Studio Ghibli has taken over the internet, with people sharing all kinds of AI-generated images in the style of the Japanese animation studio, but its founder has a particularly dim view of AI art.
Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli, had once called AI art an “awful insult to life”. In 2016, some researchers had visited him, and told him about how AI could soon be used to create art.
“There’s something called ‘Deep Learning’ in AI,” the researchers had said. “We think computers will be able to paint art like humans five to ten years from now.”
“If they do that, we won’t need humans,” Miyazaki had replied while puffing on his cigarette. (The idea of AI art) is very unpleasant,” he’d added. “You can make horrible things if you want. But I want nothing to do with it. It’s an awful insult to life,” he’d added.
Unfortunately for Miyazaki, the internet is currently flooded with people sharing their Ghibli-inspired pictures. OpenAI had launched a new image generation model yesterday, which allowed users to turn any photo of theirs into the iconic Studio Ghibli style. This had gone viral on X, and thousands of people have shared their Ghibli-styled pictures. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman too has changed his profile picture to one in the style of Studio Ghibli.
One would wonder how Miyazaki, now 84, would feel about this. Studio Ghibli is famous for hand-drawing all its films, including Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron. Each film can have more than 250,000 drawings that are painstakingly put together to create an animated movie.
But improvements in AI have meant that computers can create Studio Ghibli-style images instantly, and nearly for free. Some will likely decry this, saying it’s a crushing of the human spirit. But AI tools like these also have the potential to democratize art — and inspire a whole generation of AI artists — in the years to come.