March 27, 2025 - 4:00pm
For much of this week, X has been filled with eerily familiar yet undeniably off-putting images that represent a new frontier in AI’s consumption of human art. Users have discovered that ChatGPT’s latest update allows them to transform any photograph into something resembling a scene from a Studio Ghibli film. Within hours, the internet was awash with these uncanny renderings — everything from 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination to Pennsylvania treasurer R. Budd Dwyer’s televised suicide, all reimagined in the distinctive style of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. This is more than just a passing trend, though. Instead, it’s another milestone in AI’s ongoing appropriation of human artistic expression.
First came the novelty of seeing serious historical events transformed into whimsical anime pastiches. Then came the rush to feed every conceivable meme template into the algorithmic maw. By Wednesday, Elon Musk was participating, a sure sign that whatever subcultural cache the trend might have briefly possessed had evaporated entirely.
There’s something particularly depressing about Miyazaki’s aesthetic becoming the unwitting template for this mass AI experimentation. The 83-year-old animator’s meticulously crafted style — the product of thousands of hours of human labour — has been crudely approximated by the very technology he so openly disdains. In a 2016 demonstration that has resurfaced amid this trend, Miyazaki watched AI researchers present a grotesque digital creature that moved by dragging its head along the ground. His response was unequivocal: “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” He continued: “I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
Nine years later, Miyazaki’s words seem almost prophetic. What is this flood of AI-generated Ghibli knockoffs if not a collective surrender of our artistic sovereignty? The modern internet user, bombarded by an endless stream of content, has outsourced even the act of image manipulation — once a legitimate form of digital folk art — to machines. The lazy shortcut of asking AI to simply “make it look like Ghibli” replaces genuine creative expression with the press of a button.
This hollowness points to a deeper artistic crisis. Human-created memes, at their best, represent a legitimate art form that emerges organically from distinctive individual sensibilities. Consider Donald Trump, whose idiosyncratic communication style spawned endless memorable memes which helped propel him to political prominence. From “covfefe” to “nipples protruding […] very very disrespectful” to “very fine people”, Trump’s linguistic peculiarities created genuinely novel cultural moments that resonated far beyond their immediate context. These weren’t just jokes but authentic cultural artefacts, carrying the unmistakable signature of individual creativity that AI cannot replicate.
The Studio Ghibli meme trend, however, constitutes the further “ensloppification” of internet culture. When anyone can generate unlimited variations of the same basic template with minimal effort, we’re left with an undifferentiated mass of content — or “slop”, to use the increasingly common internet parlance.
The speed with which the Ghibli AI cycle played out illustrates this perfectly. What might once have been a week-long trend with distinct phases of adoption, refinement, and eventually ironic meta-commentary was compressed into less than a day. By the time average users became aware of the phenomenon, it was already being declared “over” by those at the cutting edge. And unlike organic memes that might experience revivals or evolve into new forms, this AI-generated trend will likely never resurface except as a footnote in some future digital archaeologist’s catalogue of fleeting 2025 phenomena.
Musk’s involvement sealed the trend’s fate. When platform owners participate in meme culture, they strip away any remaining countercultural energy. Throughout his tenure at X, Musk has functioned as a one-man validation system for content that catches his eye, transforming niche humour into broadly accessible but quickly exhausted cultural products. His participation marks the moment a trend officially becomes mainstream — and thus instantly passé.
Yet the larger pattern represented by the Ghibli trend — the algorithmic consumption of human art, the devaluation of artistic labour, and the surrender of creative agency to machines — continues unabated. The real tragedy isn’t just that AI can now imitate Miyazaki’s style, but that we increasingly seem content to let algorithms replace the human artistic impulse entirely. When we surrender art to automation, we lose not just the distinctive voices of individual creators but also our collective power for creative expression.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work
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SubscribeThey automate my blue collar industry (manufacturing) and no-one cares. They automate your white collar industry and suddenly it’s the end of the world.
A very good point. We’re all delighted that we can get complicated mathematics done for us, why not amusing pictures?
Although this can be a crisis for human artists who depend on their trade for income, I worry more about a generation of youngsters who don’t have to think about anything anymore if they don’t want to. They simply ask their personal communication device (aka a smart phone) any question at all and get an answer.
Imagine the veracity of the second generation of a society that blindly relied on an electronic god for every question about any subject on earth? Their leaders will not need to be living human beings. And you thought calling customer service at a big bank or internet company put you into a doom loop? Just wait.This will certainly lead us to the idiocracy sooner than originally thought.
“Their leaders will not need to be living human beings”
Given what most of our leaders seems to be like, that’s probably a plus point.
To be fair, humans can imitate the style of another artist. Someone skilled can produce fakes that are very hard to distinguish from the real thing. This has been a thing in the art world for a while, with skilled imitators producing replicas of known works or entirely novel artwork in the same style as a famous artist for the sake of profit through selling fakes. AI just does it orders of magnitude faster and at less expense. In that respect, it’s much like the assembly line or the steam engine. I suspect AI can’t really invent its own style, much less do so without being prompted. Intelligence is not the same as motivation or imagination.
“AI just does it orders of magnitude faster and at less expense”
But that is an enormous difference.
I don’t know whether AI can invent it’s own style yet, but I can’t see any theoretical reason why it can’t. Maybe 99.99% of it will be rubbish (like 99.99% of humans), but if you can create 10,000 new styles in a few hours, that’s a new artist every day.
I do. The way these AI work is based entirely on consuming what already exists. They generate things by predicting what is most likely to come next, with a bit of background noise to make that more surprising and (ironically) less predictable. One inescapable trend of this seems to be that everything tends to the average and it has also been noted that AI fed on AI input tends to produce worse output. After all, the idea that generated this new 5 minute trend came from a human.
Interesting, so the AI fed AI input suffers from iterative deterioration, the same sort of thing that happens when one makes a copy then another copy from that copy. The further removed from the original one gets the more errors and noise accumulate and the less the end result resembles the original, or in fact resembles anything coherent. Basically, this is a function of entropy, a fundamental force in physics. It may prove just as hard to overcome this limitation to AI as it is to build a perpetual motion machine for the same reason.
Forgeries are generally not considered creative. Quite the opposite.
“And if their prison had an echo from the wall opposite them, when one of the passers by uttered a sound, do you think that they would suppose anything else than the passing shadow to be the speaker?” “By Zeus, I do not,” said he. “Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects.”
When the Sumerians, thousands of years ago, began to press cuneiform images into clay tablets the world was forever changed. Despite that, for thousands of years after, kings could still remain both illiterate and powerful because power continued to primarily derive from the point of a spear. Likewise, common people could remain illiterate because their “purpose” in life remained physical toil. For millennia only a very small number of people need be literate to benefit society. That eventually changed. It became impossible to be a leader and remain illiterate in the industrialized world; and engines, by supplanting muscle, made it important for common people to become literate to find jobs. Democracy rode into history on the back of the printing press.
We are at a new transition that began with the invention of computational language and has brought us to the dawn of AI. It remains as arcane today as cuneiform was to the small minority of Sumerian scribes who commanded its use 5000 years ago. Only a tiny fraction of human beings are literate in the coded languages that determine what digital devices do. For a while, that won’t matter too much to the rest of us. One can still be a Prime Minister or a school teacher and not be able to write code. But just as language literacy eventually became deterministic, so too will code language become ever more deterministic, both at the apex of power and in the broad plains of common people. This time the effect may or may not be democratizing. Power is already accruing at a stunning rate to those technology titans who have had a greater influence on our recent lives than any other humans now living. Just as Gutenberg irrevocably altered the course of politics, culture, science, religion, and art, so too is our world now being transformed again. The future will be as unrecognizable to us as our present would have been to Gilgamesh. Whether it will be good or not will be a subjective and relative question whose answer may not transcend time.
Epic sweep and you are getting what is going on, but the coding angle is a bit of a misstep. Machines have coded themselves for a while, and in any case the disruptive information shift is not really technological, except insofar as the changing technology is changing human epistemology. That’s always been so with these epistemic disruptions – the invention of recordable/ed information (ie non-oral) in the first place, then the (only) three or four (real) step changes in the technology since (truly portable platform ie paper; mass printing/circulation (and its requisite concomnitent, mass literacy); a few steps up in this (offset printing, radio/TV, digital); then 24-7 fluidity and mass autonomous publishing (the internet and software/SM).
Finally, this latest epistemic disruption – the capacity of the information medium itself to become information self-generating. Everyone’s having kittens about ‘what it means’…but all it means is that we will regress (I think, re-progress!) back to the pre-mass media era, where quality information will necessarily become (as it should be) defined not by the scale and reach of its mere carriage (‘mass media’) but by the originality, authenticity and human veracity of its instrinsic ‘human-ness’. That, really, is a kind of reversion to the pre-recorded info era of The Oral Tradition. Maybe the Oz Indy crew were right when they warned that cameras steal your soul. Maybe musicians are right when they say only live music is real music. Maybe the clever Elizabethan ensemble who invented ‘William Shakespeare’ were right when they intuited/workshopped/dramaturged-in-real-life that the only way to get a mass audience to listen to truly subversive, radical information…was to dress it up in stories of human emotional resonance, entice them into a living, breathing performance of them, and disguise your clever collective epistemic trick by faking up a ‘single hero/genius author’ figure for posterity.
So as not to scare systemic power. Systemic Power can duchess/manage a single Famous Radical, just fine. Clever, committed, far-sighted, truly selfless collective action…that’s scary; that must be not just crushed, but eradicated from history.
‘Mass media’ has always been a viciously damaging ironic lie. Fake news. Commodified, objectified ‘truth-as-product’. The internet was already flooding the zone with this ‘mass media’ type info-shit, reminding us all to run like hell away from that cohort that creates it if it’s human truth we seek – the Rupert Murdochs, the Lord Beaverbrooks, the Randolph Hearsts and all their lying yellow armies (and now…all of us, or rather that 99.9% ‘most of us’ who, alas, just don’t have much original to add to the great mass of media/info…sorry, Substackers et al all). AI is now rapidly completing the job. Every anxious article written about AI, every podcast, every TV show, every mainstream column…it sinks another suicidal stiletto eloquently into the vocation of its author. Funny…and poignant.
And lightning fast; accelerating itself. As Bateman says…this Ghibli meme thingie, it’s already over. It was over as it was being framed. The epistemic element that this latest, digitalised/AI information phase is radically disrupting is the one that everyone misses. Which is time. What’s happening – before our very f**king eyes, we are living it, one cannot believe how lucky we all are to be alive right now – is that we are compressing time to the point where we can at least imagine, hypothesise how it might be compressed out of existence altogether.
And then what? We will be living ‘in the moment’ again? Like pre-Fall creatures of animal instinct and material impulse? Freed of our existential angsty bonds? Purging ourselves of the poisonous apple? Just human…being…blissfully, as one with the material world and all in it, every second. Freed from the tyranny of self-reflection at last!? Why, why…could it be Nirvana? A Rasta epiphany? The Second Coming? The Singularity? Yada yada yawee…yippee.
I don’t fukn know either. But sh*t it’s a fun time to be alive and tapping (literally, endlessly, blah-ingly…tediously, joyfully…) into the great collective expanding Tree of Human Knowledge. Epistemically speaking.
Where-oh-where are our better f*cking philosophers when we need ’em…
What were you trippin on when you wrote that?
Life mate. The exquisite class A narcotic that be Human self-consciousness. Divine, it truly is.
No smart-arsed irony intended. Not a shred.
No algorithm will ever be capable of producing something that a human brain, heart, nervous system and yes… soul, can produce, based upon unique lived experience.
Commercial ‘art’? Sure, but let’s clarify what we mean here instead of bandying terms like “artistic” about and people getting their knickers in a twist.
Indeed and there – in my humble opinion – lie the feet of clay on which the entire AI edifice stands.
Has there ever been a time in human history when we have had a poorer or more inadequate philosophy of mind? The decline of Religion, the abandonment of Metaphysics, the triumph of desiccated Comtean Positivism and its countervalent, Expressive Individualism, has led to almost limitless muddle and confusion about what it means to be ‘intelligent’ in the first place.
We pay lip service to un-cozened Nominalism but, for all our performative rigour, we remain recusant Essentialists. Perhaps that is why AI – the Rylean ‘Ghost in the Machine‘ made flesh – asserts its plausibility so vigorously in our day.
“Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made”
And so we permit ourselves to dignify the beasts of the field and even the reified ‘Environment’ itself with the ‘rights’ that should accrue only to innate intelligence even as we declare – as it suits us – that viable unborn children are essentially inanimate.
While we flatter ourselves that we now know more about the world than we ever have – so much indeed that we can now affect to re-create it through AI – many dispassionate observers can’t help but notice that we are losing our grip on what reality even is.
For all its self-congratulatory Realism, the phenomenological history of the last 50 years could fittingly be subtitled ‘Magic and the Decline of Religion’.
It strikes me that we are further from understanding what the mind, the self, consciousness, creativity and all the down-stream products of those phenomena – art, emotion, sensibility – are than we have ever been in recorded history.
Proponents of artificial intelligence like to insist that we are on the banks of an epistemological Jordan when it rather seems to many of us that we stand in the ruins of a second Babel.
tl;dr – AI crass, Musk involvement passé. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Seriously, you shouldn’t take this so seriously, it’s just an extension of meme culture, it’s been happening for 20 years or more on the internet, and trust me when I say, it’s all slop. These look a lot better than the average 4chan drawing of 2010 but the spirit and the point is the same. The juxtaposition here is the joke, and the AI isn’t in on the joke. Taking moments of extreme horror from real history and turning them into cute anime pastiche with the aid of an unwitting AI isn’t just funny to some people, and the game is to capture the most horrific moment most innocently.
Exactly. It’s all for shits and giggles, nothing more, nothing less.
I find it unbelievable people wasted their time making such a labour saving device.
10000 monkeys have been typing for a while.
We shouldn’t be surprised in witnessing the lengths to which people will go to make a golden calf.
Life itself is based on “making copies”.
Again…ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hoo hoo hee hee hee hee...this is just too much fun.
Oh dear sweet lord. The hypocrisy, the gall, the witless hilarity, the gaping blind spots…of lifelong mass media information churn merchants, pap factories, sludge farms…whose entire existence has rested on the over-amplification and over-circulation of, mostly, regurgitated, derivative, dead information…suddenly getting all sooky about…a machine that does what they’ve always done faster, more mass…and in most cases…better.
This is too too funny. Goodness me, where are the shop stewards! Where are the unions! Where are the coal miners, why aren’t they out in solidarity with our poor doomed Information Comrades!?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hee hee hee hee hee…
Go on, Oliver – you heroic mass media ‘blogger, vlogger and podcaster’ who is ‘doing the e-work‘ – tell us again why AI is such a wicked, inhuman, anti-artistic thing!
Ha ha ha ha ha hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hee hee he ho…
*Pops another beer, continues to thoroughly enjoy the Long Overdue Death By Drowning of the Mendacious, Corrosive, Ironic Prison That For At Least Several Centuries Has Been Mass Meeja (anti-)Epistemology*
Every website should have a signal to noise ratio as metric to see if you want to click.
it’s all noise in here now mate, don’t flatter your witheringly witty self
Perhaps much of the time, though , sometimes noise gains a coherence and segues into symphony.
aye, very true…like a self-choreographing shoal of darting minnows becoming a leviathon. or a squillion firing synapses making a brain pattern that gets a body to do something useful. or 8 billion little babies squawking as one and so turning into Kubrick’s big interstellar one…or…or…*madly Googles ‘collective consciousness*…or [insert some or other additional, pre-existing metaphor that the internet spits up]
there are no new ideas. it’s all there already, somewhere. we just have to sit back a bit and plagiarise all the jigsaw bits into the next evolutionary coherent big picture. AI will figure it out faster than we can now.
I doubt it will click though.
“…a machine that’s done what they’ve always done…and, in most cases…better.” You’re kidding, right?
nope. ‘most’ recorded human information is…shit information. noise.
you would…dispute this?
I dunno. I kinda like it. Makes me smile.
We’re talking about AI and art right now, but what people need to understand is this: once enough unemployed or underemployed people(whose jobs were replaced by …)gain understanding of AI, we have no idea what that will unleash. Let me give you a glimpse of what might come. Not to mention when Quantum hits too!!
Right now, people are anxious and even panicking over memes or better laughing haha. But memes are just the beginning. Wait until average Joe starts using AI to analyze real data—pinpointing exactly where political influence comes from, tracking how public funds are misused or corrupted, and exposing who benefits while communities are left behind with evidence! No need for university….all at your fingertips! Now this is under establishment or academia.
Imagine living in Town A, which has no new school, no hospital, no working roads or trains for a long time—yet taxes from that town flow outward and never return but you have a cell tool in your hand. With AI, people can follow the money, connect the dots, and present evidence that no politician or corporation can easily deny. Multiple all cities. Everyone becomes their own researcher. Everyone holds the receipts. Voting won’t be necessary as live tracking of officials’ agenda becomes games for those unemployed but with enough internet skills ( anyone under 40).
That’s when memes stop being jokes and start becoming data-driven weapons—sharper and more impactful than traditional protests. We’re only scratching the surface of AI’s potential.
Right now, it’s a toy and we all laugh haha. Soon, it will be a tool of accountability and power in the hands of average Jane. First they laugh, then they cry, then they hide, then….
Yes scary but I bet I am even underestimating what is to come!
But if you ask it the wrong question? GIGO Will still win the day.
I would reference Douglas Adams, the answer was 42 because the wrong question was asked and the wrong question will always be asked and so life will continue as it has.
As for taxes going “astray”, they always have and they always will, we’re already pretty sure that, in the UK anyway, they flow into London and the south east but don’t flow out again but knowing that and being able to do much about it is a much bigger challenge.
AI doesn’t deserve the “I” bit anyway, it’s just statistical analysis on an enormous scale, that’s why it can do lots of things “in the style of” but nothing new.
Yes! most people misunderstand that if AI can be used as a weapon one way, it is just a matter of time before it is used as counter-weapon on its makers! people are clever! and you are right the “I” is interesting link!
“By Wednesday, Elon Musk was participating, a sure sign that whatever subcultural cache the trend might have briefly possessed had evaporated entirely“. I liked that bit. “Elon’s here – gotta go” should become everyone’s catchcry.
Creativity is most like humor. Machines don’t have a sense of humor. Although, it’s kinda funny to imagine how many of you will want to disagree.
hmm yeah i think you’re onto something here. who was it, martin amis….said all the greatest writers are funny. and that it’s profoundly hilarious that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English, and perhaps of/in all languages, too.
for that matter G_d is…nothing if not funny. cosmically speaking.