A friend sends me Christmas cards every year that feature cartoon versions of him and his wive. They hire an artist to create the images from photos that they have taken during the year. Now that it has become easy to generate such drawings using AI, I wonder if he will keep up the tradition.
Some of us don’t like how easy it is to re-create photos in the style of Studio Ghibli. We don’t value what’s free. When Jello was labor-intensive to make it was a delicacy and serving it a marker of status. Now, that it’s cheap and easy, no self-respecting restaurant has it on its desert menu. It’s the same for beautifully rendered drawings of ourselves and our loved ones.
Many people are reporting that their mental relationship to art is changing; that as fun as it is to Ghibli-fy at will, something fundamental has been cheapened about the original. Here’s someone describing their internal response to this cultural “grey goo.”
I agree it’s a problem, but only for those things that AI can generate, which is whatever a screen can show: Text, images, videos. AI cannot generate more complete experiences, like being in the same room than others and talking with them, physical love, exertion from sport, the pleasures of good food or being out in Nature. Maybe the silver lining is that we’ll value those things more.
Nehaveigur 