This Week in Anime

That AIn't Ghibli

Lucas
Steve, I've long since abandoned any sense of serenity I've known in pursuit of destroying one of the latest enemies to all that is good and inspiring in the world, Generative AI! Which is making headlines and kicking up a whole bunch of social media discourse because the chuds behind ChatGPT started posting AI gens evocative of Studio Ghibli over on the hellsite formally known as Twitter.

I saw his 4chan format post too! If there's a silver lining to all of this, it's that the CEO of a tech company leaning into being a channer pilled weirdo is a pretty good indication that said company is about to stop mattering in the public consciousness, if not go bankrupt. Meanwhile, actual Ghibli creation Princess Mononoke is enjoying robust returns from its current big-screen revival. While we're catching our readers up on "the drama," those Ghibli-themed cease and desist letters circulating around this incident are also fake. Because it's not enough for AI grifters to steal from one of the most treasured creative forces in the world today, they also have to pretend to be persecuted in the process!

While anime is hugely popular outside of Japan now, it was extremely niche in the 90s and for much of the 2000s. Around this time, Studio Ghibli began to rise in prominence around this time thanks to Spirited Away winning the Best Animated Feature award at the 2003 Oscars. However, animated media of all stripes were pretty heavily stigmatized as children's media back then, which led to mass audiences not engaging critically with Studio Ghibli's works. (Don't worry, it gets EVEN MORE infuriating from here!)

This trend, coupled with people in socially and monetarily influential positions having poor media literacy skills, has led to a lot of loud and ill-informed people revering Ghibli works with a kind of gross, affectionate orientalism. They label these works as being "pure" or "innocent," while pretty much all of them are deeply political and filled with characters who are mostly little freaks. Is that a fair primer, Steve?

I knew that the people either championing or recreationally using generative AI didn't respect art, but I'm constantly astounded by how little they understand it. From Princess Mononoke to My Neighbor Totoro to The Boy and the Heron, many of Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki's works are explicitly against the kind of resource wasting for the sake of endless content slop that generative AI is all about.

Also, and maybe this is me being petty but I don't think a technology that "Ghibli-fies" pictures or real people is all that impressive and fundamentally misunderstands why these movies are impressive! It's the backgrounds in Ghibli movies that are super affecting, and the characters are so endearing because the simplistic art style allows them to be incredibly expressive when animated. Turning a picture of people into Ghibli versions of themselves doesn't seem like a thing to brag about, or a thing that enough people want to sustain a business like OpenAI, the parent company behind ChatGPT.

This trend also discounts how intentionally unsettling scenes in various Ghibli movies are supposed to be. While the vibes are always on point in these films, they're often far from cozy.

This also makes me suspect that, if a lawsuit ever does come of this development, OpenAI will admit and argue that its stealing machine was trained on a bunch of Ghibli fan art, rather than the films themselves, in an attempt to absolve themselves of legal wrongdoing.

I couldn't agree more! Earwig and the Witch and The Red Turtle are as much Studio Ghibli movies as any of Miyazaki's work, and attributing his artistic proclivities to the entire studio is dangerously reductive. A single auteur is not responsible for all of the studio's success, and Studio Ghibli is only as big as it is now due to the work of a lot of talented and passionate people.

While I have a lot of personal opinions about Miyazaki as a public figure and how he conducts himself, I cannot stress enough to people that generative AI is explicitly counter to his feelings on the creative process. His latest movie, The Boy and the Heron is explicitly about him not wanting his legacy to be inherited or extended, and that it's more than enough for his work to simply inspire other people in their own creative pursuits.

Also, if this clip is translated accurately, he straight up called AI "an insult to life itself." It's hard to be more overt than that!

You're completely right; Miyazaki shouldn't be utilized as a prop for any kind of argument. The focus on humanity that he expresses in that clip, though, can be extrapolated more broadly and is why I think anyone sharing AI art is cringey! Art isn't just a pattern that our brains ascribe meaning to, it's a vehicle for people to express feelings or ideas. By its design, AI-generated work removes intentionality from its end product, and people sharing AI-generated products are essentially saying "look at this thing my computer did," which has nuclear levels of boomer meme energy.

At this point, the only thing of value that generative AI can do is die. Which hopefully isn't too far off, considering the venture capital money that fuels it is starting to dry up and most AI companies' inability to generate sustainable revenue is already starting to kneecap their attempts to go public.

My only possible defense of these statements is that a lot of anime directors have had to gesture at new and trending technologies, like NFTs, to secure funding for their work from investors. Still, considering the end goal of gen AI is to put Shinji Aramaki and everyone in any creative field out of work, I won't lose any sleep over calling him a hack and a sell-out for these remarks.

There are a lot of reasons to be embarrassed as an American right now, and the federal government using AI images to bully people is definitely one of the most brain breaking. Truly, AI art has become a fixation for some of the worst, most online, people alive and I think AI gens are rapidly becoming a shorthand for having terrible opinions.

Though, on the bright side, AI gen pfps pull that assumption away from anime avatars! As someone who uses an anime avatar on occasion, I look forward to anime icons being reclaimed by actual anime fans! Fingers crossed AI gen avatars become the new shorthand for people you 100% do not want to interact with on social media.