There are two accounts of the negative effects for humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory, the existential, version of it is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job, give every lunatic and terrorist the means to engineer novel pathogens at home, and administer the coup de grâce by sending terminators into our recent pasts and/or overstocking the cosmic stationery cupboard by turning all of us into paperclips.
None of these scenarios shows any signs of imminently coming to pass, though since experts in the field take them seriously, we should too. But what we’re dealing with now is not the existential, but the trivial. I speak, of course, of the global proliferation of ChatGPT Studio Ghibli memes. Over the past few days, social media has been bombarded with AI slop in the ostensible style of the Japanese anime house. Famous scenes from films, iconic paintings, popular memes, user selfies – all have been turned into cutesy cartoons.
The White House has posted a whimsical Ghibli-style image of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting a weeping felon from the Dominican Republic; the Israel Defence Forces has announced chirpily ‘We thought we’d also hop on the Ghibli trend’, posting anime versions of IDF soldiers on patrol or flying fighter jets. OpenAI has said that the sheer number of Studio Ghibli requests is threatening to crash its vast server farms.
There are two things that, if we’re considering this from an artistic point of view, we must discount.
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