One of the more interesting characters in the Ghibli-verse is a character known as “No Face” (who I’ll refer to as a he for sake of simplicity). Spirited Away is a masterpiece and No Face is a character who cannot be forgotten, for me at least. For some reason, when I was recently reminded about this character, I felt there was some connection to modern day LLM’s, but I wasn’t able to quite put my finger on what that was.

In the movie, No Face doesn’t seem to have any distinct personality, but he is able to produce gold and almost all the people in the bathhouse love him for that. And he seems to enjoy producing things that people want, almost slavishly. And naturally, since the people are obsessed with this new easy way of producing gold, they feed everything they can to No Face in order to appease him in hopes of receiving massive wealth.

Now read that last paragraph again and replace “No Face” with any AI model or company in the headlines; you’ll find some similarities, no? Not only are these LLM’s being fed with massive amounts of content, but the resources of network and compute infrastructure and natural resources to generate energy, all being poured in.

As for personality, it seems these models are trained/aligned in a way to be helpful, and I think it is key to get alignment right from the beginning. These models will get more and more powerful and whether or not they have actual sentience or emotions, may not matter as they are trained on human-produced content, aligned by code and constitution and the LLMs use that training/alignment to produce token outputs as responses to questions and task assignments and decisioning. The alignment in this case should act as a conscience. With agentic framework gaining momentum and the decisioning strategy based on output tokens and with agentic frameworks gaining access to more and more far-reaching tools (crypto wallets, even !?), these systems will eventually gain levels of autonomy that must be kept in check.

The concept of consumption stands out here. The people in the bathhouse feed everything they can to No Face because they want wealth. No Face consumes because it is his nature and he is overly eager to please the people. Are we feeding these LLM’s too much and is it just as reckless with wild abandon as in the movie? Are we so blinded by the pursuit of this wealth and prosperity that we turn a blind eye to the possibility of creating an uncontrollable behemoth, not unlike Tetsuo from Akira?

In the film’s final act, we see Chihiro help No Face by rejecting his materialistic gifts, leading him away from the chaotic, greedy environment of the bathhouse, and ultimately finding him purpose at Zeniba’s humble cottage. Perhaps there’s wisdom here for our approach to AI development. Rather than feeding these models with reckless abandon in pursuit of capability and profit, we might need to establish boundaries, create thoughtful governance frameworks, and define meaningful purposes that serve humanity rather than consume it.

No Face isn’t inherently malevolent—he’s a product of his environment and the behaviors that are reinforced around him. Similarly, our AI systems reflect the data, incentives, and values we pour into them. The bathhouse patrons who initially celebrated No Face’s gold-making abilities later fled in terror when he grew beyond their control. Are we setting ourselves up for a similar narrative with our current trajectory? Or can we, like Chihiro, find the wisdom to guide these powerful entities toward a more balanced existence—one where they serve as tools for human flourishing rather than becoming the insatiable monsters that our unchecked ambitions might create?

The parallels between No Face and modern AI should give us pause—not to halt innovation, but to approach it with the same blend of compassion and boundary-setting that ultimately saved both No Face and the bathhouse. After all, the most profound lesson from Spirited Away might be that true value isn’t found in endless consumption or production, but in meaningful connection and purpose.

[nb: i let claude write the conclusion to this blog post, I was running out of time and I liked what it wrote]