting parts of the interview were Docter’s thoughts on artificial intelligence. It’s a topic that many creative leaders in the industry have been hesitant to discuss openly, but it’s important to hear because the technology is already upending animation production and will disrupt many part of the industry in the near future.
For Docter, the technology has potential — he believes it will be a “game changer” — but he also says that it can only be a part of the creative process because “it doesn’t create anything new.” His complete thoughts on the technology, which he likens to the groundbreaking computer animation that Pixar did in the 1990s, can be read below:
And the technology, the same thing. Toy Story was a real game changer for a lot of my peers that studied hand-drawn animation. That’s how we thought. I pictured I’d be sitting at a desk drawing Mickey Mouse and instead I’m with a mouse and I’m moving a puppet virtually in screen. And people were like, “What?” at that time. And now that’s become a commonplace. And I think the latest is AI that just makes people go, What? I type in polar bear in the city having a Coca-Cola and it happens. So how useful is that? I think the answer is that in the end, why do we watch these things? It’s to feel something, to speak to our own experience as human beings. AI can do that somewhat. I think it’s a great tool for people who know how to use it to say something about the human experience. And so I think it will be a game changer, but still most effective and most powerful in the hands of artists and storytellers.
My experience so far in a lot of different ways, AI takes something and sands the edges down, so it makes the blob average. And that could be very useful in a lot of ways. But if you really want to do something brand new and really insightful and speak from a personal angle, that’s not going to come from AI fully. It only ever create[s] what’s been fed into it. It doesn’t create anything new, it creates a weird amalgam of stuff that’s been poured into it.
Docter’s thoughts about the importance of AI mirror those of his boss, Disney CEO Bob Iger, who said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting last week that, “AI may, in fact, be the most powerful technology that our company has ever seen, including its ability to enhance and enable consumers to access, experience and enjoy our entertainment.”
Iger took a broader view of the technology, not just in creative application, and added that it is “already enabling our company to be more efficient, and we’re only just beginning to deploy it for those purposes.”
He cautioned against adopting AI too quickly, saying: “Given the speed that it is developing, we’re taking precautions to make sure of three things: One, that our IP is being protected. That’s incredibly important. Second, that our creators are being respected, and last, that our customers are being considered and valued, particularly as this technology emerges rapidly.”
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