Edited by: Bhavika Rawat
Trends, to me, are such a unique phenomenon – they seem fleeting, careless and unimportant – something fun with which to distract ourselves from our real lives, they hold no meaning and have no impact. However, as much as we might want it to be, that is simply not true. Trends affect culture, they affect actions, and they most definitely affect the concepts and moral etiquettes of the community we live in. While it can most certainly be fun to recreate stupid trends you see online (I should know, having spent way too long myself recreating the most pointless reels), this desire crosses a line when it cannot differentiate between harmless TikTok dances and the tearing down of artistic integrity and originality. The Studio Ghibli AI art conversion that has been circulating around my instagram is an integral example of this. People are mass-uploading their own pictures onto ChatGPT and asking it to “make it in Ghibli style”. Without any moral qualms or stylistic choices, these images are piling up online, and people don’t seem to realise why it is so inherently wrong to even consider doing this. It seems to me that it is the most obvious concept to grasp that the action of making art should not be outsourced, that it is the thing all of us are striving towards and that that is what makes art so beautiful, so desirable and so unique, that it is made so fully of the artist that no other piece of art can ever be identical to it.
It was so sudden and so enraging partly because I saw hundreds of people, most of whom I know personally, posting all of these Ghibli-version pictures of themselves to their stories. The reality that people I know, am friends with and those who I know understand and have knowledge of the moral and ethical considerations of such topics are partaking in this trend is infuriating. This trend has recently been part of such widespread discourse based on its ethical ambiguity online, and the fact that it is still being featured in so many of these people’s posts is flabbergasting. This is not to deem these people purposefully immoral, but to emphasize that artificial intelligence has become such an inherent part of all our lives that something as insane as a non-human technological model mindlessly replicating beloved art styles has become so normalized that people don’t seem to see any moral qualms in participating in its generation. The Ghibli art style is so unique and so carefully crafted by its creator, Hayao Miyazaki, that to see its precious and beautiful defining characteristics captured so disproportionately and mass-produced is simply disheartening. This is not to mention that the creator himself has publicly expressed his disapproval of and disgust towards AI-generated art and that the generation of his own art in this very manner violates several artist copyrights. The preservation of the originality of an artist’s art style is so important and undervalued and yet its significance is still visible in these ChatGPT generated images – the mixing of different colours, the changing of vibrant backgrounds and the modification of facial expressions are only some of the many errors artificial intelligence is, of course, going to make when it attempts to recreate this art for your pictures. Of course. And it will never stop making these errors. It does not know what it’s like to have laughed so hard that you keel over with your arms around your family as a picture is taken, and how while you’re sketching someone else, you think of your own uncontrollable laughter and know exactly the emotion you are trying to capture. It has never hugged friends so tightly when meeting them after months that the image barely even has any faces in it, only intermeshed bodies. If a human were to recreate it, they would know to express the meaning of that hug through the tightness of the hold of fingers on the fabric of your friend’s T-shirt, or through the barely visible scrunch of your nose as you try not to cry – because they have felt it. They have lived what you have and they know and do the little things all of us do when we’re overwhelmed with missing and loving somebody. It’s so much more frustrating when one realises and remembers the aim and reasons for the introduction of artificial intelligence in the first place. Technology was developed to make lives more convenient, to allow human beings to escape the relentless lifestyle of constantly working and to allow us to focus on our passions instead of slogging seven days a week at a job we never even wanted. We were made to create, to make art. This was supposed to do the menial jobs for us, calculate our balance sheets and do our income taxes and do all of the procedural work we’ve drowned our entire lives in to survive, and we were supposed to create. Instead we’ve lost the meaning of art, we’ve forgotten that the reason it held value in the first place was because it put on paper and canvases emotions that could not be articulated through words. We’ve replaced its very core, humanity. All that said – the discourse and eventual ban against ChatGPT’s generation of Studio Ghibli is a step in the right direction. Although the slow creeping of technology into our most coveted, human spaces remains a concerning issue, it is relieving to know that a part of our community at the least as has taken a stance against this blatant erasure of any authenticity and has made an impact — it gives hope for a future where humanity can perhaps still be the only makers of art, a future where art still holds meaning.