The Ghibli-fication of Everything: AI, Art, and the Coming Storm

 

Yesterday, ChatGPT released its new Sora AI model, which can basically allow you to turn anything into the Studio Ghibli style. Here are a bunch of examples. People have been using them for memes, and this is going extremely viral on X [formerly Twitter] at the moment. This is happening both because it's fun, and because artists are angry.

  Especially because it feels pretty disrespectful to Hayao Miyazaki himself, the founder of Studio Ghibli, who has said before that AI literally disgusts him. This situation is completely embroiled in controversy now, particularly because artists are so vehemently against this technology. If you aren't familiar with the art community's reaction, trust me, I am. On X, if you antagonize the art community, they will not stop. They are perhaps the most vocal group imaginable, and they get extremely offended when people use AI art. They see it as an attack on their entire career and are worried about what's going to happen in the future.

I have to admit, some of these look incredibly good. Whether traditional artists like it or not, this is an unfortunate realization that they're going to have to eventually come to grips with. Companies know that if they can make an entire animation in just a few hours, doing it all themselves by buying some credits on AI software, they're not going to hire entire teams to do animation anymore. It is absolutely going to affect and hurt artists a great deal. This is especially true considering that all of this AI art is literally based entirely on the work of real artists – in this case, particularly Miyazaki, who created the Studio Ghibli style.

Right now, we're in this battle: Is it acceptable? Is it okay to use it for memes, or for this and that? There's a lot of discourse happening. The artists on X are fighting tooth and nail, even going as far as giving people death threats. I don't think everyone understands just how offensive this technology feels to the artists on X, even if you're just using it for fun. They see it as more than a disgrace; they see it as a threat to their livelihood, and literally, for good reason.

And it's almost getting too good at this point. It's almost too easy. You have artists who have been training their entire lives to turn this into a career. Art, for most of these people, is all they want to do. They love art so much that they just want to stay home, create art, study art, and post their art. It's their entire worldview. And then, to just have a machine come in and be able to essentially steal the work of real artists, allowing non-artists – people who have not committed their entire lives to creating such pieces – to now potentially outperform them with the click of a button or two... it feels deeply unfair.

Unfortunately for artists, it's likely just going to keep getting worse. As we've seen from this software, it gets better and better. Now we have AI software like Kling, for example, which can animate these still images like the Studio Ghibli-style trailer for Lord of the Rings, done by PJ Ace. He said it took him $250 in Kling credits and 9 hours of re-editing the trailer to bring that vision to life.

I have to admit, this looks pretty good. It doesn't have many of the blotchy artifacts, and the ones it does have, you could easily hand-correct yourself in post-production. This is actually pretty amazing, in my opinion, and it's absolutely going to stir a lot of feathers. Animators are in big trouble.

But, to be honest, you also have to realize what goes into traditional animation. People literally die from animating. People bring up Miyazaki – it's his style, and he doesn't like AI. But you also have to realize the context. In one of his films, according to a documentary, an animator spent 15 months – over an entire year – to create a single four-second animation clip. And he was praised greatly by Miyazaki for it. But imagine that: 15 months of work for four seconds.

The traditional process is just not healthy, guys. At the end of the day, perhaps this AI development is actually a decent thing for artists, animators, and humanity, because... it's better than dying, man. Animation is so unimaginably tedious that animators often just sit in their chairs their entire lives, sleep under their desks, and get paid next to nothing. This AI trend isn't going to improve their pay; unfortunately, it will likely do the opposite for many.

The colors, the vibrancy... yes, the AI animation isn't perfect yet, obviously. But you could always doctor the animation yourself, add frames, touch it up. I think you're going to start seeing a lot of this. Just think: 9 hours to make a nearly two-minute animation? That's crazy. To make a real, traditionally hand-drawn two-minute animation of that quality could take years. Literally, years of work condensed into about 9 hours.

This carries weight. To me, watching this AI-generated animation, this is actually the first time I was really like, "Wow, this is actually scarily impressive." And yes, I fully understand that this would not exist without the talent of incredible animators, artists, and Miyazaki himself.

But it's also, to me, kind of exciting. Because traditional animation is just too time-consuming. Plain and simple. It's literally too demanding to have a sustainable career for many. Now, what if you can use AI to modify your own art? What if I could just click a button and have the artwork I commissioned come to life?

I think that's what we're all going to have to start doing as artists and animators: using AI as a tool to enhance our work. As an artist or animator, you're going to have to come to this realization, and quickly. It's not necessarily the end for you, and it's not the end of the industry – not yet, anyway.

But I think the artists on Twitter who despise AI and make such a big fuss are trying to create a culture of unacceptability around posting anything AI-generated. And it's working to some extent now, but I unfortunately don't think it's going to last forever. Eventually, the AI art is just going to get to the point where people aren't going to pay you $100 for your commissioned artwork when they can just click a button. That's just the sad truth of life.

This is affecting all industries, not just art. We're all potentially going to be out of jobs in the next five to ten years. Think of the 3.5 million truck drivers in America. Trucks deliver our food, our supplies. What happens when we just have AI autonomous trucks? That's 3.5 million people potentially losing their jobs. It's going to be like this in every industry. We're going to have to learn how to adapt.

You guys can kick and flail all you want; I understand your pain. But it's not going to change anything. It's only going to be frowned upon in the short term, because unfortunately, this software is just going to get so good and so easily accessible that everybody's going to be spamming it everywhere.

It's going to get completely oversaturated by AI animation, which is very unfortunate. And the reason is, if you give this power to everyone, including those who never trained in art or animation, they don't need to anymore. They can just click buttons, write a prompt, and boom: a moving piece of animation. It seems completely unfair to people who have devoted their entire lives to this craft.

Some of these memes are really funny and cool, I have to admit. Some are kind of crazy. But it's not 100% there yet, but it's getting so close. It feels like it might be the end for most artists. The people who are going to survive and thrive, and their pay might actually increase, are the people at the absolute top tier of the game, whose art can't be easily replicated, like Miyazaki himself. They're not going to fire Miyazaki and just use AI to make his films, at least not yet. So the super-high, super-talented people will likely stay in business. But the rest of the artists are absolutely going to struggle to make art a career. I don't think you'll really be able to make art a career anymore in the next few years unless you use AI as a tool to enhance your own work.

It's going to get to the point where it gets so oversaturated that it loses its value. The intrinsic value of beautiful animation is partly that it's so rare. Once you saturate the internet with AI anime and animation, you won't know what to watch, and it might start to not be as fun anymore. Scarcity creates value. Using AI to flood the market loses that scarcity.

It's going to get to the point where you can literally just write a prompt and say, "I want to watch a movie tonight about dragons and knights," and AI will be able to generate an entire movie – eventually, probably within 5 to 10 years. You'll be able to watch a different movie every day using AI that you literally create with a prompt. It's going to take over everything. You're literally seeing the potential collapse of the modern world as we know it, job-wise.

It's both terrifying and, in a way, kind of awesome at the same time. The world is changing, and we're going to have to adapt. Instead of just kicking and screaming, we've got to figure out ways to use this to our advantage. Because I really don't think, unless the world puts a ban on AI – which I think might be a good thing, if we just destroyed AI – but it's not going away. That's the sad, unfortunate truth, and this is something we're going to have to live with now.