Ghibli art is famous because ghibli art means ghibli movies. It is more beautiful in motion than still, the beauty is in part due to the emotion evoked by the story.
There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.
Yes they used to work at ghibli, but so too did john romero work at id, and yet daikatana was not a quake-killer.
This doesn't devalue ghibli at all, I think
(In fact, I think AI will always have the fundamental problem that most people have no taste or sense or introspection, they don't know why good things are good, and can't see that crap things are crap, so they are predestined to only be able to produce garbage. Nod to Ted Sturgeon.)
It is not "competition" and "copying", it is the fact that Ghibli almost closed for good several times, so some employees created their own studio.
>On August 3, 2014, Toshio Suzuki announced that Studio Ghibli would take a "brief pause" to re-evaluate and restructure in the wake of Miyazaki's retirement. He stated some concerns about where the company would go in the future. This led to speculation that Studio Ghibli will never produce another feature film again. On November 7, 2014, Miyazaki stated, "That was not my intention, though. All I did was announce that I would be retiring and not making any more features."[40] Lead producer Yoshiaki Nishimura among several other staffers from Ghibli, such as director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, left to found Studio Ponoc in April 2015, working on the film Mary and the Witch's Flower.
> There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom.
Sorry to take this on a tangent, but the problem with Doom clones isn't that they aren't as good as Doom, it is that Doom already exists and is known to the audience. If you've had your mind blown by Doom, playing a 10% better version of Doom isn't going to blow your mind again, it is going to merely be a fun experience. Many people won't even bother to try that 10% better Doom clone, since all they'll see is a clone of something they already tried.
To add, cloning is one thing, but a lot of games - including id's own games - iterated on the formula, leading to the genre of first-person shooters like Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Halo, Bioshock, etc.
That is, clones rarely work, but evolutions do. Stardew Valley on the surface can be considered a Harvest Moon clone, but it iterated on the formula, leading to a lot of attempts at casual farm games from many different competitors. Minecraft was an Infiniminer clone (or inspired by?) and iterated on the idea. Fortnite was a PUBG clone which was a DayZ clone.
The wrongdoing here isn't in devaluing somebody's work, it is about enriching oneself by openly repurposing their IP without compensation and dodging any kind of repercussions whatsoever. It was bad when Chinese companies did it, OpenAI using legal sleight of hand to indemnify their actions isn't any less galling.
I personally think the line should be mostly output based. You should be able to train on any copyrighted work by having a single reader license (e.x. purchasing a book or e-book) for that work and no other special licenses. You shouldn't be able to download pirated works for training but you shouldn't need special licenses to train instead of read.
But if your model produces outputs that too closely match their inputs and a company can show it that is a copyright violation and you can be sued for it.
Your argument is an example of survivor bias. Just because one very wealthy corporation wasn't affected (too much) when their intellectual property was stolen, doesn't mean that smaller and less wealthy or less important companies/people aren't affected by IP theft by LLM porch pirates.
And even in Ghibly studio case it's not quite clear, if they won't be affected long term.
Don Bluth worked at Disney, and poached some of the animators to make his own independent studio, and produced quite a few Disney-like feature films that stood pretty well on their own.
The people who founded Ponoc seemed to have creative differences with Miyazaki. They wanted to make a movie [1] that they felt Ghibli won't greenlight [2] - but there seems to have been no deep seated animosity or desire to rip-off. Incidentally I just borrowed this movie from the local library a few hour ago because the cover art reminded me of Ghibli but I noticed it wasn't a Ghibli production. Some searching online led me to the cited article.
This is looking for silver lining: so, someone copied Ghibli style, which is plagiarism, which is bad, but it turns out that by plagiarizing the offender also made the original work more famous and more valuable in some ways... OK. But plagiarizing is still bad. Even if it had some positive effects.
Gee, whatever would Ghibli have done without this publicity boost.
It’s always the already-popular artist’s identity giving clout to the model, not the other way around.
And if the artist’s style is not well known, their identity is obfuscated because the model/LORA/“finetune”-peddler can get away with it. And they’re all peddlers, if it’s not OpenAI it’s grifters with Patreons to fund their “hard work” of tagging people’s work and throwing it at rental GPU compute.
> There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom
Sure, but there were some "Doomlikes" I would still rate as better than doom; like Build Engine games Duke Nukem and Blood/Blood 2 and other IdTech based games like Hexen.
> There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.
True, but this was also during a time when it was incredibly hard to make a video game. It wasn't like anyone could spin up a Doom clone in 2 minutes. Competition vs. commoditization at massive scale are different things.
I'd argue many of the clones were better but not enough better. Doom was the first to do X and once you already played a game that did X the next game needed to do 2X not 1.2X.
Yeah, the concept of a commercial / off the shelf game engine wasn't that much of a thing until Doom, but with Doom and especially its successors Quake and Unreal from Epic it did. Quake's engine spawned Half-Life's, Unreal became one of the biggest game engines anywhere.
Imagine what classical realists artist though about early photography and how it shaped in history. Painters abandon achievement for replicate reality (all kind of *ism come later) or use new technology (photography) to improve creative process (Mucha).
AI is just another tool for artist. AI by itself never generate "art". It cannot by definition.
Read on Reddit that people love AI because it's "democratizing creativity". Let that sink in. People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called an alpinist.
I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.
The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though. People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.
It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.
What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose prestige was forged by countless professionals working very hard.
There was a very similar discussion when photography was made easily accessible. Baudelaire thought that photography was the killer of art by allowing non-artists to crate something that was very much like art, mechanistically, without having a good insight into what they were doing.
And, in some ways he was right... but also not. What eventually happened is that art education that would be required for any aristocrat or an aspiring aristocrat became optional. Most intellectual elite today would be unable to draw much beyond a stick figure diagram. Art, at least where it concerns drawing or painting became a narrowly specialized field. And so, most people today don't understand and don't appreciate art.
But, art didn't die. Instead, artists started asking themselves more questions about the nature and philosophy of art, figuring out which aspects are essential, experimenting more. In retrospect, it's sad that fewer people today have decent access or understanding of art, but while more common before, the understanding was often very superficial anyways.
I can't really speak for other people, but I think the "democratizing creativity" part comes in in places where the specific creative part that the AI replaces is not a core part of the creative experience.
Take a look at Super Auto Pets, a pretty successful and fun auto-battler game. It literally uses a free emoji pack for its core art. It doesn't really matter that they didn't hire an artist for those (though I think they did hire an artist after finding success) since a free emoji pack was enough for the creative product they wanted to create. If they had AI generated emoji instead, it wouldn't have really mattered much for the final result (creatively at least, I assume audiences would respond poorly due to GenAI's reputation). At the same time, the ability to create their product without paying a lot of money for artists was critical to make it in the first place.
This is what it means to me to "democratize creativity", to allow creatives to realize their creative ambitions in an area they are proficient at (e.g. video games) without requiring a lot of creative skill in adjacent areas that aren't critical to the experience they are trying to make.
I think there's a reason people would respond more poorly to generated art than to emojis: the contentlessness of emojis is broadly understood. We look at an emoji and we know what it is intended to signify. With "AI" art, there is an ambiguity: which aspects of the artwork are intentional, and which aspects are the creator accepting whatever the "AI" churned out?
If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art. It doesn't matter if the simple art is or isn't AI generated, what matters (in my opinion) is that it doesn't lead us into looking for meaning that isn't there.
> People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called an alpinist.
No, people want to see their ideas come to life, previously this required effort in mastering a skill, now... it takes less and/or different amount of work.
We all say "they have no _idea_ what they're doing" in English. Creativity basically equals skill. Those with less skills has less to express.
I mean, everyone knows it takes a programmer to spec an app. The "different" skill needed for vibe coding is regular old coding skillset. Only difference with image AI is that it doesn't do "vibe drawing" well.
AI art experiment is over. It's been long over, like camera based self driving was by the time some large orgs started embracing the technology. And it's taking longer for some to understand that it's over, just like that time.
I heard a good one. AI isn't art, AI is content. People don't want to create art per se, they want to generate images for e.g. memes or filler / illustrative images on their blog, replacing or being an addition to stock images.
No shade on stock photographers / illustrators, but that's where I see image generation end up at. And you could already get custom illustrations made for cheap on sites like fiverr. The real long term question will be whether an AI generated image can compete with services like that. (my guess: probably, AI images are higher resolution/quality and generated faster, but I don't know the real total cost of them nor that of cheap illustrators or stock images)
People want to express their creativity stuck in their head without having the skill or training (privilege of the training) to be a legit artist. I think it’s awesome that this removes the barrier and empowers people to be creative in ways that they previously could not.
Your definition of creativity is flawed. Imagining something is a small part of the process. Developing the skill and technique to express that imagination is the most important part.
Do you also object to people paying money to have other people's art in their homes? Is the moral damage from getting an artwork in your home that you didn't create inversely proportional to your monetary investment?
Artists' main objection to AI seems to be that they think that people who use it are posers who are trying to claim that they're just as good as Rembrandt because they can type "beautiful painting, style of Rembrandt" into Midjourney.
I don't think this is very true, I don't often see anyone bragging about their skills and demanding their outputs get put in a gallery and judged on equal merits as the old masters.
I'm not much of an artist and whenever I use an image generator to generate something, I don't do it to show off my artistic talent or whatever - if I was to do it before AI I would've commissioned an artist for it (which I probably wouldn't have done because it was too expensive, so I would forgo it) - the work the artist does would actually have even less of my own input than the AI's, since I'm giving them less description to go off - it's all the artist's, based on their own experiences.
I don't know where you hang out on Reddit but on my subs people are almost invariably hostile to AI. AI art, even stuff that looks great, gets down voted to oblivion.
The real problem is not the effort (or lack thereof), it’s the perception that modern AI is dropping them off at the peak of Everest, when in reality they’re being stood on a plastic-molded crag at a sea-level tourist trap.
Creative vision is not being realized, it’s being stunted.
I've been suspecting the subtext of that was "take back anime from Japanese", except what they made was a death trap welded stuck in reverse. Now they must climb with what they have, for that they are closer to the top from there than to where they came from.
I think it's less about wanting to be called an artist and more about wanting to be able to get the results of making things more easily. And there is a good case that we can have a successful boom from this sort of thing.
People don't click buttons on Guitar Hero controller to be called musicians. They do it to briefly feel how they imagine a musician might feel sometimes.
> we’re exiting the scarcity economy of visuals & entering something weirder—where aesthetics become ambient infrastructure, like wifi.
AI is democratizing _execution_, not creativity. The advent of the smartphone camera era allowed for the average person to take vastly more photos than ever before, and yet the photos I personally find noteworthy are either remarkable in their context or aesthetic quality (e.g. [0]) or personally meaningful.
Alternatively put, "culture" values a proof-of-work that is creativity + execution. Taking a photo of a lunar eclipse setting over a crater has global value, because of the effort in planning and taking the shot (read [0], it's great). Me shitposting a meme for my game night groupchat neatly summarizing what happened in our last session of Pandemic: Legacy has local value, because of the creativity in adapting a meme format to our particular context and the execution of the edit, but nobody besides us would find it as funny.
(Interesting aside — I personally think that the photo in [0] is more impressive than someone going all that way to _paint_ the same scene en plein air, because of the split-second precision of the execution. Even though photography may have devalued a lot of the technical execution of capturing a scene, it has opened up new ways in which said execution can be valuable.)
So AI decouples creativity and execution in a way that is, like every innovation before, unlike every innovation before. The Ghibli aesthetic is the soft pastels of the color palette [1] and the comfortable, nostalgic character design [2] but also the restful rhythm of "ma" [3] and the detail lovingly lavished to background characters [4]. GPT-4o devalues some of those things, but it another sense it just re-weights our cultural proof-of-work valuations back towards human effort.
What if the transcendence of a unique style into a commodity is inevitable for all greatly influential styles, and a mark of greatness not of debasement or dilution. What if instead of the "impurity" of the commons polluting the "purity" of the pure form, the pure form has evolved into a memetic virus that has infected everything and reproduced itself in many forms, beyond even the power of its creator? The creator's grief at, in part, loss of control is understandable but perhaps is a tribute to how what they created transcended them into a thing with a life of its own, one of the truest tributes to creative genius, no?
What if a distinct style is not owned by one artist, even if they are most associated with it, but in reality, in art historical reality, is most commonly explored by a group of more and less famous creators, all as part of a movement, at a time? What influences did Ghibli draw on?
Buddhism says all things are essentially empty of their own existence but are merely conditions resulting from other causes, and so on, in a chain unending. Like this.
The pointillism[0] of Impressionism that ended up spread to the masses by countless including Bob Ross is one example of the memetic evolution and transcendent influence of "high art". Greatness can filter down but it doesn't mean it's not great.
An iPhone is still a masterpiece even if you hold it in the ghetto. Does the ghetto pollute it or does it lift the ghetto? Maybe there's cross pollination, but I think it's infected with its greatness.
I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this, the fact that machines are able to recreate his style seems to go against the whimsy he creates in his art. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a possible lawsuit considering how strongly that style is tied to him, and that the model surely used his films as data.
If it was me I would feel horrible that what I gave to the public and dedicated my life to was contorted in this manner.
> After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque creature
Reacting to an animation where a gross critter "learned to walk using AI" instead of being animated by a person 8+ years ago, and ended up using its head as a leg
It has nothing to do with the current image generation topic beyond the "AI" label being stuck on both of them
Which is not to say I expect he's thrilled about ChatGPT cloning the art style on a mass scale, but that quote that everyone keeps reposting doesn't have anything to do with it
"After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque creature, Miyazaki pauses and says that it reminds him of a friend of his with a disability so severe he can’t even high five. “Thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
He's disgusted by the creature, not the computer based technique. While he's on record as disapproving of CGI, Earwig and the Witch, directed by his son, used CGI so his disapproval isn't absolute.
Presenters: "This is a presentation of an artificial intelligence model which learned certain movements [...] It's moving by using its head. It doesn't feel any pain, and has no concept of protecting its head. It uses its head like a leg. This movement is so creepy, and could be applied to zombie video games. An artificial intelligence could present us grotesque movements which we humans can't imagine."
The screen shows some Silent Hill looking vaguely humanoid, crawling blob. As the presenters say, it's pretty creepy looking.
Miyazaki: "I am utterly disgusted [...] I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all"
IMHO saying Miyazaki outright hates AI is putting words into his mouth. All the clip shows is that a dude that doesn't make zombie horror films doesn't need a zombie horror generator thank you very much.
So yeah, he clearly rejects the product pitch. But judging from Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro I don't see why you'd pitch him that product.
>I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this, the fact that machines are able to recreate his style seems to go against the whimsy he creates in his art.
Supposedly, you have a working internet connection. In no time, you can check the name of Hayao Miyazaki. You can see how he draws his manga, in a style which would be really hard to animate. You can see how he designs his characters. Well, maybe the colour palette can be attributed to “his style” in some works. Still, you can learn that Ghibli had famous background artists and art directors like Nizo Yamamoto and Kazuo Oga. You can compare characters drawn by Yoshifumi Kondou and Katsuya Kondou with Miyazaki's, and guess who was responsible for what in different works. You can learn how in the era when everyone waited for computers to make economical marvel of “three dee” real, Isao Takahata used computers to transfer pen and brush strokes to animation in “The Yamadas” and “Princess Mononoke”.
But you don't want any of that. You want to have a familiar pop cultural label (“Miyazaki”) that produces a familiar reaction (“Oooh!”). Purely decorative, symbolic objects. Stories, ideas, hard work? Eh, don't bother me with that nonsense.
There is nothing new or “cutting edge” in ignorance. And AI companies know perfectly well that they work for exactly that audience. Despite all the talk, they don't create the next genius artist, they want to be a next “enhancement filter” in TVs, something that no one uses, but everyone has to add to impress the public. That's just parasitism on lack of ability to discern.
While I don't doubt it's true, this could be challenging to prove, because Studio Ponoc (ex-Ghibli) has produced work that uh, hews rather closely to Miyazaki's style. Were the models trained on Ghibli, Ponoc, both, something else, etc?
I mean, I have no doubts. But proving it seems tough!
Ponoc is made of former Ghibli employees who founded a new home when Ghibli's future was uncertain. I am sure they are on friendly terms, if not family, with Ghibli: they worked together for years. People like them can have a gentleman's agreement.
What is OpenAI in all this, if not a greedy, sloppy, soulless outsider stealing their Art and effort for financial gain without ever asking for permission?
Truly, every artist hopes their distinctive style will be taken by a multi-billion-dollar corporation and used by the White House to make a jeering depiction of crying deportees. It's the ultimate compliment.
If it was me, I would feel great that my work has been extended to give joy at such a large scale. (Not that it’s invalid if he has a different opinion.)
The vast majority of people are consumers, not AI developers. Of course viral moments will be more consumer-oriented. It's easier to digest and reshare a Ghiblified-caricature than a research paper. But the content of that research paper will lead to the next viral moment years down the line.
IANAL but artistic style is not copyrightable. Many many human artists have created images and animated films in the style of Ghibli or Disney or Pixar and there's no direct copyright issue there.
A friend of mine tried to create stock illustrations in Disney style on Etsy, got banned almost immediately for copyright infringement. I guess it depends.
Maaybe, but you'd also have to pass the three-prong test of fair use, and one of the prongs of the test is that your fair use of the material can't eliminate the market for the original material.
I fail to see how taking a distinctive artistic style that was incredibly difficult to produce and shitting out massive amounts of it everywhere as a super low quality commodity would pass the test of fair use.
That feels like an omission in the law. Previously it was simply impossible to "take" a style wholesale. You would at least have to become an artist versed in that style, and it in investing your life into that style you would also make it yours.
AI can take a whole style wholesale with no effort and no contribution. It is greivous theft in the moral sense if not the legal sense.
There were some AI training exceptions passed in Japan if I recall correctly, but with the copyright culture in Japan lacking anything resembling fair use, there was pretty much zero chance something like Stable Diffusion could have been built and proliferated in such a culture. Those AI laws seem pretty reactionary to the West's innovations to stay relevant in my view.
Marvin Gaye estate tried to argue that style is copyrightable, and sued some artists as their songs use similar chord progressions as Marvin Gaye songs; they won one case (which I won't google) but they lost with Sheeran.
In music, copyright is (relatively) clearly defined: it's the melody. You can't touch that. There are also reproduction rights, which protect the (recorded) performance, even if the music's copyright belongs to someone else.
Infact it isn't the style which has been copyright infringed but the original works which had been fed into the Neuronal networks in order to learn how to produce such works.
There is no consent from the authors. I'm not a fighter copyright but if someone makes money from someone others work than the author should be compensated.
The AI industry is standing on the shoulders of giants and make a lot of money.
If the authors had been asked beforehand if their works could be use to train NN than I'm sure this whole AI blubble is has burst long time ago.
...perhaps this is what it takes to finally end the farcical narrative of "intellectual property" and usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge.
The copyright infringement is on the part of the models being trained on Studio Ghibli's work without permission. There's no law against you "accessing the entire corpus of evolved knowledge" and doing the work yourself.
Yeah, and culture will stagnate forever at the 2020 mark, as nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return.
>usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge
We have had that for decades and everything is going to shit. People now just reject facts.
Japanese firms take copyright pretty seriously, and Miyazaki is famously not a fan of CG or automation or indeed the US. I suspect lawsuits will not be long in coming.
On the other hand, Japan pretty much ignores the amateur comics community using copyrighted works for their fan fiction. Even when they have big, well known, events where they sell the comics.
The takeaway? If you’re launching a consumer product, technical superiority doesn’t automatically translate to cultural impact. In the battle for attention, a memorable vibe often beats a better benchmark.
Exactly, I feel like AI was initially meant for "nerds" or at least tech enthusiasts so big numbers were great but when the market widens it becomes less relevant
The Ghibli stuff is really amusing but for me the best are the infographics - you can make amazing stuff with basically 0 2D CG know-how for e.g. a presentation, web page, documentation, blog, etc.
The biggest difference to what was previously available is the accuracy - especially the text. This opens up a plethora of possibilities.
This is what I'm most excited about as well. Prior to 4o image generation, most GPTs I came across really struggled with this type of image generation. The only one that seemed to come close was Ideogram.
Readit News
There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.
This, however, is not the first time ghibli has had competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower in fact they have a whole studio dedicated to copying ghibli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc
Yes they used to work at ghibli, but so too did john romero work at id, and yet daikatana was not a quake-killer.
This doesn't devalue ghibli at all, I think
(In fact, I think AI will always have the fundamental problem that most people have no taste or sense or introspection, they don't know why good things are good, and can't see that crap things are crap, so they are predestined to only be able to produce garbage. Nod to Ted Sturgeon.)
It is not "competition" and "copying", it is the fact that Ghibli almost closed for good several times, so some employees created their own studio.
>On August 3, 2014, Toshio Suzuki announced that Studio Ghibli would take a "brief pause" to re-evaluate and restructure in the wake of Miyazaki's retirement. He stated some concerns about where the company would go in the future. This led to speculation that Studio Ghibli will never produce another feature film again. On November 7, 2014, Miyazaki stated, "That was not my intention, though. All I did was announce that I would be retiring and not making any more features."[40] Lead producer Yoshiaki Nishimura among several other staffers from Ghibli, such as director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, left to found Studio Ponoc in April 2015, working on the film Mary and the Witch's Flower.
Sorry to take this on a tangent, but the problem with Doom clones isn't that they aren't as good as Doom, it is that Doom already exists and is known to the audience. If you've had your mind blown by Doom, playing a 10% better version of Doom isn't going to blow your mind again, it is going to merely be a fun experience. Many people won't even bother to try that 10% better Doom clone, since all they'll see is a clone of something they already tried.
That is, clones rarely work, but evolutions do. Stardew Valley on the surface can be considered a Harvest Moon clone, but it iterated on the formula, leading to a lot of attempts at casual farm games from many different competitors. Minecraft was an Infiniminer clone (or inspired by?) and iterated on the idea. Fortnite was a PUBG clone which was a DayZ clone.
But if your model produces outputs that too closely match their inputs and a company can show it that is a copyright violation and you can be sued for it.
And even in Ghibly studio case it's not quite clear, if they won't be affected long term.
[1] Mary and the Witch’s Flower https://imdb.com/title/tt6336356/
[2] https://otakuusamagazine.com/hayao-miyazaki-says-he-wont-see...
It’s always the already-popular artist’s identity giving clout to the model, not the other way around.
And if the artist’s style is not well known, their identity is obfuscated because the model/LORA/“finetune”-peddler can get away with it. And they’re all peddlers, if it’s not OpenAI it’s grifters with Patreons to fund their “hard work” of tagging people’s work and throwing it at rental GPU compute.
Sure, but there were some "Doomlikes" I would still rate as better than doom; like Build Engine games Duke Nukem and Blood/Blood 2 and other IdTech based games like Hexen.
Is this an exaggeration? Or do some people literally have no introspection?
True, but this was also during a time when it was incredibly hard to make a video game. It wasn't like anyone could spin up a Doom clone in 2 minutes. Competition vs. commoditization at massive scale are different things.
AI is just another tool for artist. AI by itself never generate "art". It cannot by definition.
It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.
It is enshittification.
And, in some ways he was right... but also not. What eventually happened is that art education that would be required for any aristocrat or an aspiring aristocrat became optional. Most intellectual elite today would be unable to draw much beyond a stick figure diagram. Art, at least where it concerns drawing or painting became a narrowly specialized field. And so, most people today don't understand and don't appreciate art.
But, art didn't die. Instead, artists started asking themselves more questions about the nature and philosophy of art, figuring out which aspects are essential, experimenting more. In retrospect, it's sad that fewer people today have decent access or understanding of art, but while more common before, the understanding was often very superficial anyways.
Take a look at Super Auto Pets, a pretty successful and fun auto-battler game. It literally uses a free emoji pack for its core art. It doesn't really matter that they didn't hire an artist for those (though I think they did hire an artist after finding success) since a free emoji pack was enough for the creative product they wanted to create. If they had AI generated emoji instead, it wouldn't have really mattered much for the final result (creatively at least, I assume audiences would respond poorly due to GenAI's reputation). At the same time, the ability to create their product without paying a lot of money for artists was critical to make it in the first place.
This is what it means to me to "democratize creativity", to allow creatives to realize their creative ambitions in an area they are proficient at (e.g. video games) without requiring a lot of creative skill in adjacent areas that aren't critical to the experience they are trying to make.
If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art. It doesn't matter if the simple art is or isn't AI generated, what matters (in my opinion) is that it doesn't lead us into looking for meaning that isn't there.
No, people want to see their ideas come to life, previously this required effort in mastering a skill, now... it takes less and/or different amount of work.
I mean, everyone knows it takes a programmer to spec an app. The "different" skill needed for vibe coding is regular old coding skillset. Only difference with image AI is that it doesn't do "vibe drawing" well.
AI art experiment is over. It's been long over, like camera based self driving was by the time some large orgs started embracing the technology. And it's taking longer for some to understand that it's over, just like that time.
No shade on stock photographers / illustrators, but that's where I see image generation end up at. And you could already get custom illustrations made for cheap on sites like fiverr. The real long term question will be whether an AI generated image can compete with services like that. (my guess: probably, AI images are higher resolution/quality and generated faster, but I don't know the real total cost of them nor that of cheap illustrators or stock images)
I don't think this is very true, I don't often see anyone bragging about their skills and demanding their outputs get put in a gallery and judged on equal merits as the old masters.
I'm not much of an artist and whenever I use an image generator to generate something, I don't do it to show off my artistic talent or whatever - if I was to do it before AI I would've commissioned an artist for it (which I probably wouldn't have done because it was too expensive, so I would forgo it) - the work the artist does would actually have even less of my own input than the AI's, since I'm giving them less description to go off - it's all the artist's, based on their own experiences.
Creative vision is not being realized, it’s being stunted.
There's nothing wrong with that.
People want to run marathons on shoes with padded soles and be called an athlete.
Anyway plenty of people can't even finish 1K, so 42.2K in padded shoes is still impressive.
AI is democratizing _execution_, not creativity. The advent of the smartphone camera era allowed for the average person to take vastly more photos than ever before, and yet the photos I personally find noteworthy are either remarkable in their context or aesthetic quality (e.g. [0]) or personally meaningful.
Alternatively put, "culture" values a proof-of-work that is creativity + execution. Taking a photo of a lunar eclipse setting over a crater has global value, because of the effort in planning and taking the shot (read [0], it's great). Me shitposting a meme for my game night groupchat neatly summarizing what happened in our last session of Pandemic: Legacy has local value, because of the creativity in adapting a meme format to our particular context and the execution of the edit, but nobody besides us would find it as funny.
(Interesting aside — I personally think that the photo in [0] is more impressive than someone going all that way to _paint_ the same scene en plein air, because of the split-second precision of the execution. Even though photography may have devalued a lot of the technical execution of capturing a scene, it has opened up new ways in which said execution can be valuable.)
So AI decouples creativity and execution in a way that is, like every innovation before, unlike every innovation before. The Ghibli aesthetic is the soft pastels of the color palette [1] and the comfortable, nostalgic character design [2] but also the restful rhythm of "ma" [3] and the detail lovingly lavished to background characters [4]. GPT-4o devalues some of those things, but it another sense it just re-weights our cultural proof-of-work valuations back towards human effort.
[0] https://lrtimelapse.com/news/total-lunar-eclipse-over-teide-...
[1] https://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/graphic-design/the-ri...
[2] https://stylecircle.org/2020/09/the-studio-ghibli-closet/
[3] https://screencraft.org/blog/hayao-miyazaki-says-ma-is-an-es...
[4] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away...
What if a distinct style is not owned by one artist, even if they are most associated with it, but in reality, in art historical reality, is most commonly explored by a group of more and less famous creators, all as part of a movement, at a time? What influences did Ghibli draw on?
Buddhism says all things are essentially empty of their own existence but are merely conditions resulting from other causes, and so on, in a chain unending. Like this.
The pointillism[0] of Impressionism that ended up spread to the masses by countless including Bob Ross is one example of the memetic evolution and transcendent influence of "high art". Greatness can filter down but it doesn't mean it's not great.
An iPhone is still a masterpiece even if you hold it in the ghetto. Does the ghetto pollute it or does it lift the ghetto? Maybe there's cross pollination, but I think it's infected with its greatness.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism
If it was me I would feel horrible that what I gave to the public and dedicated my life to was contorted in this manner.
[1] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hayao-miyazaki-ar...
Reacting to an animation where a gross critter "learned to walk using AI" instead of being animated by a person 8+ years ago, and ended up using its head as a leg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc
It has nothing to do with the current image generation topic beyond the "AI" label being stuck on both of them
Which is not to say I expect he's thrilled about ChatGPT cloning the art style on a mass scale, but that quote that everyone keeps reposting doesn't have anything to do with it
"After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque creature, Miyazaki pauses and says that it reminds him of a friend of his with a disability so severe he can’t even high five. “Thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
He's disgusted by the creature, not the computer based technique. While he's on record as disapproving of CGI, Earwig and the Witch, directed by his son, used CGI so his disapproval isn't absolute.
Presenters: "This is a presentation of an artificial intelligence model which learned certain movements [...] It's moving by using its head. It doesn't feel any pain, and has no concept of protecting its head. It uses its head like a leg. This movement is so creepy, and could be applied to zombie video games. An artificial intelligence could present us grotesque movements which we humans can't imagine."
The screen shows some Silent Hill looking vaguely humanoid, crawling blob. As the presenters say, it's pretty creepy looking.
Miyazaki: "I am utterly disgusted [...] I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all"
IMHO saying Miyazaki outright hates AI is putting words into his mouth. All the clip shows is that a dude that doesn't make zombie horror films doesn't need a zombie horror generator thank you very much.
So yeah, he clearly rejects the product pitch. But judging from Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro I don't see why you'd pitch him that product.
How much of it is _his_ style and _his_ art?
How many people work on the frames and animation?
But you don't want any of that. You want to have a familiar pop cultural label (“Miyazaki”) that produces a familiar reaction (“Oooh!”). Purely decorative, symbolic objects. Stories, ideas, hard work? Eh, don't bother me with that nonsense.
There is nothing new or “cutting edge” in ignorance. And AI companies know perfectly well that they work for exactly that audience. Despite all the talk, they don't create the next genius artist, they want to be a next “enhancement filter” in TVs, something that no one uses, but everyone has to add to impress the public. That's just parasitism on lack of ability to discern.
I mean, I have no doubts. But proving it seems tough!
What is OpenAI in all this, if not a greedy, sloppy, soulless outsider stealing their Art and effort for financial gain without ever asking for permission?
It's in the article
the quote in context - https://youtu.be/ngZ0K3lWKRc?si=gw-_z17n_XWfqzcQ
On twitter maybe but on places like localllama google Gemini got way more airtime than this drama
Which probably is just a small integer multiple of two weeks, but hey!
I fail to see how taking a distinctive artistic style that was incredibly difficult to produce and shitting out massive amounts of it everywhere as a super low quality commodity would pass the test of fair use.
- When does generative AI qualify for fair use?:
https://suchir.net/fair_use.html
- AI is currently just glorified compression:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399753
AI can take a whole style wholesale with no effort and no contribution. It is greivous theft in the moral sense if not the legal sense.
Marvin Gaye estate tried to argue that style is copyrightable, and sued some artists as their songs use similar chord progressions as Marvin Gaye songs; they won one case (which I won't google) but they lost with Sheeran.
This is the tricky part; is it immoral? I think so, but that's a personal opinion. Is it illegal? Not by Japanese copyright laws.
>usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge
We have had that for decades and everything is going to shit. People now just reject facts.
https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-exp...
The biggest difference to what was previously available is the accuracy - especially the text. This opens up a plethora of possibilities.