In Death of the Masterpiece, Istaara Amjad ’28 explores our ever-changing relationship to art in the modern world.

A Studio Ghibli film leaves you with a myriad of emotions: nostalgia, appreciation for the natural world, a sense of wonder evoked by the magical surrealism of its story. But in the back of your mind, there’s something else, too: the unnamed desire to place yourself into this world and lead an existence where the simplest moments can be cherished — in essence, to experience life as a Studio Ghibli character. 

On March 25, GPT-4o allowed people to realize this desire: OpenAI’s image-generating technology can now design images in the style of Studio Ghibli. The trend spread quickly in online spheres and brought the debate around artificial intelligence (AI)-generated art to the forefront. 

Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio founded in 1985, has become something of a global phenomenon. With visually stunning 2D animation and emotionally complex storylines, works like “My Neighbour Totoro,” “Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle” have garnered international acclaim. The studio continues to use largely hand-drawn animation, moving at a glacial pace by modern standards. In a 2020 interview, director Hayao Miyazaki shared that one minute of animation took the 60 animators at work for Ghibli’s newest film “How Do You Live?” a whole month to produce.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said “the democratization of creating content has been a big net win for society.” Perhaps these AI-generated works do empower social media users, allowing them to portray themselves and their loved ones in a new light and romanticize people or settings that would otherwise never have been found in a Studio Ghibli film. Could AI be a means to redefine the limits and prejudices of traditional art? 

To me, this trend points to our tendency to value art based on its superficial value to us. If art is something that I simply find beautiful, then there is no doubt that Studio Ghibli-themed AI art is “real” art. And if that beauty can be spread infinitely, then all the better, right? 

But where does our aesthetic consciousness come from in the first place? Why do we look at something and decide that it is beautiful? 

Studio Ghibli’s work has become synonymous with a sense of comfort, slow movement and an appreciation for the natural world. This is not incidental. The animators’ painstaking attention to detail and Miyazaki’s environmentalist and anti-war philosophy shape our viewings. Our perception of the work is based on the story the artists themselves are trying to tell. 

It is impossible to assign objective parameters to discriminate between good and bad art, the beautiful and the ugly. From Warhol’s experimental styles to Goya’s dark subject matter, society has granted a wide range of work the honor of being considered “good” art. It depends entirely on the context of the artist, their audience and the world around them; no quantification of technical mastery, aesthetic significance or apparent emotion can be useful. My best friend’s photography is masterful in my eyes but may be unremarkable to another. 

AI could generate good art — or even great art! It could match the technical skill of the most learned digital artist out there right now. But I struggle to define it as art. On a logical level, all that a machine learning model like ChatGPT can do is regurgitate the data that it has been trained on. Sure, even human artists learn from the works that have been created before them. However, there’s something to be said about the process of creation and the effort that someone goes through when they have something to say and must face the monumental task of saying it.  

One day soon, you may come across a piece of AI-generated art worthy of being hung in a museum, impossible to differentiate from art made by a human. At that point, does the difference matter? I would argue that it does. 

Creating something is the greatest act of vulnerability, of exposing your innermost self and hoping someone else will understand. If someone did not deem a work worthy of creating, I would not deem it worthy of appreciating: it is the only factor worth judging a creative work by. If someone believes that their loved one deserves to be portrayed with the beauty of a Studio Ghibli character or an outlandish idea must be visualized, then why not make the leap themselves — or employ one of the countless talented artists around them?

Altman claims that generative AI for creative purposes “lower[s] the barriers to entry.” Some mediums of creativity are certainly less accessible than others in terms of the cost of equipment and learning resources. Improving creative education is a worthy cause. But the continued persistence of art and expression in every time and circumstance, through poverty, authoritarianism, war and injustice, proves time and time again that, as Audre Lorde wrote, “poetry is not a luxury.”

The more we rely on machines to think, feel and create in our place, the less we are able to say for ourselves.