Aaron Blaise
Animator & Artist
Oscar-nominated Disney animator and co-director of Brother Bear. He urges fellow artists to “embrace” AI as a creative tool while condemning the nonconsensual training of models on artists’ work as unacceptable.
In his words
No one’s art should be used to train AI to create something else. That’s essentially profiting off of someone else’s hard work.
Rather than resist it, we should try to embrace it and see how it can help us.
Biography
Aaron Blaise (born 1968) is an American animator and director who spent more than two decades at Disney, working on The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Mulan, and Pocahontas before co-directing Brother Bear (2003), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He now runs the popular art-education platform CreatureArtTeacher and a large YouTube channel.
Embrace the tool, reject the theft
Blaise has become one of animation’s more nuanced pro-AI voices, drawing a sharp line between the technology itself and the way its models are trained. In a widely shared video discussion he argued that resisting AI outright is a mistake: “Rather than resist it, we should try to embrace it and see how it can help us,” he said, imagining AI handling laborious tasks like adding shadows so artists can focus on creation.
No one’s art should be used to train AI to create something else. That’s essentially profiting off of someone else’s hard work.
On the tool’s creative potential he is unequivocally hopeful — “I don’t see AI as a threat. I think it’s exciting and will provide new opportunities for creativity” — while stressing that art “needs to be yours,” rooted in lived human experience. That dual position, enthusiastic about the tool and unforgiving about how it is built, keeps him in the pro camp with real caveats.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/aaron-blaise