Well he didn't seem very fond of it even before it was created
No, that's what happens in nature when two different worlds collide. And you accept it, like Lady Eboshi does.
I think Miyazaki's just an old conservative emotional man. He probably doesn't think very hard or rationally about his taste.
Software, in fact, does not.
I wonder his response if he knew it.
("Then you would never get to work for a genius like the great Miyazaki, haha!" Sure, I understand that. That isn't a novel observation: he's far from the only celebrity genius in the world who gets away with abusing their underlings, who's so great and amazing that people are willing to turn a blind eye to their personality issues. They say "never meet your heroes").
But, even in that context, they did a horrible presentation. At least from this clip they appear like full-blown nerds with low EQ who didn't consider what kind of person their senior they will present this to is like. Any fan could have told them HM wouldn't like the animation and it would not reveal what DL can do.
There are serious people and unserious people.
They say it has no sense of pain, and that it's a horror beyond human imagination.
Miyazaki says whoever made it gives no thought to pain, and it's very unpleasant.
That just seems like he was repeating back pretty much what they said to him?
Also, I'm not familiar with Miyazaki's entire oeuvre, but he doesn't seem to be into zombie horror, or 3D? So kinda understandable that he wouldn't be interested in adopting a product where their number 1 demo was zombie horror.
I'd prefer a moment of brutal harshness, packed with rich information like that. Over mealy-mouthed, information-less, repetitive nonsense, any day of the week.
Miyazaki did not say "I love this tech but it doesn't look good enough yet."
He actually doesn't comment on the quality of the animation at all. His comments are entirely focused on how he feels the technique lacks a human-ness that he thinks is important to art. An early effort you would like to see improved does not "disgust" you or make you feel the creators are "insult[ing] life itself."
Of course he could change his mind, but if you don't think his comments reflect a belief at that moment in time about machines creating art, I do not believe you've understood what he is saying.
The problem with AI has been always that it removes from the artist the act the artist finds joy in, the work to create a beautiful final product, and leaves only the most boring and meh parts: contract negotiation, right fights, pay and attribution concerns, etc.
Not sure how you could confidently say this. Given that most artists and animators already have a disdain for generative AI, it's difficult to believe that the guy most unenthused about technology would love Stable Diffusion. The guy didn't even like CGI.
You don't know that.
Hayao Miyazaki is so caught up in his own vision that it seems like he doesn't have much room for appreciation of things outside of it. As such we shouldn't give too much weight on his opinion on things outside the kind of movies he wants to make.
I wonder how he thinks of the future of animation now, after the introduction of StableDiffusion and others.