Everything gets commoditised after a point. So why not art?

it's okay to generate all those Ghibli-styled images

There hardly ever is a trend on twitter where everyone jumps in and the entire timeline becomes so wholesome. After the first 12 hours or so however, people started hating on the latest Ghibli-styled image recreation trend for various reasons including the views of Miyasaki (Studio Ghibli’s co-founder) about computer generated art and how he found it to be “an insult to life itself”.

Now, I have a problem with this. Not with Miyazaki’s views, ofcourse, but with the fact that people think art should not be commoditized. Everything gets commoditised after a point so why not art? I am yet to see an argument that makes sense in this regard. I found the logic presented in a few of these arguments so bizarre that if it were to be extended to other aspects of the world, I think most things we love will fall apart.

Coming to the central point of this essay, there was a time when only a few people had access to computers. Now everyone has one in their pocket. Before that, there was a time when only a few people had a light bulb in their homes. Before that, there was a time when only a few people had access to books. I can go on and on but I think you get the point. Everything you have access to and love today, was once a luxury that only a few people had.

One of the most common arguments against this new OpenAI update is how the animation at Studio Ghibli is all hand drawn and having these images be generated by a computer is an insult to the hard work of the animators. I think Dr. Ally Louks had tweeted something on the likes of, “This is so cute but i wish it was made by a human.” Apart from the fact that I can see how someone would have said that same thing when cameras replaced portrait painters, I love roon’s reply to this which basically said that the counterfactual to Ghibli-styled images generated by ChatGPT isn’t a drawing made by a person, it's that the drawing doesn’t exist. I think roon’s argument here fundamentally explains a lot of things about AI as well. The counterfactual to AI completing an XYZ task isn’t that a human would have done the task, it’s that the task would have never been completed.

Another common argument I am seeing often is that Miyazaki hates AI or even computer generated art and hence we shouldn’t be doing this. To that I say, since when have we started caring about what the founder of anything thinks about how we use their creation? Should we retract all generic medicine because the founders of the companies that first made them would never want them to be generic? Should the United States go back to institutionalizing slavery since George Washington was a slave owner? Must the Indian republic never break out of its socialist policies? The logic of not doing something because, “Oh the founder would hate it”, if applied to other industries, will result in a catastrophe and I see no reason why artists should get a leeway.

Finally there are the arguments of anime gatekeepers. “Oh do you even know a single movie made by Studio Ghibli???”, they say. Brother in Christ, why do I have to know anything about anything before enjoying it? When you are looking at ducks swimming in a lake on a perfect 20°C evening with a light breeze, do you go, “Hmm I wonder what the previous generations of this duck looked like”? Why do you care if people are familiar with Studio Ghibli art or not? Maybe you should just let them enjoy this recreation of their picture with their dog inspired by the seminal works of Miyazaki and his team and stop gatekeeping stuff.

@RadishHammers on twitter puts the problem with a lot of these critiques perfectly in one of his tweets. He says, “...I think everyone wants to pretend an artistic critique is a moral one.” and I think this is the central problem. The perceived value of being a critique of the arts, to me, is much higher than it should be. I am all for hating art because you think it is bad or not appealing enough but hating it because of how it was made, how people are using it or what the founder would think is pretentious to say the least.

Finally, I think in the near future we will see AI generated art as just another category of art. Just like we don’t compare paintings to photographs, we won’t compare AI generated art pieces with human-made ones. People will also come around to like and use most of these products because they are clearly superior to any other tools that exist and this will be a money printer for OpenAI in so many more ways.