Everything is Ghibli

This makes no sense whatsoever to me.

huh.

this is your brain on boomer nostalgia

OpenAI definitely is, as apparently image generation is, for the time being, not available in the free tier, so the only way to keep up with the fad is to upgrade.

OpenAI had a publicity cycle around how tuned their image generator is for this particular style in the same week that google released a major rev for Gemini. That kind of social media dominance against a major competitor is incredibly valuable.

Utter bullshit. Or more politely - wrong take. OpenAI embeds itself further in public consciousness, arguably attracting more users therefore profiting.

Enabling mass-production of Ghibli style without permission or monetary compensation is theft.

The question is how much that first-mover advantage still means. I guess with video games and movies (Doom and Ghibli), there's a massive difference between telling ChatGPT to make your selfie look like Ghibli.

But for illustrators and graphic artists? What's now keeping me from downloading an illustrator's portfolio and telling ChatGPT to make me something in that style, but for my company?

Is there still value in that illustrator pioneering her unique style? It used to be a client magnet, now a good portfolio might take your potential clients away.

I guess the other side of this is that the more a style/idea/media spreads, the more comesw back to the original creator, but I'm doubtful this is true in AI.

Tale as old as time... today's "bakers" are nothing like the bakers of 100 years ago. With their digital temperature gauges, global recipe and ingredient sourcing, cold storage, and more advanced food science.

Today's musicians have far greater access to lessons, recording equipment, inspirational material than 100 years ago.

Mountain biking (80s single speed with no gears, suspension, etc.) versus modern e-bikes with radial tires and hydraulic brakes.

Who cares? Value your own experience as you do. The less we all think about prestige, the more it will go away.

I think people who are using these models and trying to claim they are artists for clout are not a very large group. Have you really seen a significant number of people doing this? Otherwise it just feels like you're nutpicking

Such is technological progress.

AI generated images are only an extension of what e.g. photography has experienced in the last decades. We’ve had film cameras, then digital cameras, then smartphones, each of these commoditized image creation by a then-unthinkable factor.

It’s an ongoing process, even if this leap seems especially big.

Not everyone who engages in AI-assisted creative work is patting themselves on the back and being tone deaf and denigrating people that actually have creative skill... but some certainly are. While I don't support a moral absolutism when it comes to the use of GenAI, I do support putting these idiots in their place.

> People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.

This is such an old man “I used to walk uphill both ways” take.

Not everybody has the TIME COST to pursue being an expert in art or code or whatever. But if they have an amazing idea and can now use AI to produce the idea then that is a beautiful thing!

For example: Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end. It would die in your head because most people cannot stop their life and dedicate a substantial amount of time, effort, and sacrifice to produce the single cartoon idea.

What's better, seeing a beautiful view from the mountain after being driven up, or never seeing the view at all?

I cannot draw for the life of me. I would however like a ghibli version of my D&D character. Am I a bad person?

That thinking is time honoured and never found much traction. For example, pretty much nobody knows how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, carve their own furniture or even drive a manual car. Hordes of tourists circle the globe bringing disrepute to all sorts of time honoured monuments of history's greatest. Skills and challenges which aren't needed get forgotten and are generally not missed.

"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves." - Edmund Hillary.

It's not about climbing.

I wonder if explorers from a few hundred years ago would say the same thing.

Does it though? We are all constrained by the time cost of everything we do. Not everybody with a quick creative spark cares enough to sacrifice opportunities, dedicate time, skip sleep or whatever it may take to gain the skills needed to act on the creative spark. AI empowering the output is a beautiful thing.

Let them do it.

We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.

I can't draw but I want to create my Art using AI. What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party. I want to resolve the issues around copyright for training, but once this is out of the way I want to draw exclusively through AI because it's the only way I can do it. And I LIKE IT.

I'm a skilled pianist. The funny thing is that I heard similar criticisms about computer music a couple decades ago. "No playing skill needed". Despite knowing how to play, I'd rather do computer music nowadays anyway. Please stop telling me what I can and can't do!

In someone's mind, you are part of the shallow mass.

You're just not shallow in the parts of reality that you care about.

Don't feel superior for you are not.

> enshittification

Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?

> If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art.

However, complex art is needed to fit with genre tropes to attract the expected audience. It's like Apple shoving AI into their products needlessly—not a core part of the experience, but needed so Wall Street doesn't throw a hissy.

> looking for meaning when none is there

Or you generate your own meaning. Art is analysis for the audience.

If it has value to them, what do you care? Does the value in your mind of <artpiece> drop when somebody creates <artpiece 2 in the style of artpiece>? If so, you might benefit from focussing more on your own life. I mean this lovingly, as I myself am going through the same thing right now; I realize I'll never be happy if I stay grumpy like this. You can't protect the world from itself.

Universe is a prison.

That's a good thing.

Is something only valuable when it's difficult? I think there is both value in the destination and the journey, not only one or the other.

I think capitalism has really done a number on people.

It is now possible for people to value "doing the dishes" over "producing art of a high enough quality" and still get results. If people care more about doing the dishes than spending the hours required to make an equivalent piece by hand, then people will choose doing the dishes and leave the rest to AI. Now that the tech is out there, reducing the effort required to a button press, it has become a matter of people's priorities.

In my view, the people who want to be dropped off at the apex of the mountain the most always dreamed of this outcome for a long time, even if only a little bit. They dreamed of the day they would be freed from the toil of having to study for years and years to produce art that satisfied their tastes, because they would not lower their tastes to make the process less stressful, or had other priorities so could not devote time to practice.

Now the market has innovated and their dream has come true. To people not serious about coming manual artists, there is nothing wrong with this picture. The market need is being fulfilled.

We have to ask where this market need to produce art at such a low level of effort comes from.

In your view, these people have always been cheapskates up in their minds, we just didn't realize it until their preferences were revealed by AI becoming available. If it hadn't, they just wouldn't be artists of any kind and we'd never understand they had any artistic ambitions at all.

At the end of the day, for whatever reason, these people want art they can call their own - it's just a matter of how much effort is required to realize their ambitions.

If these people are to reject AI, yet still care enough about creating art of some kind for a sustained period of time, you basically have to convince them that learning a hard artistic skill is more important than "doing the dishes"/whatever else occupies the rest of their time instead. Maybe a grueling 9-5 work schedule, for example. That is simply how the nature of practice/10000 hours-type advice works out.

If people for some reason just don't want to put in the time, but still want to produce quality art, then they'll choose AI. These two desires are no longer contradicting. They would have been 10 years ago, when you could just retort with "you're going to have to put in the effort, there's no other way." It's clear that that virtue of work-ethic being one's only path to results has been obliterated by AI, and to the new converts it sounds like gatekeeping in hindsight.

Cultivating new interest in learning a skill when it doesn't already exist is way harder than it seems. That gets into mental well-being and existentialist issues that many people in today's society find difficult to reflect about deeply.

Yes in the sense of ownership, no in the sense of authorship.

People kind of did. Before the radio it was much, much more common for middle class and even fairly poor homes to have musical instruments, pubs to have pianos and so on. There were whole traditions of self-entertainment of which only fragments survive now.

I don't think that rises to the level of "mass media has made the world worse", but it certainly has made it different and lost a few things.

So if I have a great idea for a cartoon, but my life is filled to the brim and I can’t spend months or years to learn the craft, the idea should die in my head? All because of some idealist opinion?

This is ableism. A big part of this 'democratization' is that people unable to develop the skill and techniques can now express that imagination. There are physical, mental and financial impediments. They may never be a traditional craftsman, but they can certainly be artists (and not just conceptual artists).

The definition of creativity seems to change everytime someone tries to define it.

Guilty as charged. I don't think the leap was far but there was certainly a logical leap. Thanks for pointing that out.

If you continue the quote, he says: "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 was pretty clearly talking about AI, at least to me.

His last comment in the video "we humans are losing faith in ourselves" clearly about the overall concept and not just the particular creature though

It is really depressing to see how people universally don't even understand what he's talking about, and stick to non-explanations.

Art is humane. It tells humans how to be humans. A thought about an ill person in pain is worthy of being told as a story. Not only that animation automation thing is of no use to someone trying to express those thoughts, its authors — just like many, many others — have no idea what humans do with their lives, and which tools artists may need to show it. They've made a toy, and were told that it's just useless wanking, together with the whole genres of pointless amusement that introduced such images into pop culture.

“An insult to life itself” is not just a phrase. There is life, and there are people who deliberately ignore it, and enjoy the sights painted on cardboards.

"Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever."

I think it's clear that he is specifically responding to the the overall soullessness of the technique - to animate without a human understanding of what is being animated. But as others have pointed out this is well before modern AI image gen and I have been corrected in that aspect.

"Well, we would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do"

"Would you?"

"Yes"

Awkward silence

From this I don't think it's difficult to extrapolate his feelings about modern AI image gen. But you are correct in that this is not a direct assessment. Appreciate the correction, thanks.

The relevant title would be Grave of the Fireflies, his opus about the nature of human suffering.

That crying deportee was a fentanyl trafficker btw.

That could be the worst thing that happened, but it's exceedingly far from the only thing that happened.

I feel like you underestimate the degree to which AI developers are influenced in just the same ways as everybody else.

Capturing mindshare matters no matter how you do it. I would bet my life savings that more people will join OpenAI to work on their models as a result of the Ghibli moment than will join Google as a result of this particular (incredibly impressive!) Gemini iteration.

Because we’re humans! And we’re all pretty easily impressed, even those of us who actually build these dang things.

Chatgpt has 500mil users. Google with all it's distribution via Chrome, Android still probably doesn't have that many Gemini users

the fact that vast majority of people are consumers matter

Etsy as a private platform banning it doesn't necessarily mean it was actually legally infringing. Like all the content hosting platforms, they would err super cautiously to avoid any possibility of anything even remotely resembling any legal case, even if they would virtually certainly be in the clear.

Did your friend describe it as "Disney style"? In that case there would be a trademark infringement.

Also, Disney have deep pockets and Etsy would not want to argue it out with them if they got a complaint.

>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.

"artistic style" is outright not copyrightable. Fair use doesn't play into it, any more than fair use doesn't play into whether a photo taken by a monkey can be redistributed[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

> Tom Waits won a case where a commercial imitated his style.

Not under US copyright law, AFAICT. He's won cases where he sued over things like false endorsement - i.e. claiming that listeners would believe it was actually him, not just that the style was similar.

(Apparently he did win a similar case in Spain under their copyright law, but from skimming articles it sounds like the issue there also was impersonation, not just stylistic similarity.)

the laws for music are different & much stricter than images.

Speed of replication isn't a part of copyright law, is it?

Should I be concerned about my drawing speed lest it qualifies as copyright informant?

> 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.

right, because before copyright laws nobody ever created anything...

Where is the problem here? There already exist multiple lifetimes of whatever creativity you enjoy.

ジブリ isn't the JP translation of an Italian word, it's a Japanese proper noun with an unambiguous pronunciation in the language it was coined in. The fact that it's derived from a word pronounced differently is neither here nor there - arguing that would be like arguing that English "origin" is ambiguous because the Latin derivation had a hard G.