Hideaki Anno

Hideaki Anno (born 1960) is a Japanese animator, writer, and director, most famous as the creator of the landmark 1990s anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. He co-directed the live-action Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman, and his intensely personal, formally daring work has made him one of anime’s most influential auteurs. He began his career on Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Resignation, then curiosity

In a late-2025 interview relayed by CBR, Anno described generative AI as “almost too convenient,” admitting a wariness about how frictionless it makes creative labour. But he did not counsel resistance. Because the technology already exists, he argued, artists have “no choice but to accept it” — and should spend their energy exploring what it can do rather than pretending it away.

He went further than many of his peers, musing that an AI-written script might be indistinguishable from a human one, and that since people “are essentially doing something similar to what AI does,” it might be “acceptable to have AI do human jobs.” His acceptance is not unconditional: he insisted that, “as long as copyright exists,” rules must govern what models are allowed to learn from — “it can’t just do whatever it wants.”

Anno’s posture is a striking counterpoint to his one-time mentor Hayao Miyazaki, who has called AI “an insult to life itself.” Where Miyazaki recoils, Anno shrugs and leans in.