Last month, OpenAI launched a new AI image generator, powered by its GPT-4o model, by showing off its ability to turn any image into one inspired by iconic Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli. The new functionality quickly kicked off a viral trend that had everyone from the White House to Israel Defense Forces Ghibli-fying images. It also kicked off a major public backlash, given that Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki, famously committed to hand-drawn animation, once called AI-generated art “an insult to life itself.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has finally responded to the criticism. Appearing on a YouTube podcast with Indian entrepreneur Varun Mayya on Sunday, Altman characterized AI art generators as a “democratization” of art creation.
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“I think the democratization of creating content has been a big net win for society. It has not been a complete win, there are negative things about it for sure, and certainly it did something about the art form, but I think on the whole it’s been a win,” Altman said.
Altman’s sentiment is unsurprising, as it’s seemingly been the company line for AI boosters on X, Reddit, and other major social media platforms since Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, and Stable Diffusion were released to the public in 2022. (It’s worth noting that sentiment is largely absent on Bluesky, whose user base has been widely anti-AI.)
In the podcast, Altman goes on to say that while there might be “job loss” due to the rise of AI art, he believes that lowering barriers to participation and creating more “competition” by allowing people of “differential abilities” to create is “a real benefit to society.”
That argument only really works if you believe generative-AI art is actually good. At least for the moment, the verdict is no. The art produced by these tools have been described as being strangely uniform in aesthetic, lacking in emotion or intent, and, at the very least, deeply unsettling. (That’s without getting into the philosophical argument over what the purpose of art produced without humans even is.)
Unfortunately, “good” or bad” may soon be besides the point. Low-quality “AI slop” is already crowding out human content across social media platforms, with one recent study finding that over half of long-form posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. Meanwhile, another study from researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that test subjects were unable to distinguish between AI-generated poems and those by canonical bards like William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot. Participants thought the AI-generated poems were more likely to be written by a human, rating those poems more favorably than those by the actual authors. It’s a bleak state of affairs.
In the interview with Maya, Altman suggested that the benefits to lowering the barriers to entry for art would be similar to the ease associated with starting a company since the advent of the internet. But Altman’s analogy, where he argues OpenAI would have impossible in another era, elides one critical point. OpenAI was founded in 2015 by some of the most powerful people in tech, including Elon Musk, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Paypal founder (and major right-wing funder) Peter Thiel, and Altman, who was then the president of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most famous tech accelerator. It’s more than a little absurd to describe OpenAI, as Altman does, as a “ragtag bunch.”
The current debate over AI-generated art produced by OpenAI and its competitors is unfortunate in no small part because there is a long history of artists using AI and machine learning to interesting effect—see Harold Cohen’s AARON, which dates back to the early ’70s. Today, there are numerous artists leveraging those tools to explore aspects of contemporary society, the nature of consciousness, and the underlying logic of such technologies, among other topics.
Much of that work was on display last month in Hong Kong, where Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen explored the limits and dangers of nostalgia by creating a custom generator using classic Hong Kong films, while Chinese artist Lin Jingjing crafted a AI artist avatar for a series of paintings that suggest a more fluid idea of authorship. Key to those works—and those by other artists working in similar modes—however, is both a clarity of intent and a deep engagement with the tools themselves that goes far beyond entering a prompt like “Rembrandt painting, Ghibli style.”
AI enthusiasts, meanwhile, have suggested that Miyazaki’s quote, which comes from a 2016 documentary on Japanese television, was taken out of context and misunderstood. Here’s the fuller context, per Indiewire:
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.”
Miyazaki’s stance seems pretty unambiguous to me.
