AI Could Be A ‘Game Changer’ in the Hands of Storytellers

Pixar Creative Chief Pete Docter Says AI Could Be A ‘Game Changer’ in the Hands of Storytellers

In the Toy Story 30th anniversary celebrations, three-time Oscar-winning Pixar writer-director (and the studio’s current Chief Creative Officer) Pete Docter shared his memories of the game changing film’s creation, discussed its legacy and addressed key issues facing the animation industry today.

For Docter, the AI 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 was recruited by Pixar co-founder John Lasseter to join the computer animation studio in 1990 fresh off graduating from California Institute of the Arts. He was the supervising animator on Toy Story and went on to earn Oscars for best animated film for Up, Inside Out and Soul. He appointed co-chief creative officer of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios alongside Jennifer Lee in 2018, a year after Lasseter stepped down from the role.