“I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves”. Hayao Miyazaki
AGI has been achieved. Artificial Ghibli Images. On May 25th, @sama announced the launch of a new update to OpenAI’s 4o model, with an improvement to the models image generating capabilities. People quickly realized that when providing the model with an image in it’s prompt, it is capable of applying a “style transfer” to it, allowing them to re-imagine their photos in any way they wished. Inevitably, we all settled on Anime styles, and the heart-warming and wonderous style of the Ghibli studio stood out as the most popular.
I think this was an incredibly fun time on twitter, but many pointed out the issues with copying the Ghibli aesthetic, because it went against Miyazaki-san’s own feelings on AI and automation of the human spirit. Many quoted a documentary where Miyazaki was shown a demo of an AI generated animation where a zombie comes to life and walks around in a disturbing and non lifelike way. Miyazaki was offended, saying to the engineers: “I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself”. Later, the producer asks the AI team their intentions, to where they respond “we would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do.” After this encounter and Miyazaki-san has returned to drawing, he says “I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves”.
Sit with that statement for a moment and consider, as a software engineer, where we are in the AI adoption cycle. We have “agents” that can generate pretty good code for routine tasks, but they can quickly go off the rails. It takes a human expert to guide it and correct it. They are very good at generating reams of code that looks right. It’s often very subtly wrong, but if you trust it and do not carefully inspect it, you could put bugs into production. The same can be said of human written code too, but what Miyazaki-san, and many other engineers worry about, is that we are losing faith in ourselves and handing over too much to a machine. In short, we are selling ourselves out and getting slop in return. I do believe the models are useful, and get better every day, but what do we lose when we adopt them? Is this the end of times?
I think we software engineers need to ask ourselves if we are using these AI code-gen tools because we don’t have faith in ourselves, or if we are just reacting to the high-demand for software in our modern world. I do not doubt the utility of these tools, but they do have an intoxicating appeal. In one sense, an reasonably trained engineer can now generate vast amounts of code necessary for creating a game, and they can focus on the artistic and creative aspects of bringing this experience to life, which requires many complicated layers of software to work in harmony to accomplish. Thus these tools make it almost as easy for anyone to pick up as it is to pick up a pencil and begin to draw on the page, with the same ease that someone would for making a drawing like Miyazaki-san. But as any game dev with a decade of experience would say, glossing over those layers of details inherent in that tech stack will only produce sloppy results and a meager experience at best. The beauty of a game inherently lies in those little details, just as each frame in a Miyazaki film was a drawing that may have taken hours to finish. The heroic effort that we put into our work, even the smallest details, is an act of faith in the human spirit. Are we giving that all away?
We are at a time where we must grapple with the duality of the utility of these AI tools and the potential loss of our own faith in ourselves, and in the human spirit.
What is the true cost of these tools? Diminishing the abilities of humans, and accelerating our proliferation of addiction enabling tools and services. Are we the greedy parents in Spirited Away, lured by the buffet? Have we already become pigs, or is it not too late to save ourselves?
I’m a huge Miyazaki fan. I cherished his films ever since I first encountered them as a child. I feel like as an art style, the “Ghibli” style has been imitated for a long time since it’s incredibly popular. As an artist myself, I am always torn when I see another artist copy someone’s style. They say “imitation is the most sincere form of flattery”, and I think that applies to the fun that we were all having on twitter yesterday.
Seeing everything re-imagined in a Ghibli style was a wondrous feeling, a feeling that the world was a little more beautiful than it had been before. After being glued to the twitter feed all day, I walked outside and the world felt fresh and new, almost as if my eyes had inherited the ability to make the same style transfer operation on my optical inputs. Or maybe it was just a beautiful spring day.
I hope that Miyazaki-san would at least understand that the proliferation of Ghibli-styled images is out of good intentions –intentions of love and admiration for his work– and not be upset. I also hope that he lives a peaceful life detached from the things going on on the internet, and doesn’t have a care for it at all.
Note: I wrote this 3/27 and looking at it in 6/3 I realize it already feels somewhat outdated. But the essence is still there. Don’t loose faith in yourself.