Living in different worlds

If you're online at all you've probably seen the flood of Studio Ghibli-style images from ChatGPT's new image model update. It is technically impressive, ethically pretty gross, and most likely something that will fade in usage after this viral moment but continue to contribute to the critical mass of slop on the internet.

Beyond "this sucks", I don't know how to feel about it. This is a weird moment where a lot of what's being said seems to lack context on one side or the other. A few things are true at the same time:

1) Lots of people are having fun with this tool without putting a whole lot of thought into how it cheapens some of the most beautiful artwork made in the last century.

2) The cutesy Ghibli style is belied by the violence and horror of Miyazaki's work. There is something there that AI cannot capture and that, for the most part, it's not even allowed to.

3) Miyazaki himself fucking hates this shit.

4) Miyazaki is also pretty famously a shitty boss, terrible father, and all-around unpleasant guy who happens to also be a genius.

People mindlessly making Yoda in the style of Totoro or whatever bothers me on an existential level. At the same time, I think getting outraged on Miyazaki's behalf ignores that there's some sort of poetic justice here. I have to point out that the guy for whom his art and work were all-consuming to the point that it ruined his relationships with almost everyone who ever cared about him is maybe not the best example of why human art has some inherent greater meaning. This is a complex and mostly awful guy who made some great stuff.

Mostly, as I often do during viral AI moments, I feel unmoored by how differently people can engage with this. I can check Reddit and find people enjoying themselves with this, or go to bluesky and see an army of people clamoring for Sam Altman's head. Neither group seems to have any concept of the other except as an amorphous concept of what, respectively bad people or fun-hating scolds look like.

I know calling for nuance will get my head dunked in the digital toilet but damn it I'm still gonna do it. There is more to these tools than the objectively evil billionaires driving the AI bubble. There is more to art than becoming grist for the image generation mill. And performing the act of mental reduction, of flattening a complex set of vectors - turning an extremely flawed, complex man into an avatar of art itself - is behaving more like an algorithm than a person.