life imitates art.

AI art and everything wrong with it.

I’m sure all of you’ve heard, and maybe even tried out OpenAI’s new image generator of Studio Ghibli-inspired art. Did you have fun? Enjoyed watching your old photos turned into the magical world of Ghibli, with your friends and family? Well, wake the hell up and see why AI art is an immense disrespect to artists.

You may be thinking, “what the fuck I’m on about” and “Oh, it is not that deep. We are just having fun.” Imagine spending your entire life dedicated to your most passionate work and then some new technology comes around, your life’s work-something precious and unique- is suddenly being used without your consent to train the machine. And if you think, even for a second, “Oh it’s been made publicly available, we can use it however we want.” With all due respect, which is none by the way, just because someone is sharing their work doesn’t give you any right to copy, share, modify or use it for commercial purposes without the creator’s consent and call it your own work.

Back to the main point, this machine, this AI algorithm that takes their original work and turns it into a pale imitation, turning years of time, effort, passion and creativity of real, existing human beings into meaningless, disposable pieces. Art in itself looses it’s value completely. Art is not, and never has been, about aesthetics. It’s a way of expression, giving life to new realities of creation and that feeling of looking at something indescribable but inherently human.

Have you ever been to art exhibitions or museums? Ever visited historical sites and seen the cultures expressed on it’s very architecture? Ever saw the news of archeologists finding centuries old cave-paintings, pottery, lost literature, etc? Don’t you feel anything? Like someone understands you, even if they were ancient and you are not alone. Like how every mind works differently and you’re only getting a glimpse of it’s breath-taking entirety and you’re in love with it?

AI removes all of that- the emotions, the imperfections, the struggle. I’ve never been a traditionalist; I will always question every new truth, every new rule that is asked to follow without a rhyme or reason. And right now I’m questioning, the existence of AI in the artistic industry. Nothing related to this has felt like a break-through in technology. Instead, I’m afraid we just continue to evolve backwards.

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Studio Ghibli refers to the famous Japanese studio founded by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki. One could easily argue it has one of the best animation style to date, with it’s hand-drawn art style and soft aesthetic, potraying iconic characters, tragedies, and childhood favorites like Howl’s Movie Castle, Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delievery Service, etc. It’s recent release of Boy and the Heron in 2023 became the fifth highest grossing Japanese film of all time with about $282.4 M worldwide. So before you go saying, “oh no one even knew about this before GPT made it famous”, sit down and think again. A direct quote from the Studio Ghibli artist himself in a 2016 NHK documentary series by Kaku Arukawa:

“Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability," Miyazaki said. "It’s so hard for him just to do a high five; his arm with stiff muscle can’t reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is."

Silence filled the room.

And then, just to drive the point home, Miyazaki added, "I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it, but I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."

As someone who has spent their childhood growing up with Studio Ghibli movies and a computer science major, I feel dissapointed with the progress of AI in the modern world. As a college student, I use ChatGPT too. And be for real, who the heck doesn’t? But it raises the million-dollar question of ethical usage of artificial intelligence.

You want to know what’s so wrong with it? Well, allow me. First and foremost, AI art using OpenAI’s DALL-E, Midjourney, etc is built on exploitation. The AI is trained on datasets comprising of copyrighted works without the author’s permission. AI art isn’t just inspired from their work, they’re built directly from it, without credit or proper compensation. AI Companies have already faced various lawsuits against this and still this persists.

Second off all, AI-generated images are filling up online spaces because now anyone can make art of anything at all. This makes it harder for human artists and illustrators to stand out in any platform. Art contests, stock image websites are preferring AI art at the expense of actual artists. Not only they are undermined they are literally losing their jobs as companies see it as a cost-cutting measure.

You thought AI isn’t actually coming for your jobs? It’s a living reality for every artist and you’re not helping. Don’t even get me started on the capitalism aspect of it all, with tech companies trying to control creative industries for their benefit. Go on, help them out, make your AI-generated images for ‘fun’ and watch art get monopolized by those in power, just like any social media app that steals your data and streaming services which refuse to provide basic features without spending half your salary on it.

It’s a fun trend today, but what about tomorrow? What about our future?

AI art could’ve been fun, scientifically speaking, if it was creating art on it’s own instead of recreating human work in a far more eerie style. It’s becoming a systematic problem quickly and you’re not helping.

That’s just a specialized case. Let me tell you about the the social aspect and how that’s impacting AI. Take a look around you. What have you been seeing for the entirety of our lives? Racism, misogyny, discrimination against religions, background, monetary assets, etc. It’s everywhere and anywhere. We are built under a system that demands us to fail. And this bias is exactly what is being used to train AI models. In machine learning language, we call this over fitting in sampling bias where majority class is preferred over minority class. In simple words, AI is being trained to have racial bias and an inherently misogynistic and hyper-sexualized interpretation of women. Don’t believe me? Take a look from UNESCO themselves.

ChatGPT has been affecting the environment over the last couple of years According to official reports, it emits 8.4 tons of carbon dioxide per year. A recent study by the University of California, revealed the significant water footprint of AI. Microsoft used approx 700,000 liters of freshwater during GPT-3’s training in the data centres. That’s equivalent to the amount of water needed to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla vehicles.[source]

And that’s only the start of our problems.

Creativity is about expressing your emotions in a way only you can comprehend. Imagine an AI writing this very Substack. What emotions will that invoke in you? Would you hear what I think or would you recognize the pattern of meaningless words strung together to form something vaguely coherent?

And we say life imitates art. Then where is humanity headed? To become a grotesque imitation of a muse? Or something even worse?