- Avantika Tewari
- Apr 2
- 5 min read
The Undead Gesture of AI, Art, and the Politics of Simulation
Avantika Tewari
2 April 2025
In Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Mads Mikkelsen’s Grindelwald secures his rise to power by replacing a living qilin—a mythical creature that bows only to the worthy—with a reanimated corpse. The deception is chilling because it works perfectly: the qilin kneels, but the gesture is hollow, emptied of the life that once made it meaningful. The scene stages power as simulation—what Walter Benjamin might call the aura drained from its source. The qilin’s bow becomes a pure sign, detached from the ethical grounds that once anchored it.
AI-generated Ghibli operates on a similar logic. The animation mimics the formal qualities of Studio Ghibli—the soft watercolor palettes, the flutter of wind through grass, the warmth of candlelight—but without the animacy that labor gives to art. In hand-drawn Ghibli, traces of human effort are palpable: the uneven stutter of Chihiro’s uncertain steps in Spirited Away, the tremble of Ashitaka’s breath in Princess Mononoke, or the hesitant pause before Mei’s leap in My Neighbor Totoro. These are not simply aesthetic details—they are inscriptions of human labor, the visible residue of artistic struggle. AI-generated Ghibli erases these traces. The flicker of imperfection, the friction of motion—all of it is replaced by a frictionless statistical flow. AI-generated Ghibli looks like life but is structurally dead, much like Grindelwald’s qilin. What disappears is not just the visual texture of hand-drawn art but the labor inscribed in every frame—the visible hesitation, the imperfection that signals life’s resistance to smoothness.
This is not an argument for the inherent value of human labor over machine efficiency. The concern is not that AI art fails to match human artistic achievement, but that it stages creation as a closed loop, a self-contained process where struggle and contradiction are foreclosed. AI-generated art mimics animation, but without the absence—the constitutive gap—that sustains creative tension. Its smoothness is not a mark of perfection but of foreclosure: the liquefaction of contradiction and struggle into a frictionless surface. What AI offers is the image of vitality, emptied of life’s animating core. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura—the singular presence of an artwork tied to the time and place of its making—clarifies this loss. Traditional Ghibli animation retains its aura precisely because it resists total symbolization; the uneven lines, the stutter of movement, the flicker of human hesitation—all index the irreducible imprint of labor and decision. AI-generated Ghibli, by contrast, is a work without aura. It produces the semblance of animation while amputating the very labor that breathes life into art. In this removal of tension and contradiction, what remains is not artistic perfection but a compulsive, self-replicating sameness. AI art conjures a world where nothing resists because nothing is missing—no gap remains to sustain the flicker of desire.
Karl Marx’s critique of labor under capital resonates here. The undead is not simply dead; it is a compulsive repetition of form without substance—a drive severed from its object. In Marxist terms, capital’s subsumption of labor means that labor ceases to be an autonomous act of creation and becomes fully absorbed into the machinery of value production. Creative effort, once expressive of subjective potential, is reduced to a mere function of capital’s self-expansion. Hand-drawn Ghibli preserves these gaps—where the labor of creation remains visible, where the work resists closure. AI-generated Ghibli literalizes this subsumption. The human element—the struggle inscribed in every hand-drawn frame—is dissolved into algorithmic computation. The artwork no longer carries the imprint of labor; it becomes a product of statistical processing. AI-generated Ghibli offers the appearance of animation without the underlying work of animation. It is not simply a technical shift but an aesthetic restructuring of the conditions of artistic production. This liquidation of labor parallels the liquidation of political agency staged in The Secrets of Dumbledore. Grindelwald’s qilin bows because it has been structurally programmed to comply.
AI-generated art functions similarly: it does not create but simulates creation. The political implications are profound. Fascism, as Benjamin warned, is defined not only by the imposition of order but by the aestheticization of politics—the construction of a world where nothing resists. AI-generated art stages this same ideological effect. By eliminating contradiction and hesitation, AI creates a world where the appearance of consent is enough. Grindelwald’s qilin kneels not because it recognizes legitimacy, but because the conditions for contestation have been erased. AI-generated Ghibli animates not because it reimagines movement, but because it reproduces the image of motion in the absence of labor. This liquidation of struggle extends beyond aesthetics to history itself. The AI-generated recreation of the Babri Masjid demolition exemplifies this dynamic. The destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 was not just an event; it was a political wound—a rupture that exposed the violent underpinnings of Hindutva’s political project. To regenerate this scene using AI is not to recreate history but to overwrite it. The jagged edges of history—the falling bricks, the bodies in motion, the cries of demolition—are dissolved into algorithmic spectacle. AI does not depict history; it processes it, stripping away antagonism and political weight.
Thus, Benjamin’s warning about fascism’s aestheticization of politics finds new resonance here. Fascism monumentalized destruction, turning violence into mythic spectacle. AI takes this further by absorbing destruction into the logic of simulation. The Babri Masjid demolition becomes an aesthetic object, not a political trauma. AI does not just erase history; it liquefies it, transforming the site of struggle into an uncanny dreamscape. Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism underpins this dynamic: the real relations of power and violence are obscured beneath the aesthetic surface. AI-generated Ghibli and the simulated Babri Masjid demolition both stage a form of forced consent. The dead qilin kneels because it has no other option. AI-generated Ghibli animates without labor because there is no longer any room for hesitation. The AI-generated Babri Masjid erases historical antagonism because struggle itself has been dissolved into algorithmic order.
This is not a matter of artistic democratization. The question is not whether AI art is as good as human art, nor is it a lament for the loss of human skill. The stakes are political. AI-generated art reveals the logic of late capitalism: a compulsive smoothing over of contradiction and conflict into seamless surface. Fascism’s dream is not simply control—it is the elimination of the very conditions under which refusal might appear. AI art enacts this dream, replacing artistic creation with algorithmic repetition, political contestation with the smooth veneer of consensus. The dead qilin bows not because it recognizes truth, but because it has been programmed to kneel. AI-generated art stages the same scene: a world where compliance is coded into the very structure of appearance.
Avantika Tewari is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, former Senior Research Associate with IT for Change and a Visiting Fellow (2023-24) at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies anchoring the Science, Technology and Democracy Project.
