It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.”
In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing Studio Ghibli versions of Elon Musk, “The Lord of the Rings“, and President Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even seems to have made his new profile picture a Studio Ghibli-style image, presumably made with GPT-4o’s native image generator. Users seem to be uploading existing images and pictures into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot to re-create it in new styles.
It’s even simpler than that: In the first instance a human learned a thing. In the second instance a bunch of humans wrote software to ingest art and spit out some Frankenstein of it. Software which is specifically designed to replace artists, many of whom likely had art used as inputs to said software without their consent.
In both cases humans did things. The first is normal, the second is shitty.
Our current AIs are kinda pathetic, and might realistically only replace mediocre artists. However, people who buy art, can’t tell the difference between good art and mediocre art, so the financial impact could be felt by a larger number of people.
It’s a bit like comparing factory made clothes to properly tailored ones. We still have both, but machines have clearly won this race. Besides, only very few people appreciate tailored clothes so much that they are also willing to pay for them. Most don’t, so they wear cheap lower quality clothes instead. I think the same will happen to music and paintings too.