‘Ghibli AI’ sparks controversy: art or an insult to creativity?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been improving rapidly and making our lives easier due to its accessibility and quick responses to our queries. However, at what cost?
Recently, social media has been taken by storm by ‘Ghibli AI’, where images are converted to Studio Ghibli’s signature and beloved art style. This has reignited debates about AI’s impact on art. Some argue that AI makes art more accessible, while others raise concerns about users’ privacy, copyright laws, and the future of artists. A 2016 video of Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli, recently resurfaced, showing his strong disapproval of AI-generated art. He called it “an insult to life itself.”
Hayao Miyazaki poured his heart and soul into his art. Like him, artists all over the world have worked for years to perfect their craft. Seeing AI-generated art can be heartbreaking and dehumanizing for artists. AI has solutions to many things, but preserving one’s creativity is not one of them. It reduces one’s critical thinking, problem-solving, and of course, creativity. Generating art through AI means removing human effort from the process.
In response, artists are constantly rallying against AI art, showing how beautiful it is to create things by one’s own hand. As technology transforms art, it is crucial to uphold originality while fostering innovation and implementing stricter regulations. Creativity is a deeply personal and human process, and relying on machines to generate art risks diminishing our chance to self-express.
