[HN Gopher] Everything is Ghibli
___________________________________________________________________
Everything is Ghibli
Author : ghuntley
Score : 173 points
Date : 2025-03-31 21:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (carly.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (carly.substack.com)
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Massive, industrial scale copyright infringement
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Japanese firms take copyright pretty seriously, and Miyazaki is
| famously not a fan of CG or automation or indeed the US. I
| suspect lawsuits will not be long in coming.
| pnw wrote:
| Apparently current Japanese law allows models to be trained
| on copyrighted content.
|
| https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-
| exp...
| lxgr wrote:
| Such a law doesn't automatically imply that everything a
| model outputs is automatically copyright free though, does
| it?
|
| Otherwise: Meet my new and surprisingly performant new
| model, IdentityFunctionGPT! Oh, the weights? Sorry, trade
| secret.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I don't know, I'm no lawyer.
|
| However, if I make a drawing in the style of Ghibli, I
| own the copyright because I made it. I don't know if in
| Japan, art style is copyrightable.
|
| I don't know if copyright applies to generated content
| (of any sort) though. It probably does.
| lxgr wrote:
| The important question here isn't who owns the copyright
| in the output, but rather whether the output also
| infringes on somebody else's, and if so, who's liable for
| that: The company that trained the AI, the one that hosts
| it as a service, or the user that prompted it.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| On the other hand, Japan pretty much ignores the amateur
| comics community using copyrighted works for their fan
| fiction. Even when they have big, well known, events where
| they sell the comics.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| There's an industry consensus to leave it alone in most*
| cases, since it is considered to expand the total manga
| market and generate new talent. Micro-publishers are very
| different from megacorporations, though.
|
| * Unsurprisingly a famous exception involves Nintendo
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_incide
| n...
| numpad0 wrote:
| There's a unwritten framework regulating it, unwritten but
| enforced by selective C&D. I think that's how a lot of
| industries work anyway, see Oracle v. Google drama on use
| of Java in Android.
| falcor84 wrote:
| IANAL but artistic style is not copyrightable. Many many human
| artists have created images and animated films in the style of
| Ghibli or Disney or Pixar and there's no direct copyright issue
| there.
| iszomer wrote:
| Yeah but humans aren't exactly fast at replicating any
| particular art style.
| catach wrote:
| Speed of replication isn't a part of copyright law, is it?
| iszomer wrote:
| Nope.
|
| But I do feel bad for partaking in part for Louis CK's
| Twitter-Jesus rant.
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSSDeesUUsU
| SirMaster wrote:
| No, but I have to wonder if the reason it isn't is
| because up until now it was so slow and time consuming
| etc to create a replication.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Should I be concerned about my drawing speed lest it
| qualifies as copyright informant?
| conartist6 wrote:
| 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.
|
| I fail to see how taking a distinctive artistic style that
| was incredibly difficult to produce and shitting out massive
| amounts of it everywhere as a super low quality commodity
| would pass the test of fair use.
| gruez wrote:
| >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_d
| isput...
| user432678 wrote:
| A friend of mine tried to create stock illustrations in
| Disney style on Etsy, got banned almost immediately for
| copyright infringement. I guess it depends.
| vikingerik wrote:
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| jmount wrote:
| It is complicated. Tom Waits won a case where a commercial
| imitated his style.
| fenomas wrote:
| > 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.)
| spot wrote:
| the laws for music are different & much stricter than
| images.
| pera wrote:
| It's not about the style and it's a mistake to perceive
| generative AI models as analogues of human artists:
|
| - _When does generative AI qualify for fair use?_ :
|
| https://suchir.net/fair_use.html
|
| - _AI is currently just glorified compression_ :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399753
| trealira wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but I don't think art styles are copyrightable,
| though maybe they could be in Japan.
| epolanski wrote:
| Unlikely since there's a studio led by a former ghibli lead
| that does visuals in the very same style.
| conartist6 wrote:
| That feels like an omission in the law. Previously it was
| simply impossible to "take" a style wholesale. You would at
| least have to become an artist versed in that style, and it
| in investing your life into that style you would also make it
| yours.
|
| AI can take a whole style wholesale with no effort and no
| contribution. It is greivous theft in the moral sense if not
| the legal sense.
| doright wrote:
| There were some AI training exceptions passed in Japan if I
| recall correctly, but with the copyright culture in Japan
| lacking anything resembling fair use, there was pretty much
| zero chance something like Stable Diffusion could have been
| built and proliferated in such a culture. Those AI laws seem
| pretty reactionary to the West's innovations to stay relevant
| in my view.
| TheRealQueequeg wrote:
| IMO, massive industrial scale indignation of humanity.
| jMyles wrote:
| ...perhaps this is what it takes to finally end the farcical
| narrative of "intellectual property" and usher in an internet
| age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved
| knowledge.
| krapp wrote:
| The copyright infringement is on the part of the models being
| trained on Studio Ghibli's work without permission. There's
| no law against you "accessing the entire corpus of evolved
| knowledge" and doing the work yourself.
| aredox wrote:
| Yeah, and 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.
|
| >usher in an internet age where everybody can access the
| entire corpus of evolved knowledge
|
| We have had that for decades and everything is going to shit.
| People now just reject _facts_.
| anhner wrote:
| > 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...
| aredox wrote:
| Then why were copyright laws created immediately after
| the advent of the printing press? One wonders...
| danielbln wrote:
| Yes, immediately, just a short three hundred years later
| (printing press 1440, first copyright law 1710). And if
| you look into that law (Statute of Anne) then you will
| find that poor hardworking authors where not exactly on
| the receiving end of that protection.
| karel-3d wrote:
| Style is not copyrightable.
|
| Marvin Gaye estate tried to argue that style is copyrightable,
| and sued some artists as their songs use similar chord
| progressions as Marvin Gaye songs; they won one case (which I
| won't google) but they lost with Sheeran.
| tgv wrote:
| In music, copyright is (relatively) clearly defined: it's the
| melody. You can't touch that. There are also reproduction
| rights, which protect the (recorded) performance, even if the
| music's copyright belongs to someone else.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's not copyright infringement / not illegal if it's legal and
| / or there's an exception for "information analysis":
| https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-guide...
|
| This is the tricky part; is it immoral? I think so, but that's
| a personal opinion. Is it illegal? Not by Japanese copyright
| laws.
| frankzander wrote:
| Infact it isn't the style which has been copyright infringed
| but the original works which had been fed into the Neuronal
| networks in order to learn how to produce such works. There is
| no consent from the authors. I'm not a fighter copyright but if
| someone makes money from someone others work than the author
| should be compensated. The AI industry is standing on the
| shoulders of giants and make a lot of money. If the authors had
| been asked beforehand if their works could be use to train NN
| than I'm sure this whole AI blubble is has burst long time ago.
| shmerl wrote:
| Hayao Miyazaki is frying this kind of idea:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc
|
| _> I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself_
| facile3232 wrote:
| "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself"
|
| I emphatically appreciate Miyazaki. Even if you take him as
| hyperbolic, or perhaps biased due to differences in intention
| between the engineer team and artistry he represents, it's very
| positive to have strongly opinionated voices in the room that
| can clearly articulate why. The anecdote about pain and
| stiffness is succinct but exactly what is necessary to
| communicate specifically what is missing from the animations at
| hand.
|
| However, I'm curious what he would have thought about someone
| playing QWOP. I wonder if he would be more fully bought into
| such a concept (well outside his own work of course) if such
| technology might emphasize appreciation for life rather than
| trying to mimic/bastardize/reproduce it.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I can't help but feel that at least a significant part of his
| reaction is due to the subject matter of AI zombies crawling in
| what we imagine would be painful poses without feeling pain,
| rather than just the technology itself.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Likewise, I feel like the article presents a somewhat
| manufactured "quote" and misinterpretation of what was being
| referred to in the linked video.
|
| Unfortunately I'm sure this sensationalised fake-quote will
| spread much more quickly than any context / checking.
| shmerl wrote:
| I don't see how. This kind of AI has no mind and can't feel
| anything, so it has no component that's needed for
| expressing feelings in art. That's his main point. That was
| true then, it's true today.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| What was shown in the video seems to be something like
| Karl Sims' work[0], which is completely different
| (genetic algorithm for optimising black-box locomotion
| within a physics simulation framework) from AI image
| generation / what we're currently calling
| "Ghiblification".
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZtZia4ZkX8
| imtringued wrote:
| I agree. They were clearly going for a bipedal gait and
| failed to produce anything in time. Then they swapped the
| model with a zombie to sweep their failure under the rug.
|
| Hayao Miyazaki is just calling them out in a diplomatic
| way.
| bl4ckneon wrote:
| I thought the same thing, it wasn't a quote about all AI, it
| was in direct response to what he saw which was a "person"
| like limbing on the floor in a creepy way.
| gilbetron wrote:
| "I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my
| work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life
| itself."
|
| The "insult to life" is specifically about the tech, from my
| reading. Granted, if he had been shown something less
| grotesque, maybe he would've responded differently? I doubt
| it, the guy doesn't like CGI either.
| sva_ wrote:
| Crucially, this was before the transformer paper, "Attention is
| all you need", or any of the diffusion models had been
| released.
|
| This just looks like some painful RL or evolutionary
| algorithms, at best.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| In all fairness, Hayao Miyazaki is famously grumpy about
| everything, especially when related to modern society. I
| wouldn't have expected anything less.
|
| A common meme is to put him side to side with Junji Ito. Hayao
| Miyazaki as the grumpy old man whose work is cute and happy,
| and Junji Ito as the nice and cheerful guy whose work is the
| thing of nightmares.
|
| Junji Ito's take on AI, is that he worries for his profession,
| but he thinks he still has something AIs can't replicate, at
| least for now. As expected, while both of them oppose AI, they
| do it in a way that couldn't be more different.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Someone's attitude shouldn't prejudice you against their
| opinion
| GuB-42 wrote:
| When someone who dislikes most things says he dislikes
| something, it carries less weight than when someone who is
| naturally enthusiastic does.
|
| Hayao Miyazaki disliking AI is just Hayao Miyazaki being
| himself. Had he been enthusiastic about it, it would have
| been very noteworthy.
|
| It can probably be modeled using Bayesian statistics or
| something.
| paxys wrote:
| This video is shared a lot to represent Miyazaki's feelings on
| AI, but all I see is him reacting to one specific video on the
| screen - grotesque/bloody figures crawling on the floor in
| totally unnatural motions. He specifically says he doesn't like
| it because it seems to make light of the suffering of disabled
| people. There zero feedback on the AI whatsoever. Who knows
| what he would have said if the engineers had built something
| closer to the company's artistic vision.
| Ekaros wrote:
| What he is criticising here is not AI or AI art. But instead of
| rather old machine learning trying to achieve some type of
| ambulation or human like gait. Which I think is some level
| cool. But also artistically is clearly grotesque and not
| something that should be widely presented.
|
| Just think of using this type of movement or actions in media
| specially a film. That would be entirely unworkable and doomed
| idea. Disgust from most viewers would be similar.
| Havoc wrote:
| > Google dropped their biggest upgrade ever & ghibli core
| completely hijacked the zeitgeist.
|
| On twitter maybe but on places like localllama google Gemini got
| way more airtime than this drama
| ketzo wrote:
| Right -- which is to say, the vast, vast majority of people
| heard about Ghibli and not Gemini.
| paxys wrote:
| The vast majority of people are consumers, not AI developers.
| Of course viral moments will be more consumer-oriented. It's
| easier to digest and reshare a Ghiblified-caricature than a
| research paper. But the content of that research paper will
| lead to the next viral moment years down the line.
| ketzo wrote:
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| the people who are qualified to work on the frontier of
| AI research are people with PhDs from leading
| universities who spend 80% of their day on arxiv reading
| CS papers, they don't learn about AI from Ghibli art on
| twitter. That's bread and circus for the masses. There's
| no correlation between who consumes that stuff and who
| builds the technology, if anything, the opposite. Leading
| edge chip designers at TSMC didn't end up there because
| they ended up playing graphic intensive video games
| ketzo wrote:
| I just think you're totally wrong about that, to be
| honest. It's very strange to me to paint every AI
| researcher as an unfeeling robot who does nothing but
| read PDFs, who's not remotely interested in how their
| work will ever be used by real people.
|
| No, frontier model researchers are not _learning about
| the concept of AI_ from Twitter.
|
| But it's one more piece of visibility, one more sense of
| "hey this company is actually _doing stuff_ with their
| models," that absolutely contributes to where these
| insanely in-demand people choose to do their work.
|
| > Leading edge chip designers at TSMC didn't end up there
| because they ended up playing graphic intensive video
| games
|
| What a baffling and wrong example! I mean, I guess I
| don't know about TSMC _specifically_ , but tons and tons
| of technologists have an origin story that rhymes with "I
| was really into computer games, then got curious how they
| worked"
|
| This is my whole point: engineers are real people, and
| real people are fascinated by the uses of AI!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's the people who can be hired and get paid big bucks
| right now. The comment is referencing people who might be
| inspired to start learning this stuff seriously.
|
| _Leading edge chip designers at TSMC didn 't end up
| there because they ended up playing graphic intensive
| video games_
|
| Kind of a large assumption. I find it quite plausible
| that enjoying video games as a kid might lead to someone
| studying engineering as opposed to medicine or finance.
| saagarjha wrote:
| The people who work at frontier AI labs are sending
| around Ghiblified pictures of themselves like everyone
| else (except on Signal).
| jjani wrote:
| > I feel like you underestimate the degree to which AI
| developers are influenced in just the same ways as
| everybody else.
|
| I feel like you're overestimating that. I work every day
| on developing LLM-based products, use them a lot while
| developing those, and have been doing so since November
| 2022 (beta release of GPT 3.5). So I should be a prime
| representative of the demographic you're talking about.
|
| When a new frontier model is released, I run a series of
| tests, play around with it, and decide whether or not to
| use it based on that. Anything else would be ridiculously
| stupid, leaving either cost savings, product quality
| improvements, or development velocity increases on the
| table. We're not talking about databases or cloud VMs
| where there's a big switching cost. It's changing a model
| string and provider, so frictionless that it's a no-
| brainer.
|
| We actually have some data that's on my side. Take a look
| at OpenRouter's model usage statistics. Note how OpenAI
| mmodels make up a tiny share on there, despite having
| more general mindshare on social media than all other
| model providers combined. Their data also shows people
| are very quick to switch when improvements to
| price/performance are released.
|
| It's a bit like how vacuum cleaner specialists never use
| Dysons despite them having the most mindshare and
| overwhelming marketing budget. Regardless of vacuum
| cleaner specialists also just being normal people. Even
| if this one doesn't hold in your region, there's
| countless of these examples.
| rablackburn wrote:
| > It's a bit like how vacuum cleaner specialists never
| use Dysons despite them having the most mindshare and
| overwhelming marketing budget. Regardless of vacuum
| cleaner specialists also just being normal people.
|
| Yes, but Dyson still crushes the market because it has
| the mindshare with non-specialists. That's OPs point,
| uninformed people (the vast majority) will be impacted
| more by the "ghibli-core" memetic moment, and have a
| greater impact on future events than specialists who
| appreciate the Gemini 2.5 release
| jjani wrote:
| Back up the thread it was about the whole market, but
| then we started talking about AI developers (=the vacuum
| salesmen) and how much they're affected by the mindshare,
| which is also the part I quoted. The average consumer,
| absolutely, they all currently use GPT as the data shows,
| and are indeed led by Ghibli memes - though there's still
| plenty of time to change that by the huge players, a la
| Chrome eating all other browsers despite Microsoft's IE
| monopoly. AI developers though? Much less so.
| jatins wrote:
| 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
| bla3 wrote:
| Exactly. New image models are always exciting for two weeks or
| so. New LLM models are useful until the next,. better model
| comes out.
|
| Which probably is just a small integer multiple of two weeks,
| but hey!
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Silicon Valley doesn't care
|
| They are like the Mafia.
|
| "I don't care, pay me"
| tehjoker wrote:
| tbh i think it's a good thing when people can make art in a style
| they love. most people make kitsch, that's ok. people who study
| will make stuff that reaches the emotional and intellectual
| heights of the best.
|
| it does make me uneasy if OpenAI charges more than at-cost to
| help people do so though. it's the profiteering off others' work
| that is gross.
|
| a quote from "The Communist Manifesto" about the nature of
| capitalism:
|
| "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted
| disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and
| agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
| All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
| venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed
| ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
| melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last
| compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life,
| and his relations with his kind."
| krapp wrote:
| >tbh i think it's a good thing when people can make art in a
| style they love
|
| I agree. But people aren't making art in a style they love,
| people are telling a machine to make an inferior copy of
| something resembling art in a style they claim to love.
|
| I say "claim to" because I find it hard to believe someone
| could be a fan of Ghibli and treat the studio's work in a way
| that Miyazaki would despise. This isn't love so much as
| exploitation.
|
| If people value the Ghibli style so much, they could learn the
| art of drawing and animation, and _actually_ make art instead
| of insulting the studio 's talent and legacy by avoiding the
| craft and seeking an endorphine high from AI slop. It doesn't
| have to be perfect or even good to be satisfying, but it will
| be _yours._
| tehjoker wrote:
| That's true, but you're basically just describing kitch.
| That's what most people make, and often they are happy with
| it. I agree that more effort and thought will produce a piece
| they will be happier with and feel a sense of ownership of.
| SamPatt wrote:
| You can love an art style and want to create images in that
| style without wanting to be an artist.
|
| My family and I absolutely love Ghibli films. I ran some
| family photos through 4o and my wife was thrilled. It made
| her day.
|
| You can call it slop, you can say I'm not truly a fan, but I
| made my wife happy, and I can't see the harm.
|
| How is it "insulting their legacy"? You think people writing
| Harry Potter fan fiction are insulting J.K. Rowling?
| krapp wrote:
| The harm comes from AI "entrepreneurs" making a business
| out of cloning Miyazaki's style - and the styles of
| countless lesser known artists - and flooding the market
| with garbage that cheapens the value of the original work
| and undermines the market for human talent. And from the
| people in the AI community who are already claiming this is
| superior to the original and celebrating the death of human
| art. And from the likelihood that people will become
| dependent on this technology - which will be forced down
| our throats whether we want it or not - and consider
| themselves artists having never bothered to learn how to
| express themselves or develop their own talent, or even be
| allowed the tools to do so beyond the bounds of what an AI
| intermediary allows.
|
| No one cares about your family photos. This isn't about
| you.
| SamPatt wrote:
| >No one cares about your family photos. This isn't about
| you.
|
| My wife cares. That was the point of my comment.
| krapp wrote:
| The point of your comment was to imply that because you
| personally made some AI photos for your wife, and it made
| you happy, any argument that AI art could be harmful was
| null and void.
|
| You're like the person who comes into threads about gun
| violence and says they don't see what the problem is,
| since _they_ only shoot watermelons in their backyard.
|
| Like, OK. You refuse to recognize the bigger issues at
| play, noted.
| tehjoker wrote:
| What if the concept of art was like a gun?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| People writing harry potter fan fiction are not just
| pressing the "make fan fiction" button (or at least they
| weren't in the past, maybe some are with chatgpt these
| days)
| cobertos wrote:
| The dopamine from an image edit like this is such a short
| term gain for all the long term effort that went into
| perfecting and performing a specific art style and it
| becoming a name and cultural _thing_. Groups of people
| staking their careers around something.
|
| If the technology stays, the commercial incentives to
| produce art with such a depth and craftsmanship will cease
| to happen (unless perhaps new styles would be generated to
| feed an LLM as part of an art pipeline? Maybe? Wishful
| thinking most likely). You won't be able to stand up a
| company like Studio Ghibli in the new market. You'll have a
| harder time even standing up a career as an artist in
| general, let along getting enough to come together to form
| a studio. This will be the last time art creation like this
| happens. You may love Ghibli, but this will kill the
| process the allowed Ghibli to form.
|
| ---
|
| Spread across all such art styles, art itself no longer
| signals any quality of the minds or depth of effort behind
| its creation. We will have to look elsewhere for things to
| love and that have meaning.
| owebmaster wrote:
| > people are telling a machine to make an inferior copy of
| something resembling art
|
| So art ended when someone created a photo camera?
| krapp wrote:
| No, obviously it didn't, and obviously LLMs are not "photo
| cameras."
| luqtas wrote:
| > it does make me uneasy if OpenAI charges more than at-cost to
| help people do so though. it's the profiteering off others'
| work that is gross.
|
| i think they shouldn't be able to sell anything at all.
| violation of copyright isn't a excuse to sell stuff at-cost,
| let alone feed Nvidia with trillions of USD by releasing open-
| source (if they ever release) technology
| tehjoker wrote:
| tbh i not a huge fan of copyright, but it is crazy that
| OpenAI is allowed to privatize the results of training on a
| significant fraction of media produced by humans let alone a
| technology that was produced over a long duration in great
| part through public funding
| arealaccount wrote:
| Let them privatize, Id rather not subsidize the losses
| tgv wrote:
| > when people can make art in a style they love
|
| It's not making, creating. It's consuming.
|
| Wrt. the Communist Manifesto: it's precisely the bourgeoisie
| and the church who are responsible for the greatest art, and
| its development. As you say, the workers love kitsch.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Lol, the bourgeoisie and the church _pay_ for art because
| they have surplus cash and it is almost always workers that
| produce it.
| keyle wrote:
| Great read. I particularly noted The takeaway?
| If you're launching a consumer product, technical superiority
| doesn't automatically translate to cultural impact. In the battle
| for attention, a memorable vibe often beats a better benchmark.
| harrall wrote:
| Selling on benchmarks is like selling users a blender by
| telling them the efficiency % of the motor. No regular person
| cares.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't know, eventually while this was cool and got lots of
| attention from internet at scale, it is largely irrelevant in
| $ terms.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Not long ago cheap chinese phone included their benchmark
| score in advertisement
| Miraltar wrote:
| Exactly, I feel like AI was initially meant for "nerds" or at
| least tech enthusiasts so big numbers were great but when the
| market widens it becomes less relevant
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Here is a montage of many of the recent ghibli creations:
| https://0x0.st/82oM.webm
|
| It's chocked full of memes, historical and political photos, and
| general pop culture.
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| The real movie was humanity all along.
| knowknow wrote:
| I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this, the fact that
| machines are able to recreate his style seems to go against the
| whimsy he creates in his art. I wouldn't be surprised if there
| was a possible lawsuit considering how strongly that style is
| tied to him, and that the model surely used his films as data.
|
| If it was me I would feel horrible that what I gave to the public
| and dedicated my life to was contorted in this manner.
| lowq wrote:
| "An insult to life itself" [1]
|
| [1] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hayao-miyazaki-
| ar...
| wlesieutre wrote:
| _> After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque
| creature_
|
| Reacting to an animation where a gross critter "learned to
| walk using AI" instead of being animated by a person 8+ years
| ago, and ended up using its head as a leg
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc
|
| It has nothing to do with the current image generation topic
| beyond the "AI" label being stuck on both of them
|
| Which is not to say I expect he's thrilled about ChatGPT
| cloning the art style on a mass scale, but that quote that
| everyone keeps reposting doesn't have anything to do with it
| lowq wrote:
| Guilty as charged. I don't think the leap was far but there
| was certainly a logical leap. Thanks for pointing that out.
| zerreh50 wrote:
| 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
| gilbetron wrote:
| 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.
| fenomas wrote:
| Not at all - he was talking about a CG demo he'd just
| seen of a wriggling 3D model, which didn't bear any
| technical or visual resemblance to generative AI.
|
| I mean, the quote might very well reflect his actual
| views about generative AI, but that's definitely not what
| he was talking about.
| golly_ned wrote:
| The purpose of that demo was to create a machine that can
| draw like humans can, as the creators explained. His
| objection was that whatever produced this had no concept
| of pain, and that's what makes it grotesque. He called
| out that he had no objection to creating horror if that's
| what the authors wanted to do.
|
| That complaint is just as applicable to current Gen AI
| models. He wasn't simply reacting with his gut to a gross
| looking video but to the concept of a thing with no
| concept of pain creating and animating artwork of living
| things. He understood the technology was about Gen AI, as
| "deep learning" is written on the whiteboard. He deserves
| some credit.
| fenomas wrote:
| > The purpose of that demo was to create a machine that
| can draw like humans can, as the creators explained
|
| Watch the video - the purpose of the demo, as the
| creators explained it, was to train a creature to move
| quickly. Since the AI model didn't simulate pain it used
| its head like a foot, and since the result was creepy
| they thought it could be used for a zombie game. That's
| what they presented to Miyazaki, and that's what he
| commented on. Then Suzuki asked where they eventually
| wanted to end up, and a different presenter said the
| thing about machines that can draw.
|
| > That complaint is just as applicable to current Gen AI
| models
|
| If you like, but that's not what Miyazaki applied it to.
| ogurechny wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The article you link to directly quotes him:
|
| " _After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque
| creature, Miyazaki pauses and says that it reminds him of a
| friend of his with a disability so severe he can't even high
| five. "Thinking of him, I can't watch this stuff and find
| [it] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what
| pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really
| want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. 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's disgusted by the creature, not the computer based
| technique. While he's on record as disapproving of CGI,
| Earwig and the Witch, directed by his son, used CGI so his
| disapproval isn't absolute.
| lowq wrote:
| _" 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| Let's look at the context:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc
|
| Presenters: "This is a presentation of an artificial
| intelligence model which learned certain movements [...] It's
| moving by using its head. It doesn't feel any pain, and has
| no concept of protecting its head. It uses its head like a
| leg. This movement is so creepy, and could be applied to
| zombie video games. An artificial intelligence could present
| us grotesque movements which we humans can't imagine."
|
| The screen shows some Silent Hill looking vaguely humanoid,
| crawling blob. As the presenters say, it's pretty creepy
| looking.
|
| Miyazaki: "I am utterly disgusted [...] I would never wish to
| incorporate this technology into my work at all"
|
| IMHO saying Miyazaki outright hates AI is putting words into
| his mouth. All the clip shows is that a dude that doesn't
| make zombie horror films doesn't need a zombie horror
| generator thank you very much.
|
| So yeah, he clearly rejects the product pitch. But judging
| from Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro I don't
| see why you'd pitch him that product.
| lowq wrote:
| _" 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.
| conartist6 wrote:
| The relevant title would be Grave of the Fireflies, his
| opus about the nature of human suffering.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| same studio, but not Miyazaki's work
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_the_Fireflies
| ted_bunny wrote:
| What's with the narrator's voice in that clip? Unwatchable
| crawsome wrote:
| >I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this
|
| It's in the article
| knowknow wrote:
| It's not, the quote in question was from a completely
| different AI demo which the author mischaracterizes.
|
| the quote in context - https://youtu.be/ngZ0K3lWKRc?si=gw-
| _z17n_XWfqzcQ
| seizethecheese wrote:
| If it was me, I would feel great that my work has been extended
| to give joy at such a large scale. (Not that it's invalid if he
| has a different opinion.)
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Hopefully he's wise enough to realize that it's the ultimate
| compliment.
| michaelt wrote:
| Truly, every artist hopes their distinctive style will be
| taken by a multi-billion-dollar corporation and used by the
| White House to make a jeering depiction of crying deportees.
| It's the ultimate compliment.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| That could be the worst thing that happened, but it's
| exceedingly far from the only thing that happened.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| Art becomes tainted by association.
|
| The USSR had some absolutely incredible art used on their
| propaganda posters. But if you use that for anything
| outside of ironic Russian themes (e.g. a goofy game set
| in that era, some silly snack that claims to be Russian-
| inspired), people will think you're an unironic communist
| and you instantly turn away loads of people.
|
| When a dominant political force uses AI "art" for
| everything they do and the style becomes apparent,
| anything that looks similar to that instantly disgusts
| loads of people. You can argue "well that's their fault
| for being disgusted", but pattern recognition and being
| conditioned to associate certain images with "bad" goes
| far deeper than the conscious and it's a base instinct in
| animals.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| If you think Ghibli is now tainted by association with
| Trump based on this image, I don't know what to tell you.
| That sounds preposterous in the extreme.
| doright wrote:
| More like "AI art in the style of ____" will be tainted
| by association. I can almost hear the complaints to the
| editor to every boutique indie blog post and company
| listicle with AI filler at the top. For me at least it
| cheapens the feeling of the blog post itself - "if the
| author couldn't be arsed to get any real art/pay for a
| stock image, what about the rest of the content?"
| jaredklewis wrote:
| Hideo? You mean Hayao right?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| and that the model surely used his films as data.
|
| While I don't doubt it's true, this could be challenging to
| prove, because Studio Ponoc (ex-Ghibli) has produced work that
| uh, hews rather closely to Miyazaki's style. Were the models
| trained on Ghibli, Ponoc, both, something else, etc?
|
| I mean, I have no doubts. But proving it seems tough!
| leoh wrote:
| Well they then stole from Ponoc, too, right?
| aredox wrote:
| Ponoc is made of former Ghibli employees who founded a new
| home when Ghibli's future was uncertain. I am sure they are
| on friendly terms, if not family, with Ghibli: they worked
| together for years. People like them can have a gentleman's
| agreement.
|
| What is OpenAI in all this, if not a greedy, sloppy, soulless
| outsider stealing their Art and effort for financial gain
| without ever asking for permission?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I gathered the Japanese government legalized using
| copyrighted works to train AI last year:
| https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-
| guide...
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Also hope he goes against all the artists who demanded payment
| for copying his style before
| ogurechny wrote:
| Supposedly, you have a working internet connection. In no time,
| you can check the name of Hayao Miyazaki. You can see how he
| draws his manga, in a style which would be really hard to
| animate. You can see how he designs his characters. Well, maybe
| the colour palette can be attributed to "his style" in some
| works. Still, you can learn that Ghibli had famous background
| artists and art directors like Nizo Yamamoto and Kazuo Oga. You
| can compare characters drawn by Yoshifumi Kondou and Katsuya
| Kondou with Miyazaki's, and guess who was responsible for what
| in different works. You can learn how in the era when everyone
| waited for computers to make economical marvel of "three dee"
| real, Isao Takahata used computers to transfer pen and brush
| strokes to animation in "The Yamadas" and "Princess Mononoke".
|
| But you don't want any of that. You want to have a familiar pop
| cultural label ("Miyazaki") that produces a familiar reaction
| ("Oooh!"). Purely decorative, symbolic objects. Stories, ideas,
| hard work? Eh, don't bother me with that nonsense.
|
| There is nothing new or "cutting edge" in ignorance. And AI
| companies know perfectly well that they work for exactly that
| audience. Despite all the talk, they don't create the next
| genius artist, they want to be a next "enhancement filter" in
| TVs, something that no one uses, but everyone has to add to
| impress the public. That's just parasitism on lack of ability
| to discern.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Seems like a fad where everyone looks basically the same after
| the conversion. You are gonna get a reaction for first 5 photos
| but I've grown past it and I just skip looking most of it on
| social media
| imp0cat wrote:
| That's why it's called AI slop.
| PostOnce wrote:
| Ghibli art is famous because ghibli art means ghibli movies. It
| is more beautiful in motion than still, the beauty is in part due
| to the emotion evoked by the story.
|
| There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as
| Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.
|
| This, however, is not the first time ghibli has had competition
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower in fact
| they have a whole studio dedicated to copying ghibli:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc
|
| Yes they used to work at ghibli, but so too did john romero work
| at id, and yet daikatana was not a quake-killer.
|
| This doesn't devalue ghibli at all, I think
|
| (In fact, I think AI will always have the fundamental problem
| that most people have no taste or sense or introspection, they
| don't know why good things are good, and can't see that crap
| things are crap, so they are predestined to only be able to
| produce garbage. Nod to Ted Sturgeon.)
| rchaud wrote:
| The wrongdoing here isn't in devaluing somebody's work, it is
| about enriching oneself by openly repurposing their IP without
| compensation and dodging any kind of repercussions whatsoever.
| It was bad when Chinese companies did it, OpenAI using legal
| sleight of hand to indemnify their actions isn't any less
| galling.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I doubt anyone is enriching themselves with AI memes, at best
| it slightly devalues their brand by reducing scarcity.
| freetinker wrote:
| 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.
| pearjuice wrote:
| Theft of what? There was no market for "memes in ghibli
| style commissioned by the original studio" which would
| probably cost hundreds if not thousands if hand-drawn.
| Nobody was going to pay for that. When it became freely
| available and instantly reproducible, that's the new
| market.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's not truly free though, it's a loss leader for the
| near-trillion dollar AI industry. If we're asking where
| the stolen value ends up, I think you can answer "in the
| NVIDIA share price".
| Yizahi wrote:
| Theft of copyrighted data (movies/art), which OAI used
| for developing their LLM.
| mavhc wrote:
| Oh, you mean copyright infringement, not theft
| Yizahi wrote:
| Unless you live in some anarcho-capitalist society, it is
| theft, in very simple terms. And I wonder, just where are
| all those highly successful libertarian societies? The
| ones who don't need to enforce copyright and where every
| member of society is creating his own creative art
| content, movies, songs, games etc. Oh, they have all
| failed miserably to scammers? Poor people, how I pity
| them (not).
| rchaud wrote:
| I see the neo-Silicon Valley spirit of "regulatory
| arbitrage as a service" is unwavering.
|
| It's promotion for OpenAI's product, without any of the
| appropriate licensing. 3D printing companies don't
| provide Lego schematics to sell their products. There's
| also the small matter of their ex-employee turned
| copyright whistleblower, who ended up dead:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0el3r2nlko
| melagonster wrote:
| >Nobody was going to pay for that.
|
| Japanese artists exist.
| freetinker wrote:
| Excellent points both. I need to ponder this...
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| It doesn't seem hard to imagine 2-5 years from now when
| "memes in Ghibli style" turns into "pay us 25 cents and
| we'll send you a 30 minute cartoon in Ghibli style".
| TimPC wrote:
| Styles are notoriously hard to copy. It's not like Ghibli
| style being copied is anything new. For example, Studio
| Ponoc where former Ghibli employees did the copying. As
| long as they aren't literally generating copyrighted
| works styles can't be owned.
|
| Would the world be better off if Picasso's heirs owned
| Cubism and any artist wanting to produce works in that
| style had to buy a license?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Studio Ponoc had Miyazaki's blessing. I doubt the same
| can be said for OpenAI. OpenAI doing this without even
| asking might not be illegal, but it comes across like an
| act of incredible disrespect for the very creators that
| these memes are masquerading as an homage to.
|
| _"When we opened the new studio, Studio Ponoc, I went to
| report this to Mr. Miyazaki," he went on, "and he gave
| his blessing and said, 'You really need to have the
| conviction to go create a new film studio and the
| conviction to show children worthwhile films. And every
| film you make, you'll have to realize that has to be a
| film that is worthy to show to children'._ [1]
|
| [1]: https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| It's there on my free account with the new generator.
| Jensson wrote:
| People pay to get more images generated, you can make
| money even if you have a free version.
| awkward wrote:
| 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.
| TimPC wrote:
| I personally think the line should be mostly output based.
| You should be able to train on any copyrighted work by having
| a single reader license (e.x. purchasing a book or e-book)
| for that work and no other special licenses. You shouldn't be
| able to download pirated works for training but you shouldn't
| need special licenses to train instead of read.
|
| But if your model produces outputs that too closely match
| their inputs and a company can show it that is a copyright
| violation and you can be sued for it.
| ljlolel wrote:
| I've never seen these ghibli movies and I think they're
| beautiful.
| aredox wrote:
| >This, however, is not the first time ghibli has had
| competition
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower in
| fact they have a whole studio dedicated to copying ghibli:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc
|
| It is not "competition" and "copying", it is the fact that
| Ghibli almost closed for good several times, so some employees
| created their own studio.
|
| >On August 3, 2014, Toshio Suzuki announced that Studio Ghibli
| would take a "brief pause" to re-evaluate and restructure in
| the wake of Miyazaki's retirement. He stated some concerns
| about where the company would go in the future. This led to
| speculation that Studio Ghibli will never produce another
| feature film again. On November 7, 2014, Miyazaki stated, "That
| was not my intention, though. All I did was announce that I
| would be retiring and not making any more features."[40] Lead
| producer Yoshiaki Nishimura among several other staffers from
| Ghibli, such as director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, left to found
| Studio Ponoc in April 2015, working on the film Mary and the
| Witch's Flower.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| > There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good
| as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.
|
| True, but this was also during a time when it was incredibly
| hard to make a video game. It wasn't like _anyone_ could spin
| up a Doom clone in 2 minutes. Competition vs. commoditization
| at massive scale are different things.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, the concept of a commercial / off the shelf game engine
| wasn't that much of a thing until Doom, but with Doom and
| especially its successors Quake and Unreal from Epic it did.
| Quake's engine spawned Half-Life's, Unreal became one of the
| biggest game engines anywhere.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| 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.
| TimPC wrote:
| I'd argue many of the clones were better but not enough
| better. Doom was the first to do X and once you already
| played a game that did X the next game needed to do 2X not
| 1.2X.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Imagine what classical realists artist though about early
| photography and how it shaped in history. Painters abandon
| achievement for replicate reality (all kind of *ism come
| later) or use new technology (photography) to improve
| creative process (Mucha).
|
| AI is just another tool for artist. AI by itself never
| generate "art". It cannot by definition.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good
| as Doom.
|
| Sorry to take this on a tangent, but the problem with Doom
| clones isn't that they aren't as good as Doom, it is that Doom
| already exists and is known to the audience. If you've had your
| mind blown by Doom, playing a 10% better version of Doom isn't
| going to blow your mind again, it is going to merely be a fun
| experience. Many people won't even bother to try that 10%
| better Doom clone, since all they'll see is a clone of
| something they already tried.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| To add, cloning is one thing, but a lot of games - including
| id's own games - iterated on the formula, leading to the
| genre of first-person shooters like Quake, Unreal, Half-Life,
| Medal of Honor, Halo, Bioshock, etc.
|
| That is, clones rarely work, but evolutions do. Stardew
| Valley on the surface can be considered a Harvest Moon clone,
| but it iterated on the formula, leading to a lot of attempts
| at casual farm games from many different competitors.
| Minecraft was an Infiniminer clone (or inspired by?) and
| iterated on the idea. Fortnite was a PUBG clone which was a
| DayZ clone.
| Kye wrote:
| Minecraft is the most successful Doom clone because you don't
| even realize it's a Doom clone.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| huh.
| googlehater wrote:
| this is your brain on boomer nostalgia
| eric_cc wrote:
| This makes no sense whatsoever to me.
| areyourllySorry wrote:
| probably https://minecraft.wiki/w/Legend_of_the_Chambered
| crabbone wrote:
| This is looking for silver lining: so, someone copied Ghibli
| style, which is plagiarism, which is bad, but it turns out that
| by plagiarizing the offender also made the original work more
| famous and more valuable in some ways... OK. But plagiarizing
| is still bad. Even if it had some positive effects.
| blargey wrote:
| Gee, whatever would Ghibli have done without this publicity
| boost.
|
| It's always the already-popular artist's identity giving
| clout to the model, not the other way around.
|
| And if the artist's style is not well known, their identity
| is obfuscated because the model/LORA/"finetune"-peddler can
| get away with it. And they're all peddlers, if it's not
| OpenAI it's grifters with Patreons to fund their "hard work"
| of tagging people's work and throwing it at rental GPU
| compute.
| z3phyr wrote:
| > There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good
| as Doom
|
| Sure, but there were some "Doomlikes" I would still rate as
| better than doom; like Build Engine games Duke Nukem and
| Blood/Blood 2 and other IdTech based games like Hexen.
| Tycho wrote:
| Also _Marathon_ and its sequels by Bungie.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Don Bluth worked at Disney, and poached some of the animators
| to make his own independent studio, and produced quite a few
| Disney-like feature films that stood pretty well on their own.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Your argument is an example of survivor bias. Just because one
| very wealthy corporation wasn't affected (too much) when their
| intellectual property was stolen, doesn't mean that smaller and
| less wealthy or less important companies/people aren't affected
| by IP theft by LLM porch pirates.
|
| And even in Ghibly studio case it's not quite clear, if they
| won't be affected long term.
| blueflow wrote:
| > ... that most people have no taste or sense or introspection,
| they don't know why good things are good
|
| Is this an exaggeration? Or do some people literally have no
| introspection?
| Gothmog69 wrote:
| Like when Don Bluth left disney. He did have a good run though.
| margorczynski wrote:
| The Ghibli stuff is really amusing but for me the best are the
| infographics - you can make amazing stuff with basically 0 2D CG
| know-how for e.g. a presentation, web page, documentation, blog,
| etc.
|
| The biggest difference to what was previously available is the
| accuracy - especially the text. This opens up a plethora of
| possibilities.
| smjburton wrote:
| This is what I'm most excited about as well. Prior to 4o image
| generation, most GPTs I came across really struggled with this
| type of image generation. The only one that seemed to come
| close was Ideogram.
| thefz wrote:
| Read on Reddit that people love AI because it's "democratizing
| creativity". Let that sink in. People want to be dropped on the
| top of the mountain and be called an alpinist.
| emblaegh wrote:
| I think it's more like people want to enjoy the view without
| having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable
| thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.
| dxuh wrote:
| I'm afraid that in time people will forget that it's all
| about learning to climb.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| None of those things you mention have been forgotten.
| Many people do all of those things not because they have
| to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and
| grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness.
| People will actively seek out challenges even when they
| seemingly have none.
|
| The trouble with things like climbing is there are only
| so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in
| many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the
| day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The
| existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your
| ability to do your own knitting, though.
| roenxi wrote:
| I'm replying almost solely to observe that inconvenience
| also doesn't bring happiness. Happiness is achieved
| precisely by feeling happy in the setting that you find
| yourself in. People can train themselves to only feel
| happy when inconvenienced but that is doing a major
| disservice to themselves and those immediately around
| them. But that is something of a tangent and so I have a
| cover story for why I'm typing!
|
| > The trouble with things like climbing is there are only
| so many mountains to go around.
|
| This is taking the metaphor far too far. Nobody is
| literally taking mountains away from people.
| kragen wrote:
| I think the _majority_ of people still know how to grow
| their own food. We only passed 50% of the population
| living in cities a few years ago.
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS says
| 43% of the population is still rural, and I'm guessing
| about 80% of that 43% (32%) knows how to grow their own
| food. So do all the people who have moved from the
| country to the city over the last 40 years.
|
| There's a big gap between "pretty much nobody" and the
| reality, which is somewhere between one third and two
| thirds of everybody. You might want to reflect on exactly
| how your perception diverged so radically from reality.
|
| Do people in cities suffer from not being able to grow
| their own food and make their own clothes? I don't know
| for sure, but official statistics claim that, even today,
| they commit suicide at much higher rates despite having
| much less material scarcity. Robinsonades have been a
| popular genre of fiction for centuries, suggesting that
| people long for that kind of autonomy. Today, we also
| have zombie apocalypse fiction, RPGs, and preppers.
|
| From another angle, sports consist entirely of skills and
| challenges which aren't needed and never have been,
| suggesting that they don't get forgotten. Hobbies also
| consist of skills and challenges which aren't needed.
| s_dev wrote:
| "It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves." - Edmund
| Hillary.
|
| It's not about climbing.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Um, no, that quotation means literally the opposite: it
| _is_ about the climbing, it 's not about getting to the
| top of any particular mountain. What Hillary was getting
| at is we get satisfaction from learning, training,
| overcoming difficulties and limitations, and ultimately
| pushing ourselves to our limits. His limit was Everest,
| your limit might be Snowdon, but it's climbing it that
| matters, not just taking the train to the top and taking
| a selfie.
| mavhc wrote:
| Should we ban people from taking the train? They get a
| different experience, but they still get an experience
| overfeed wrote:
| No, but we should mercilessly laugh at them for calling
| themselves mountaineers when they are train-riders.
| bspammer wrote:
| The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though.
| People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come
| from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.
|
| It's not a moral judgement, that's just how humans are wired.
| The lows make the highs higher.
| mgfist wrote:
| What's better, seeing a beautiful view from the mountain
| after being driven up, or never seeing the view at all?
| going_north wrote:
| Maybe torturing the metaphor, but building a road up the
| mountain often ruins the view.
| mrWiz wrote:
| To continue this metaphor, a while back my girlfriend and
| I went to Machu Picchu. We were taking a bus to the
| summit, but there was a landslide near the bottom of the
| mountain so everybody had to climb most of the way up.
| This led to it being eerily empty until people started
| trickling in, which certainly made it a better experience
| than the normal tourist swarm would have been.
|
| I can imagine AI art having a similar effect (creating a
| glut of images/logos/whatever that devalues ones made
| with care) but am hopeful that we'll get better at
| filtering the cream of the crop. In 5 years tons of
| things will have AI logos that would have been made by a
| graphic designer (or simply not made) in the past. That
| sucks for graphic designers who are out of a job, is good
| for people who get cheaper logos, and TBD for overall
| society who now has lots more "custom" logos etc to wade
| through.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I agree. Toil itself is not valuable or noble. We, as a
| society, should work towards reducing the training, skill
| level, and manual effort needed to achieve things. There
| is no need to artificially gatekeep activities behind
| needless toil.
|
| This kind of mentality would ban Star Trek replicators,
| should they be invented one day. "In my day, you had to
| actually make things, we didn't get to replicate them, so
| we shouldn't, even if it's possible!"
| SirMaster wrote:
| >Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end.
|
| What's the point in having an idea for a cartoon in your
| head if an LLM can just write an infinite amount of
| cartoon ideas in a heartbeat, and probably a better one
| than you came up with.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| Because it's your own? And previously that creativity of
| yours was hamstrung by your lack of ability in another
| domain (drawing), that the AI can help you with.
| Gothmog69 wrote:
| 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?
| aredox wrote:
| People want to take a selfie at the top. No one is "enjoying
| the view" anymore - certainly not the shallow masses.
|
| It is enshittification.
| creata wrote:
| > 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?
| aredox wrote:
| Things turning to shit? The word coined by Doctorow is
| new, but the phenomenon itself isn't (just talk to any
| car enthousiast).
| hangsi wrote:
| You are right. The grandparent post ironically uses word
| this in a cheapened, shallow way when they can use it
| freely in their own writing.
|
| You could argue this is the very sort of activity they
| were criticising when they posted! We are all vulnerable.
| glimshe wrote:
| 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!
| creata wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with "let them do it", but the
| comparison with computer music isn't really fair.
|
| Computer music, as it existed a couple decades ago, still
| played exactly what you asked it to, and it wasn't
| filling areas where you _underspecified_ the music with a
| statistical model of trillions of existing songs. And
| that 's the difference, for me: the ability to
| _underspecify_ , and have the details be filled in and
| added in a way that to the audience will be perceived as
| intentful, but which is not.
| gombosg wrote:
| Agreed - computer music compared to live music is what,
| say, Adobe Illustrator is to drawing. Or a Wacom drawing
| table, but definitely not prompting AI to draw for you.
|
| Whether drawing (writing etc.) through AI counts as
| drawing (as making art) is a debate we have to resolve in
| the upcoming future.
| d0100 wrote:
| Tell that to guitar effects, electronic music and
| anything that has any amount of randomness added
|
| As soon as we get more control over AI output, those
| arguments will finally die their well deserved death
|
| To those that AI art offend: don't think of people as
| artists, but simply as art directors dealing with
| stubborn artists that won't ever work to spec
| mola wrote:
| It is possible to very critical of something without "not
| allowing people to do it".
|
| Dismissing the argument that we are losing something in
| this "democratization of creativity" by fighting a
| strawman that says you are not allowed to participate
| instead is a bit lazy
| aredox wrote:
| >We have no right to tell people they have to learn to
| climb to get to top of the Everest.
|
| My, my, you really took the worst example to defend your
| point. The Everest is now an overcrowded dumping ground
| full of cadavers, shit and trash, with idiots putting not
| only themselves but their sherpas and other mountaineers
| in danger due to their arrogance, lack of ability and
| shittiness.
|
| >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.
|
| What I see is a bunch of people creating digital doubles
| of existing artists without their consent and using it to
| make money.
|
| >Please stop telling me what I can and can't do!
|
| Oh the irony...
| julianlam wrote:
| Synth & Son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrHZ6u5_eYw
| jeffhuys wrote:
| 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.
| aredox wrote:
| Like you, I am ready to admit that one man's turd is
| another man's gem, and that cultural "prescriptors" and
| gatekeepers often got it wrong.
|
| Unlike many, I am not going to follow along into
| caricatural post-modernism where nothing is good, nothing
| is bad anymore.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > nothing is good, nothing is bad anymore
|
| Explain to me why nihilism is factually incorrect?
|
| Good and bad is all relative to the perceiver.
| creata wrote:
| It cheapens the experience a _lot_ , but oh well, at least
| the experience is still there for the people who want it.
| eric_cc wrote:
| 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.
| overfeed wrote:
| What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being
| called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the
| peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on
| commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose
| prestige was forged by countless professionals working _very_
| hard.
| thih9 wrote:
| 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.
| j-bos wrote:
| Hasn't that been true since the dawn of mass media? A book does
| not demand you share your own stories, the radio does not
| require you carry a tune
| aredox wrote:
| Didn't know that before books and radios you had to share
| your own stories and carry your own tunes
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| aredox wrote:
| >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
|
| That's exagerrated by movies. There were folk songs, but
| instruments - and players - have always been rare, and
| played by those who had enough time to learn to play -
| the poorest of the poor, the crippled and the blinds...
|
| Note that at that time, either there was already a
| copyright to protect musical partitions, or if learning
| by ear the teachers had total discretion on who they
| taught and for how much. There were still barriers to
| knowledge.
|
| And outside of Europe, any ceremonial/religious music was
| only taught to the initiated and played on rare occasions
| (there are interesting stories of Americans, etno-
| musicologists or even just musicians looking for new
| musical construction in the vein of Steve Reich, in the
| 60s, going to Africa to learn rythms with e.g. Nigerians,
| staying there for years, fully integrated - or so they
| thought - and bam! for a rare ceremony their hosts
| suddenly play something they never showed them before and
| refuse to discuss it afterwards)
| j-bos wrote:
| It's more difficult today, but if you get a chance, try
| visiting an impoverished rural area and hanging out with
| the locals during casual sit-down, dinner, outing, etc.
| People will sing, people will dance. And not just those
| who are good at it.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I've been suspecting the subtext of that was "take back anime
| from Japanese", except what they made was a death trap welded
| stuck in reverse. Now they must climb with what they have, for
| that they are closer to the top from there than to where they
| came from.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| I can't really speak for other people, but I think the
| "democratizing creativity" part comes in in places where the
| specific creative part that the AI replaces is not a core part
| of the creative experience.
|
| Take a look at Super Auto Pets, a pretty successful and fun
| auto-battler game. It literally uses a free emoji pack for its
| core art. It doesn't really matter that they didn't hire an
| artist for those (though I think they did hire an artist after
| finding success) since a free emoji pack was enough for the
| creative product they wanted to create. If they had AI
| generated emoji instead, it wouldn't have really mattered much
| for the final result (creatively at least, I assume audiences
| would respond poorly due to GenAI's reputation). At the same
| time, the ability to create their product without paying a lot
| of money for artists was critical to make it in the first
| place.
|
| This is what it means to me to "democratize creativity", to
| allow creatives to realize their creative ambitions in an area
| they are proficient at (e.g. video games) without requiring a
| lot of creative skill in adjacent areas that aren't critical to
| the experience they are trying to make.
| creata wrote:
| I think there's a reason people would respond more poorly to
| generated art than to emojis: the contentlessness of emojis
| is broadly understood. We look at an emoji and we know what
| it is intended to signify. With "AI" art, there is an
| ambiguity: which aspects of the artwork are intentional, and
| which aspects are the creator accepting whatever the "AI"
| churned out?
|
| If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art.
| It doesn't matter if the simple art is or isn't AI generated,
| what matters (in my opinion) is that it doesn't lead us into
| looking for meaning that isn't there.
| baq wrote:
| > People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be
| called an alpinist.
|
| No, people want to see their ideas come to life, previously
| this required effort in mastering a skill, now... it takes less
| and/or different amount of work.
| thefz wrote:
| So everything is cheap, nothing has value.
| baq wrote:
| Universe is a prison.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| Because it discourages people from trying. It's hard
| enough to survive as an artist, and now there is even
| less sense in trying to start. This will hurt art, and
| humanity.
|
| It's like pupils using an LLM to do their homework. They
| get the grade, but Idiocracy is awaiting.
| pizzly wrote:
| Disagree. I think many people will actually be encouraged
| to try as the barrier to creating art has dropped and
| some of those people will decide to become more
| proficient at art.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| It's photoshop all over again. It's computers all over
| again. It's camera's all over again. It's the paintbrush
| all over again. It's...
| numpad0 wrote:
| I agree with parent but not to this one. AI "art" has
| significantly lower quality and performance ceiling
| compared to all existing means.
|
| AI image generation is a gateway drug. You quickly grow
| resistance, and you will face withdrawal, too.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Well, it's a Pandora's Box. It's irreversible, so we as
| humanity should learn to cope with it. That's just
| reality. What's the alternative? Banning LLMs? Good luck
| because I have a few on my hard disk. And even if you
| make it illegal, how would you detect it? I could've used
| an LLM to write this comment, would you know?
|
| I agree though that schools are even more in trouble now.
| But my point still stands: we have NO CHOICE. We must
| adapt, or Idiocracy awaits ;)
| eric_cc wrote:
| "Starving artist" trope.
|
| I bet a LOT of people would be an artist if there was
| money in it. Most don't attempt because of the poor
| risk/reward of that profession.
| tgv wrote:
| Well, there's less money in it now, since production and
| consumption of whatever you _think_ you want to see or
| hear is easier and cheaper than ever. So there will be
| less attempting. QED, I suppose.
| thefz wrote:
| > 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>?
|
| That is the whole point of copyright, yes.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| I believe you can't copyright a _style_ of art.
|
| > no, you cannot copyright the Studio Ghibli art style
| itself. Copyright law doesn't protect styles, techniques,
| or general aesthetics--like the hand-drawn, watercolor-
| inspired look with soft colors, detailed natural
| backgrounds, and whimsical vibes that Studio Ghibli is
| known for. It only protects specific, original works,
| like an individual film frame or character design from
| Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro.
|
| And your answer... Doesn't seem to cover my question, I
| think. So the point of copyright is that the value of the
| style doesn't degrade?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Copyright is also just an outright fabricated concept
| intended to protect interest of authors. It can be
| expanded or removed as needed.
|
| It's just like an API. The very definition can be changed
| upstream by patches. People seem to miss that.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Yes, of course! By all means, update the law. I don't
| think anyone misses that part of being a human. Any
| concept we think of is fabricated.
|
| But here's the real meat of the issue I guess, how far do
| we wanna go? At what point SHOULD something be un-
| copyrightable? What describes a certain "style"? My style
| is black&white, can I copyright that?
|
| What would your diff be? :)
| doright wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| We all say "they have no _idea_ what they're doing" in
| English. Creativity basically equals skill. Those with less
| skills has less to express.
|
| I mean, everyone knows it takes a programmer to spec an app.
| The "different" skill needed for vibe coding is regular old
| coding skillset. Only difference with image AI is that it
| doesn't do "vibe drawing" well.
|
| AI art experiment is over. It's been long over, like camera
| based self driving was by the time some large orgs started
| embracing the technology. And it's taking longer for some to
| understand that it's over, just like that time.
| crabbone wrote:
| There was a very similar discussion when photography was made
| easily accessible. Baudelaire thought that photography was the
| killer of art by allowing non-artists to crate something that
| was very much like art, mechanistically, without having a good
| insight into what they were doing.
|
| And, in some ways he was right... but also not. What eventually
| happened is that art education that would be required for any
| aristocrat or an aspiring aristocrat became optional. Most
| intellectual elite today would be unable to draw much beyond a
| stick figure diagram. Art, at least where it concerns drawing
| or painting became a narrowly specialized field. And so, most
| people today don't understand and don't appreciate art.
|
| But, art didn't die. Instead, artists started asking themselves
| more questions about the nature and philosophy of art, figuring
| out which aspects are essential, experimenting more. In
| retrospect, it's sad that fewer people today have decent access
| or understanding of art, but while more common before, the
| understanding was often very superficial anyways.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Or get a book without having to wait for a Monk to copy one
| glimshe wrote:
| I don't know where you hang out on Reddit but on my subs people
| are almost invariably hostile to AI. AI art, even stuff that
| looks great, gets down voted to oblivion.
| thefz wrote:
| The comment was in /r/chatgpt.
| leokennis wrote:
| People want to write Java code and have a compiler translate it
| into machine code and be called a programmer.
|
| People want to run marathons on shoes with padded soles and be
| called an athlete.
| z3phyr wrote:
| A slope has two ends, even when it's slippery. People want to
| claim submarines swim, but they do not.
| fenomas wrote:
| If you hold a strong opinion about whether or not
| submarines swim, you might want to look up the source quote
| and think about it a second?
| thefz wrote:
| This equates more to being carried to the finish line by car,
| doing the last three steps and call it a marathon.
|
| Anyway plenty of people can't even finish 1K, so 42.2K in
| padded shoes is still impressive.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| I disagree. I don't care about a "marathon" I just need to
| cover 42.2k. If you wanna make a game out of it and run
| that distance that's fine, but I have errands to do and
| just need to cover the distance.
|
| If you wanna draw for the feeling of creative satisfaction
| that's great. I just need an image on a page in service of
| something else.
| chthonicdaemon wrote:
| Do you also object to people paying money to have other
| people's art in their homes? Is the moral damage from getting
| an artwork in your home that you didn't create inversely
| proportional to your monetary investment?
| thefz wrote:
| If something else created it for you, is that your art?
| Jedd wrote:
| Yes in the sense of ownership, no in the sense of
| authorship.
| vhantz wrote:
| What exactly is creative about buying art? Nonsensical
| comparison, unsurprising for HN though.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I heard a good one. AI isn't art, AI is content. People don't
| want to create art per se, they want to generate images for
| e.g. memes or filler / illustrative images on their blog,
| replacing or being an addition to stock images.
|
| No shade on stock photographers / illustrators, but that's
| where I see image generation end up at. And you could already
| get custom illustrations made for cheap on sites like fiverr.
| The real long term question will be whether an AI generated
| image can compete with services like that. (my guess: probably,
| AI images are higher resolution/quality and generated faster,
| but I don't know the real total cost of them nor that of cheap
| illustrators or stock images)
| jcalx wrote:
| > we're exiting the scarcity economy of visuals & entering
| something weirder--where aesthetics become ambient
| infrastructure, like wifi.
|
| AI is democratizing _execution_, not creativity. The advent of
| the smartphone camera era allowed for the average person to
| take vastly more photos than ever before, and yet the photos I
| personally find noteworthy are either remarkable in their
| context or aesthetic quality (e.g. [0]) or personally
| meaningful.
|
| Alternatively put, "culture" values a proof-of-work that is
| creativity + execution. Taking a photo of a lunar eclipse
| setting over a crater has global value, because of the effort
| in planning and taking the shot (read [0], it's great). Me
| shitposting a meme for my game night groupchat neatly
| summarizing what happened in our last session of Pandemic:
| Legacy has local value, because of the creativity in adapting a
| meme format to our particular context and the execution of the
| edit, but nobody besides us would find it as funny.
|
| (Interesting aside -- I personally think that the photo in [0]
| is more impressive than someone going all that way to _paint_
| the same scene en plein air, because of the split-second
| precision of the execution. Even though photography may have
| devalued a lot of the technical execution of capturing a scene,
| it has opened up new ways in which said execution can be
| valuable.)
|
| So AI decouples creativity and execution in a way that is, like
| every innovation before, unlike every innovation before. The
| Ghibli aesthetic is the soft pastels of the color palette [1]
| and the comfortable, nostalgic character design [2] but also
| the restful rhythm of "ma" [3] and the detail lovingly lavished
| to background characters [4]. GPT-4o devalues some of those
| things, but it another sense it just re-weights our cultural
| proof-of-work valuations back towards human effort.
|
| [0] https://lrtimelapse.com/news/total-lunar-eclipse-over-
| teide-...
|
| [1] https://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/graphic-design/the-
| ri...
|
| [2] https://stylecircle.org/2020/09/the-studio-ghibli-closet/
|
| [3] https://screencraft.org/blog/hayao-miyazaki-says-ma-is-an-
| es...
|
| [4] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-
| away...
| salomonk_mur wrote:
| I wonder if when commercial airplanes were invented, someone
| like you thought that the magic of traveling had been lost to
| technology.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think it's less about wanting to be called an artist and more
| about wanting to be able to get the results of making things
| more easily. And there is a good case that we can have a
| successful boom from this sort of thing.
| eric_cc wrote:
| People want to express their creativity stuck in their head
| without having the skill or training (privilege of the
| training) to be a legit artist. I think it's awesome that this
| removes the barrier and empowers people to be creative in ways
| that they previously could not.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Your definition of creativity is flawed. Imagining something
| is a small part of the process. Developing the skill and
| technique to express that imagination is the most important
| part.
| eric_cc wrote:
| 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?
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Come on, you're a tech person aren't you? Maybe a
| programmer? How many times have you had an idea guy come
| to you with a "great idea for an app" if only they could
| find someone to program it for them?
|
| Sorry, but most ideas aren't great. It's the painful
| process of refinement, hard work, and iteration that
| results in something great.
| bentley wrote:
| > How many times have you had an idea guy come to you
| with a "great idea for an app" if only they could find
| someone to program it for them?
|
| Many. And I _love_ it when those people code something up
| with Scratch, Matlab, or even Excel. Even though I
| personally would dislike the aesthetics of the result,
| I'm much happier to see other people enjoying computers
| the same way I enjoy them (i.e., by using them to solve
| interesting problems) than if I insisted everyone do so
| using my preferred "real" programming languages.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| There are elevators up mountains:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailong_Elevator
| blargey wrote:
| The real problem is not the effort (or lack thereof), it's the
| perception that modern AI is dropping them off at the peak of
| Everest, when in reality they're being stood on a plastic-
| molded crag at a sea-level tourist trap.
|
| Creative vision is not being realized, it's being stunted.
| hbarka wrote:
| The pronunciation of Ghibli is the next /gIf/ versus /dZIf/
| orthoxerox wrote:
| /gIblai/
| svara wrote:
| It's spelled ziburi - "Djiburi" roughly - making this one
| pretty easy to settle.
| layer8 wrote:
| Just as easily for GIF, whose inventor stated that it's
| /dZIf/, but people still disagree (myself included).
|
| With Ghibli there is the fact that the original Italian word
| is pronounced with a hard G. In fact, that's why it has an
| "h". We can treat this similar to Roma vs. Rome.
| fenomas wrote:
| ziburi 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.
| internet_points wrote:
| It's pronounced /fish/
| GaggiX wrote:
| The native image support of GPT-4o is really impressive, no model
| before was able to work so well in the joint space, just compare
| it to the Gemini 2.0 Flash model with native image support, the
| difference is massive, so I'm not too surprise that people
| focused more on the native image support of GPT-4o than the new
| SOTA by Google.
| nottorp wrote:
| Where's this Ghiblification? I'm still getting real cat photos in
| my FB feed. At least I hope they're real.
|
| Could it be that all the "AI" evangelists are in their own bubble
| and desperately trying to make money off each other?
|
| Like when mobile free to play gambling apps ("games" they said)
| had ads, but only for other mobile free to play gambling apps.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| Oh, well, here even the state communication director posted a
| ghibli-selfie...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > Where's this Ghiblification?
|
| The White House twitter account:
| https://x.com/whitehouse/status/1905332049021415862
| icu wrote:
| I think AI is just leverage for whatever you want to do. How you
| use that leverage, and what you apply it to is what matters. It's
| just another tool for humanity.
| karel-3d wrote:
| I like to create Corporate Memphis versions of pictures instead.
| It just seems way more dystopian.
| bfrog wrote:
| AI stealing yet again.
| keepamovin wrote:
| What if the transcendence of a unique style into a commodity is
| inevitable for all greatly influential styles, and a mark of
| greatness not of debasement or dilution. What if instead of the
| "impurity" of the commons polluting the "purity" of the pure
| form, the pure form has evolved into a memetic virus that has
| infected everything and reproduced itself in many forms, beyond
| even the power of its creator? The creator's grief at, in part,
| loss of control is understandable but perhaps is a tribute to how
| what they created transcended them into a thing with a life of
| its own, one of the truest tributes to creative genius, no?
|
| What if a distinct style is not owned by one artist, even if they
| are most associated with it, but in reality, in art historical
| reality, is most commonly explored by a group of more and less
| famous creators, all as part of a movement, at a time? What
| influences did Ghibli draw on?
|
| Buddhism says all things are essentially empty of their own
| existence but are merely conditions resulting from other causes,
| and so on, in a chain unending. Like this.
|
| The pointillism[0] of Impressionism that ended up spread to the
| masses by countless including Bob Ross is one example of the
| memetic evolution and transcendent influence of "high art".
| Greatness can filter down but it doesn't mean it's not great.
|
| An iPhone is still a masterpiece even if you hold it in the
| ghetto. Does the ghetto pollute it or does it lift the ghetto?
| Maybe there's cross pollination, but I think it's infected with
| its greatness.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism
| greenhearth wrote:
| The obtuseness and the soullessness of the user excited by this
| trick is what is most sad about this situation. "Look at me, I'm
| a cartoon!" speaks of the arrested development and some kind of a
| consciousness stunted by some autistic juvenescence prevalent in
| modern people. This pupa is really excited about living, I
| suppose.
| incrudible wrote:
| The Miyazaki quote is always taken out of context, the disgust he
| utters has nothing to do with automation of grunt work and
| everything to do with the horror content he just witnessed.
| Miyazaki is not one who insists on everything Ghibli being hand
| drawn, his son even uses cartoonish CGI, which I think looks
| awful.
|
| This type of quality is close to enabling a storyboarder like
| Miyazaki do an entire animation on their own. I have yet to hear
| him say he would not use such technology, despite him being
| rather opinionated.
| osti wrote:
| Pretentious.
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