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I can't help but feel that at least a significant part of his reaction is due to the subject matter of AI zombies crawling in what we imagine would be painful poses without feeling pain, rather than just the technology itself.

This video is shared a lot to represent Miyazaki's feelings on AI, but all I see is him reacting to one specific video on the screen - grotesque/bloody figures crawling on the floor in totally unnatural motions. He specifically says he doesn't like it because it seems to make light of the suffering of disabled people. There zero feedback on the AI whatsoever. Who knows what he would have said if the engineers had built something closer to the company's artistic vision.

In all fairness, Hayao Miyazaki is famously grumpy about everything, especially when related to modern society. I wouldn't have expected anything less.

A common meme is to put him side to side with Junji Ito. Hayao Miyazaki as the grumpy old man whose work is cute and happy, and Junji Ito as the nice and cheerful guy whose work is the thing of nightmares.

Junji Ito's take on AI, is that he worries for his profession, but he thinks he still has something AIs can't replicate, at least for now. As expected, while both of them oppose AI, they do it in a way that couldn't be more different.

Crucially, this was before the transformer paper, "Attention is all you need", or any of the diffusion models had been released.

This just looks like some painful RL or evolutionary algorithms, at best.

What he is criticising here is not AI or AI art. But instead of rather old machine learning trying to achieve some type of ambulation or human like gait. Which I think is some level cool. But also artistically is clearly grotesque and not something that should be widely presented.

Just think of using this type of movement or actions in media specially a film. That would be entirely unworkable and doomed idea. Disgust from most viewers would be similar.

"I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself"

I emphatically appreciate Miyazaki. Even if you take him as hyperbolic, or perhaps biased due to differences in intention between the engineer team and artistry he represents, it's very positive to have strongly opinionated voices in the room that can clearly articulate why. The anecdote about pain and stiffness is succinct but exactly what is necessary to communicate specifically what is missing from the animations at hand.

However, I'm curious what he would have thought about someone playing QWOP. I wonder if he would be more fully bought into such a concept (well outside his own work of course) if such technology might emphasize appreciation for life rather than trying to mimic/bastardize/reproduce it.