![Thursday – April 3, 2025
#35 | Playing God: Who gets to be an artist?
Thoughts on OpenAI's "Ghibli-style" image generation release with GPT-4o
First, I totally empathize with Miyazaki's distress and sentiment that "[AI animation] is an insult to life itself." I think we all do. The man is 84-years old. Studio Ghibli is his life's work. Millions (myself included) grew up on My Neighbor Totoro and other beloved Studio Ghibli movies. The Ghibli-style is renown for being entirely handcrafted with Miyazaki closely overseeing every single frame with immaculate attention to detail. Famously, this single four-second crowd scene took Studio Ghibli 15 months to complete.
To watch a cold, soulless machine achieve the same result with near no effort pains the human heart. To add further injury, OpenAI did not give single bit of remuneration to Miyazaki to train on Studio Ghibli's work. There is a natural deep-seated injustice that one instinctively feels. How can this possibly be legal or ethical? In what Universe is this possibly okay?
After pondering this a lot though, my thinking changed. Another way to look at things: a lot of people have dreams of being a creative person. A musician. An artist. A writer. For example, when I was a child, I absolutely worshipped Calvin and Hobbes. I loved everything Bill Watterson drew and as a kid, I spent hundreds of hours trying to mimic Watterson's style and also draw anime and manga. But eventually I gave up. Nothing I drew, despite my hundreds upon hundreds of hours of trying, was any good. I had friends who could effortlessly draw beautiful comics and cartoons. But God had not given me those talents. So eventually I went on to study engineering in college because I had no artistic gifts. But my dreams of being a cartoonist never disappeared...](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5wlpm2j3d6can6quf5hotdcc/bafkreifo5ybyxwpygwsnto72db62arynpkrb5lwlxbed4mb5ubsljfxx7e)
Thursday – April 3, 2025 #35 | Playing God: Who gets to be an artist? Thoughts on OpenAI's "Ghibli-style" image generation release with GPT-4o First, I totally empathize with Miyazaki's distress and sentiment that "[AI animation] is an insult to life itself." I think we all do. The man is 84-years old. Studio Ghibli is his life's work. Millions (myself included) grew up on My Neighbor Totoro and other beloved Studio Ghibli movies. The Ghibli-style is renown for being entirely handcrafted with Miyazaki closely overseeing every single frame with immaculate attention to detail. Famously, this single four-second crowd scene took Studio Ghibli 15 months to complete. To watch a cold, soulless machine achieve the same result with near no effort pains the human heart. To add further injury, OpenAI did not give single bit of remuneration to Miyazaki to train on Studio Ghibli's work. There is a natural deep-seated injustice that one instinctively feels. How can this possibly be legal or ethical? In what Universe is this possibly okay? After pondering this a lot though, my thinking changed. Another way to look at things: a lot of people have dreams of being a creative person. A musician. An artist. A writer. For example, when I was a child, I absolutely worshipped Calvin and Hobbes. I loved everything Bill Watterson drew and as a kid, I spent hundreds of hours trying to mimic Watterson's style and also draw anime and manga. But eventually I gave up. Nothing I drew, despite my hundreds upon hundreds of hours of trying, was any good. I had friends who could effortlessly draw beautiful comics and cartoons. But God had not given me those talents. So eventually I went on to study engineering in college because I had no artistic gifts. But my dreams of being a cartoonist never disappeared...
Thu-Apr 3, 2025
#ScreenshotEssay #35: "Playing God: Who gets to be an artist?"
"For the first time in history, thanks to our collective ingenuity & relentless industry, man now has a shot at leveling the playing field; of giving so many of us a chance at artistic creation."
#r2025.04 #r2025 #rl35