How about "Ghiblify" your mortal souls before it's too late

ChatGPT's latest gimmick doesn't celebrate art, it misunderstands the concept entirely

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A post shared by @whitehouse

Last week, the official White House account posted the above image on Instagram and Twitter (and I’m assuming Facebook, Truth Social, 4chan, and truck stop restrooms everywhere) — an AI-generated, Studio Ghibli-inspired depiction of

“Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking… arrested by @icegov in Philadelphia after illegally reentering the U.S. She wept when taken into custody.”

Now, two months into a second Trump administration that’s already said “hold my beer” to all the incompetent cruelties of the first one, very little surprises me anymore. Leaked group chats? Turning 1600 Penn into a car dealership? Old hat! I can’t even say I’m surprised by the image above, likely pitched then published by some 24-year-old aspiring Hitler Youth three hours into a K-hole. “She wept when taken into custody” — tell me you’ve got a boner without telling me you’ve got a boner!

But I am disgusted by the sight of Studio Ghibli’s (and of course Hayao Miyazaki’s) iconic animation style, filtered through unfeeling, mercenary AI and then used to celebrate deportation¹. Not only is it cruel as shit — it’s fucking tacky, and clarifies for me several things I’ve long felt about AI “art”:

1. that it’s an easy fascist tool in its ability to steal, obfuscate, and flatten

2. that it’s an oxymoron, considering there’s literally no art in it at all

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Hand-drawn still from ‘Princess Mononoke’, which took Hayao Miyazaki and his team five years to make

"I feel strongly that [AI] is an insult to life itself" - Hayao Miyazaki

Let’s back up for a second. The most charitable thing I could say to someone actively using AI tools toward creative ends — to generate visual art, to write a script, to make a whole movie — is that they’re robbing themselves of a meaningful experience. I’m able to banish from my head for a second any apocalyptic fears of decimated economies and worker replacement and just focus on the simple fact that, in incorporating the assistance of a high-powered plagiarism machine to try and accomplish an artistic task, you are in fact negating the very purpose of art, which is to express something human.

The AI “Ghiblification” trend that exploded last week, prompted by OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT, demonstrated that your average person isn’t thinking of it this way. And I’m not sure I blame them! We’ve been conditioned on at least a decade now of FaceTuning and FaceMashing and Oldifying ourselves, whatever service, that I don’t think most people are even truly aware they’re using AI, just the latest in a long line of easy filters. Who does it hurt if I Ghiblify my wedding photos, or Ghiblify the “This is Fine” dog, or even Ghiblify 9/11?

This trend, which will have already died out by next week (yesterday was LIBERATION DAY, people, we’ve got bigger cataclysmic fish to fry), isn’t going to put Studio Ghibli out of business. If anything it shines a bigger light on Miyazaki and Co., their endless ingenuities both tangible and intangible that even the most advanced AI models will never be able to recreate (and we can only say recreate, because actual creation is in fact outside the bounds of AI programming)!

And yet it’s still deeply insulting, especially for the way it flies in the face of everything Ghibli stands for. This is an artist-driven studio that, over forty years, has produced genre- and era-defining animated features. ‘My Neighbor Totoro’, ‘Spirited Away’ — movies celebrating human connection and imagination². Many of them written and directed by Miyazaki himself; almost all of them hand-drawn, painstakingly, over years and years.

His quote up there, by the way, is from a 2016 documentary, in which a team of AI developers showed the artist some of their work: a nightmare creature dragging itself across the floor.

“After taking a moment to gather his thoughts, [Miyazaki] delivered one of the most scathing critiques of AI-generated art. ‘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.’”

…So of course that’s exactly what OpenAI did!

Best case scenario, what should any technology help us accomplish? I suspect I’m not alone in thinking this might have something to do with medicine, with the environment, with achieving some measure of peace and happiness both for ourselves and the broader world. Right? Making our lives easier such that we have more time to… well, enjoy our lives! To do things that reinforce, not deny, our humanity. So tell me why a billion dollar company like OpenAI sets its sights, almost exclusively now, on colonizing the creative arts?

“Move fast and break things” has long been the unofficial motto of Silicon Valley and now, with Elon Musk (and Peter Thiel-backed JD Vance, so… Peter Thiel) and the whole DOGE family up in the White House, you’ve got an administration applying that same ethos to federal governance. To run down the list of frequently criminal “oopsies!” they’ve generated these past two months would be redundant and crazy-making³. The simplest summary is that this administration only knows how to target and retaliate. These are men without ideas or solutions, just grievance and an endless hunger for credit. Sounds a lot like AI boosters on Twitter! I’m not saying that artless, dickless tech bros asking ChatGPT to “do ‘Severance’ like it’s ‘Princess Mononoke’” are directly responsible for our steady descent into fascism. I am saying these two movements go hand in hand.

The AI rallying cry I see on Twitter that most boils my blood is some version of “now art is accessible for everyone.” For starters, this is among the most easily refuted claims in human history. Bitch, was something stopping you from drawing on the cave walls?!? Beyonce may have a small fiefdom of nannies, assistants, and minders helping her navigate her professional life, but as the coffee mug says:

You want to draw? To write? To make a movie? Fucking do it, dude, no one was stopping you. Life is hard; life also feels better when you try. Bemoan all you want the mean people who don’t take your seriously, who can’t see your genius, who are trying to keep you down and deny your creativity which you’d really like to lean into if only you had the tools. I’ll implore the Sacred Text here (‘The Social Network’, 2010) and remind you

(No small irony to be celebrating Mark Zuckerberg here, even a fictionalized version of him, when he’s pumping just as much AI bile into the Meta-verse⁴ as Sam Altman and Co.)

What is Art? Pt. 27

The thing that none of these guys understands, because they’ve literally never thought about it, is that Art®️ — define this however you want — is not in fact about the product (Lois Griffin with huge cans and also she’s a Minion) but the impulse. You want to say something; you just want to make something, however long it takes you. Your relationship to the work is what defines it, not the thing itself.

Hell, it could even be a tribute to a pre-existing work, as is the target of so much AI enthusiasm! When I was a sophomore in college, I was lucky enough to get to see Picasso’s ‘Bullfight, 1934’ at the Guggenheim in New York. Here’s the original:

Being a professional student with tons of time on his hands⁵, I was able to hang out in front of the painting for a while and sketch. Here’s my pencil version:

Genuinely not bad! The scale’s a little wonky, it’s missing some details, but the overall thrust of it feels authentic to the original. This took close to two hours, staring closely at oil-painted bull testicles as tourists dressed in 2005 garb⁶ consistently filed past.

Later, for reasons I still don’t understand, I decided that what I really needed to do was color my sketch in, and do so as tediously as possible. So I opened Apple Preview⁷ and, over the course of multiple sessions that in the end wound up totaling something like 7-8 hours, generated this:

“Bullfight, 2008” - Henning Fog, Apple Preview

Now, what I drew, the product itself, that’s not art! At best it’s loving homage, made with no shortage of effort but also no real risk, which is obviously baked into the original. But I’m still proud of this — whatever this, as an exercise, is — and I share it less fishing for compliments on my beginner-level sketching talent⁸ than reminding myself what it felt like to just… do something, anything, the strongest goal in retrospect probably some sort of pen and paper communion with one of the greatest painters of all time. If you truly, truly wanted to celebrate Studio Ghibli, you would pick up your own godamn pen and do the same!

1. I suppose I should state, for the record, that Lifting Fog does NOT condone fentanyl trafficking, cheering it on as some vanguard of Woke Culture. Maybe Lifting Fog patron George Soros is cool with it, but not me!

2. And, not for nothing, consistently banging the drum on environment destruction! AI is a noted resource-guzzler

3. which of course is the whole point of Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” philosophy

4. not to be confused with the metaverse, abandoned

5. which is the same thing as being unemployed, you just have more of an excuse

6. puka shells?

7. not even MS Paint! Genuine amateur hour over here

8. obviously this is one of the reasons I share it