ChatGPT’s New Image Generator & The Ghibli-fication Controversy

💡Creativity Is Shifting from Craft to Concept

Have you tried ChatGPT’s new Image Generator? It is miles beyond DALL-E. Some of the things it can do include:

Consistent character generation across prompts
Simple edits without revising the whole picture
Text rendering without misspellings and warps (finally!)

And, of course, you can upload any photo with the prompt ‘Create image in Studio Ghibli style’ and instantly get a warm, friendly illustration:

Easy bonus points in your relationship. I sent these to my wife and she squealed with delight:

🤖 The Ghibli-fication of Memes

Twitter had a moment when this launched. Every few years, the timeline erupts with creativity over a shared experience. Someone would share a familiar meme, remixed in a beloved artistic style, and everyone rejoiced. Well, not everyone – some people got really upset.

🎥 Ghibli Memes Backlash

Read the rest of his long rant.

After this outpouring of gleeful creativity, there was a huge backlash of shame from people who say they are protecting the rights of artists and the virtue of art.

I’ve listened to their arguments, and considered their positions. I think they are wrong. Why?

Everything is a remix.

Are these images original? No.
Are they magical? Absolutely.
Is it theft? Not even close.

It was play — and play is sacred, too.

Art is a living thing. It evolves. Every generation, it bleeds into what comes next – and those too comfortable with what came before will shriek and stutter because they are not ready for change.

Just as cave drawings evolved into oil paintings, and oil into pixels, we now have diffusion models like DALL·E and Midjourney as the next creative palette. These tools have been trained on the work of artists who spent their lives perfecting a craft which is, I must say, becoming obsolete.

Creativity is shifting from craft to concept. Artists of the future will not have to spend a lifetime mastering a painstaking craft – those who excel will be those with the best ideas, not the best craftsmanship.

In my webinar Be More Human: Do the Work that Matters Most with Generative AI, I shared the 5-Step Creative Process:

In the future, artists will focus on sorting ideas, and polishing them. Artificial intelligence is so much better at craftsmanship, the artists of the future will learn how to be good collaborators. They won’t succeed by shaming and degrading the amateur artists who are using cutting-edge tools to express their creativity.

Ideation > craftsmanship. The hard part isn’t making pretty pictures anymore — it’s imagining the right ones.

Mike Tyson made a Ghibli version of himself because he could. He would never have gone out of his way to commission an artist to do this, but because the tools make it so easy, he indulged his creative spark.

GenAI gives more people access to visual storytelling, which used to require years of training and expensive tools. Now even Mike Tyson is an artist, so long as he doesn’t have to be a craftsman, too.

Is Studio Ghibli any lesser than before? I would argue that this revival has reminded thousands of people of their favourite Miyazaki films – Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service – and improved the cultural impact of the art studio.

When the next Studio Ghibli film hits theatres, do you think they will see more ticket sales, or less?

🛠️ Progressive Prompting

If you’re not getting good results in ChatGPT, try getting it to think a bit first. Try asking three progressive prompts in sequence, and you will see your results improve.

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