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Hi from Pont-de-la-Morge!
I said “Hi from Sion” last time, but it felt wrong. Even if it is part of Sion municipality, ‘Bridge of the Morge’ is closer to Conthey than Sion Town. It belongs more to the rural outskirts with vineyards than to the historic center of Valais.
But the fact is – you don’t remember what I said last week. Right? Our attention span is quite limited.
That’s exactly what I think about this (surely fleeting) social media trend that ghiblifies photographs in the signature style of Hayao Miyazaki. If you haven’t seen images of people pretending that Totoro is their real first neighbor, you must be living under a rock. Maybe somewhere remote, on the outskirts of attention. Like Pont-de-la-Morge.
After OpenAI enabled everyone to pretend to be worthy of a Studio Ghibli model, ethical discussions on style copyright and exploitation flooded online space. Even Miyazaki’s old words on technologies that quickly mimic years of effort surfaced – it’s an insult to life, he said.
When I published my most recent article on strange hostel experiences, and illustrated it with AI images, a reader sent me this comment: “Thanks for stealing artists’ work for these AI slop illustrations. They suck.”
I agree that the regurgitating AI models will never be able to replace human expression. But I don’t know if the discussion about the digital society we live in can be solved in one blog’s comments.
The frustration of art lovers is understandable. I love art myself. I dedicated a big part of my life to it. But even if AI models might have trained on my photographs as well (just like yours, or Miyazaki’s drawings), even if large language models might have exploited my journalistic work too, anything I say may sound defensive.
In some happier place, I would be paying artists for exclusive illustrations (like I did years ago), my website would be more visible on Google, and the giant wouldn’t rip off my ads income. But sadly, in this unhappy place, where BIG players have used AI in order to become even bigger players, I don’t see what small actors can do, besides continue doing their work.
My work is all about communication. If I use AI, I use it as a tool to communicate ideas. I’m not stealing elections, I’m not printing fake Banksy T-shirts, I’m not flooding Facebook with misrepresenting AI art, nor I’m organizing scam events like that Willy’s Chocolate Experience.
If anything, I try to use my conceptual AI work to popularize the talks on climate change, advocate for Earth against politics that destroy it, popularize history, or fight for consumers – against junk fees.
I’m allergic to people stealing other’s work and then using it to take advantage of others, such as those lost luggage sales I tried to unmask.
Not once, I was the victim of author theft too. While I think it makes sense to fight for authorship, all of us choose battlefields. There’s only so much energy we can invest or – waste.
I love Miyazaki’s animation. I traveled to Japan to see his museum. And I can see that big players are exploiting his brand for commercial gain.
But in a normal world, we should direct our anger to policymakers. They are the ones who should protect the world of authors. Our work. All of us should be entitled to fair compensation from AI giants that present their tools as “copyright-free”.
Until then… People who change their social media profile pic for a week of the Ghibli trend? An article that illustrates bizarre hostel experiences with “AI art”? These just might be wrongly appointed targets.
It’s frustrating that the world works so slowly when dealing with new challenges. It works too slowly when it’s faced with climate change, it’s too slow when it needs to stop the economic collapse, and it’s extremely slow when it looks at killings done in the name of territory fights as if they are completely normal.
So yes, the world is slow in tackling the AI challenges too.
Don’t just ghiblify your profile pic. Go watch some of Miyazaki’s movies! Visit Japan if you can!
Have a Ghibli-celebrating week!
Ivan Kralj
Pipeaway.com
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