Artificial Ghibli Intelligence
What happens when _everything_ becomes imitation? I only have questions.
Two days ago OpenAI upgraded the GPT4-o image model.
Social media is spirited away.
It has remarkable prompt coherence. Renders text exceedingly well. And of course perfects style transfer.
Redraw my wedding photo in the style of Pixar Animation 
Of course copyright concerns mount. And there is murkiness.
The Bitter Lesson
But its also a vivd reminder of the bitter lesson.
For those not familiar its sharp and clear. In AI, simple powerful computation outperforms carefully crafted human intuition—every single time.
We've learned this repeatedly.
Speech and vision.
Each time, breakthroughs come not just from nuanced complexity but from raw compute.
Simple yet profound techniques carry AI forward, relentlessly. Moore’s law ensures this march never slows, steadily rendering intricate human-designed methods irrelevant.
Consider two insights:
First, general methods always prevail. They scale effortlessly. Vast computations, flowing through search and learning, sweep away hand-crafted intricacies. Human cleverness fades.
Second, complexity can't be neatly imposed. Minds—realities—are boundlessly intricate, infinitely surprising. We falter when embedding our limited insights. Better to craft meta-methods, tools that reveal complexity independently, discovering depth we couldn’t foresee.
“The earth knows longing for the rain, the sky/knows longing…” And the world longs to create what will come to be. I tell it “I share your longing.” — X.21
And so we arrive at this moment
I used to struggle to bend Midjourney to my creative will—a prime example of a first mover impacted by this bitter lesson.
But yesterday, I sat transfixed, generating as many images as my queue would allow. The ability to conjure visual art in any style, simply by providing a precise description, felt intoxicating.
But I also began to wonder while simultaneously holding back the notion “all art is to some extent imitation”…
What is the value of art when originality completely blurs.
What happens when everything becomes imitation?
I don't think we know the answer to that yet.
But I do know that I can be moved by a song or painting even if a machine helped create it.
I certainly can appreciate software built with AI.
I imbue images with meaning and emotion through my own perception. But this realization leads me to deeper questions:
When does the balance tip?
How many generations before imitation finally devours originality?
What happens when painters and illustrators step aside, replaced by prompts and parameters?
Is this another Baudelaire moment, railing against photography as "art's most mortal enemy"?
Will artists retreat to new territories as painters did post-camera—finding realms AI cannot touch?
Or are we approaching some asymptotic creative horizon? History often rhymes.
I expect we’ll soon see labels like "100% human-made" displayed proudly in galleries—a badge of artisanal authenticity amidst algorithmic abundance.
Perhaps, as some have suggested—and I tend to agree—creativity itself is transforming. Less about technical execution, more about vision and curation.
Will tomorrow's artists become conceptual directors rather than craftspeople? Guiding intelligent machines instead of wielding brushes?
And what about trust in this new visual landscape?
When every image might be a fabrication, what anchors will remain?
The canvas stretches strange and uncertain before us—neither empty nor filled, but vibrating with possibility.
Are we losing something profound or gaining unimaginable creative freedom?
Both, I suspect.
This mirror reflects not just our styles, but our deepest questions about creation itself.
And perhaps through that reflection, we might discover facets of creativity we've not yet imagined.