By Ayaan Bhagat.

‘I strongly feel like this is an insult to life itself’

Those are the words of Studio Ghibli’s founder and one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Hayao Miyasaki, when he witnessed AI generated animation for the first time in 2016. Now, less than ten years later, AI image generation has exploded in popularity, and a recent trend targets the man himself.

Over the past few weeks, social media has been flooded with AI-generated images in the Ghibli art style, facilitated by an improvement in the image generators of ChatGPT. These images have been fairly divisive, with many hopping on the trend and generating their own images in the signature Ghibli style. However, when I look at these images, I see nothing but grotesque abominations that besmirch not only the artists at Ghibli, but the sanctity of art as a whole, and by proxy, all of our humanity.

Now, such a statement may seem a bit of a stretch from a seemingly harmless cute trend of people seeking to have images that look like the iconic Ghibli films. The issue that I and many other creatives have runs much deeper, down to the question of why we make art? Or to put it more bluntly, what is the purpose of art?

Art is fundamentally useless. It doesn’t aid survival nor provide any tangible utility. And yet, art has existed since the dawn of our species. There is a growing opinion that art’s purpose lies entirely in the comfort of its aesthetic beauty, to send dopamine through our brains and give us some worldly pleasure. Consequently, AI has the potential to be just as, if not more, capable of making art as humans, since all it needs is to make a pretty picture. And so, an AI-generated image in the style of Ghibli is just as artistic as an original frame, laboriously and lovingly hand-painted by Miyazaki.

To me, this view is frankly disgusting, and I am deeply saddened and disturbed that it is gaining popularity. For me, art is the true expression of what makes us human. Art is the process of us creating something ex nihilo and ending up with something of unexplainable beauty, not qualified by the simple release of dopamine in our brain, but rather something deeper, with its mystery facilitating its meaning. Writing about it after a certain point is useless too, as it is something that ought to be experienced. And this experience is what sets us apart from a stone or a machine; that truly defines what it is to be a human being.

In all art a human creates, a part of them, and their humanity shines through. Whether it’s a song, an oil painting, a doodle on a napkin, or a film, it is imbued with humanity that has beauty regardless of how ‘pleasurable’ it is. And though an artwork’s greatness is not correlated with the difficulty of its creation, making the process easier often dilutes this humanity. And this holds true especially for the films of Studio Ghibli, who still hand-paint each and every frame of their films, even though modern technology would allow them to complete it easier and faster. Spending time on or, god forbid, lauding as ‘art’ these hollow, soulless imitations of a studio, who famously recognize the value in long periods of human effort to create something magical, is not only ironic but immeasurably disrespectful.

It pains me to the core that the culture we live in is becoming increasingly tolerant of not only AI ‘artwork’ but also all forms of corporate slop taking over spaces where real and beautiful artwork once belonged. As a society, we are beginning to replace creations that challenge our views of the world and explore the human condition. Attention spans are at an all-time low, and people are being fed content that is digestible rather than meaningful by social media companies run by oligarchs, who simply see people as commodities. I fear that art akin to those created by Studio Ghibli will soon have a near-impossible task of penetrating the mainstream and will soon become lost relics of a time when the human race made beautiful things.

But if you are reading this, remember, all is not lost and we still have power. Go watch a Studio Ghibli film, appreciate some real art with humanity behind it, and make a beautiful piece of artwork yourself, a celebration of being a human being.