I saw this on Mastodon and it is perfect. Context provided below.
Context: A few weeks ago, OpenAI released an update that allowed people to generate images, including in specific styles, if they so chose. One of those styles is Studio Ghibli, after the well-regarded Japanese animation studio. This, predictably, led to a bunch of people turning personal photos into pseudo Ghibli images, but others used the style for less tasteful purposes, to showcase terrorism and other violent acts.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, changed his avatar on X to a “Ghiblified” version of himself. A lot of people–rightly, I think–took this as being Altman’s way of saying AI companies can appropriate (steal) art and art styles as they see fit and no one can stop them. It’s at the heart of much of the criticism of AI: that the output it produces is largely built off of stolen works, that the companies behind AI simply don’t care (or even feel entitled to the stolen works) and comes at great cost to the environment, too1Some of these costs are coming down, but it ain’t exactly efficient yet..
But yeah, for a beautiful moment in time, we turned everything into a Ghibli studio movie.
The original New Yorker cartoon, which also remains perfect:
