There Is No "Art" Button
Studio Ghibli knock-offs are the latest product of OpenAI's theft machine.
At some point in your life, you’ve likely seen a Peeing Calvin. The image typically shows up as a window decal or maybe a t-shirt, but it’s a mass-produced image. It’s also theft as Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, famously never licensed his popular strip for commercial purposes. He was worried the images would oversaturate the market and lose their original power similar to the mass reproductions and commercialization of strips like Garfield and Peanuts. People took his Calvin anyway and had him urinate on things as a sign of defiance so deep that it also loathed the man who created the character in the first place.
OpenAI has raked in billions of VC dollars to create what’s essentially a Peeing Calvin machine. OpenAI, scraping the entire Internet, believes creativity should exist at the push of a button, which isn’t creating any more than a person who uses a Xerox machine could claim to be an artist. Their latest popular travesty is using their software to make knockoff images of Studio Ghibli movies. For those who have never seen the studio’s films, their most popular filmmaker and co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki, has a running theme through his movies about the power of the natural world and a deep loathing of authoritarian power. Naturally, the Trump White House drained a lake to tweet out a Ghibli-style image of ICE agents arresting a crying immigrant.
It’s fitting that fascists would love these kinds of image generators because fascists love propaganda and hate art. Leni Riefenstahl, one of the famed directors of the Third Reich, knew how to compose an image, but she didn’t make art. Triumph of the Will is not artwork because it’s not there to raise questions or explore human emotions. It’s there to make you root for Hitler, and once Hitler was dead and his Reich in shambles, there was no more point to Riefenstahl’s work. It had served its nefarious purpose and could be easily discarded.
OpenAI’s garbage tech serves a similar purpose. As much marketing as we’ve received about how AI can help us compose emails (a technology about as useful and timesaving as electric scissors), you can tell OpenAI is particularly pleased with how it’s been able to steal everyone else’s creativity in what it claims is the democratization of artwork. But there’s nothing democratic about a single company having the tools (and charging for them!) that tells people they can be creative, especially when people already have creativity within. There’s nothing stopping anyone right now from picking up a pencil and trying to do a Ghibli-style artwork. Totoro is not hard to draw. But if you’re lazy, you can type a prompt into the theft machine and it will spit out an approximation of what it thinks you want. It’s stolen from many and made by no one.
For some, I’m sure I sound like I’m overreacting. Defenders see a fun little online toy and trend, and there’s no use in getting mad at something so ephemeral. But the ephemeral nature is what OpenAI is counting on. The only thing they want to last is their business. Everything else should be disposable. Their thinking is “It’s all well and good that Hayao Miyazaki made towering, influential works, but shouldn’t Bob from Ohio be able to do that with our software? Shouldn’t everyone from everywhere be able to type in a few words and make a drawing?”
Because the people behind OpenAI do not understand what art is. They don’t understand having a point of view or the value of the process. They understand “content,” only as the result of someone else’s labor. Granted, they’re not happy if someone else steals their stuff, but they want to claim that anyone can be Hayao Miyazaki because they ripped off every Studio Ghibli movie.
We’re now in an age where we’re having to talk about “AI art” but this is an oxymoron. A child scribbling with a crayon has more artistry because at least that crude drawing came from their individuality and creativity rather than pressing a button to do it for them. ChatGPT can’t make art no matter how much OpenAI and its ilk pour into marketing campaigns to convince people otherwise. It’s a handy tool for the petty, lazy, and spiteful to shove in the face of real artists in an attempt to take them down a peg. It is an expensive sneer towards people like Miyazaki who have made the world a better place through their artwork.
When presented with an A.I. model that learned certain movements in 2016, Miyazaki responded,
“Every morning…not recent days, but I see a friend who has a disability. It’s so hard for him just to do a high five, his arm with stiff muscle reaching out to my hand. Now, watching him, I can’t watch this stuff and find [sic] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is or [sic] whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make this creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
When asked what their goal is, the programmers respond that they would like to create a machine “that can draw pictures like humans do.” Miyazaki later says, “I feel like we are nearing the end of time. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
OpenAI would like us to lose that faith, but we don’t need to sell our creativity for a cheap facsimile of what we can create without them.
