Okay. Let's say we find out tomorrow that Spirited Away was animated via generative AI. Unbeknownst to everyone, Ghibli has a top-secret AI division which—thanks to some key lucky breakthroughs—is many decades ahead of everyone else and has been for a long time. The animators are a front to hide the truth; Miyazaki's anti-AI declarations were pure jealousy.
You miss something critical here. For that to happen that GenAI would have had to be trained on another "Ghibli".
So your question isn't whether Ghibli had an AI, but whether Ghibli had a whole time traveling machine with it.
Your question feels like asking whether Einstein, Plato, etc. were secretly time travelers and copied someone else's style.
Something that is a general problem with all GenAI is that they copy and imitate. And just like with code being messy and dumb you'll find that Stable Diffusion in pieces of art does stupid and dumb stuff. Things it wasn't trained on. You can most prominently see that in big detailed fantasy (as in not just a photo) pictures, and looking at details. While the overall thing "looks cool" you don't get the details that artists do and you notice a lot of silly, dumb and what for a human author would be a "strange thing to invest time in and still do so badly" kind of situation.
I'd argue if we had AI in the sense that it had actually understood things and it could actually show creativity, etc. the story might be different, but as of today it is unknown whether that's possible. It would make sense, just like alien life would make a lot of sense. But for both actually thinking systems and alien life we have no clue how close we are to seeing one.
Every time someone takes an unbiased look at it (and there are many papers) it is shown that there is no understanding of anything, which to be fair is far from surprising given what the "training" (which is just a term that is an allegory and something that is kinda simulated, but also not really).
There might very well be hard and pretty obvious limitations, such as to feel and express like a human you need to be a human or provide away to simulate that and if you look at biology, anatomy, medicine, etc. you'll soon realize that even if we had technical means to do so we simply don't know most things yet, otherwise we could likely make Alzheimer, artificial brains, etc.
The topic then might be aside from all the ethical parts (when does something have human rights), whether a superhuman as all the futurists believe there will be even be able to create something of value to a regular human or are the experiences just too different. It can already be hard to get anything out of art you cannot relate to other than general analytical interest. However on that side of things Spirited Away already might be on the "little value" side.
This isn't to defend human creation per se, but to counter often completely off understanding of what GenAI is and does.
One final comparison: We already have huge amounts of people capable of reproducing Gibli and other art. Their work might be devalued (even though I'd assume some art their own stuff into their work).
People don't buy a Picasso, because they can't find a copy or a print that even has added benefits such as requiring as much care, being cheaper. Einstein isn't unimportant today, because you learn about his work in school or on Wikipedia.
But your question is like asking whether Einstein's work would be without value, if he secretly had Wikipedia.
> You miss something critical here. For that to happen that GenAI would have had to be trained on another "Ghibli".
Eh, maybe it got trained on Nausicaä, and then a lot of prompting and manual touch up work was used to adapt the style to what we now know as Spirited Away. Or maybe that animation department wasn't completely for show and they did draw some reference frames, but the AI figured out everything in between.
I don't really want to get into a discussion about the theoretical limits of AI, because I don't know what they are and I don't think anyone does. But if "the process is important for art," what happens if the creator lies about the process? If you initially experience the art without knowing about the lie, does learning the truth retroactively erase your previous experience? How does that make sense?
It has always seemed more logical to me that the final piece ought to be all that matters when evaluating art, and any details you know about the creator or process should be ignored to the greatest extent possible. That's difficult to do in many cases, but it can be a goal. I'm also aware that lots of people disagree with me on this.
Spirited Away is an intricate expression of Miyazaki's ethics as formed by his unique lived experience and nostalgia for classical Japanese culture, as well as a criticism of Western capitalist excess filtered through Shinto philosophy.
There is literally no universe in which a generative AI creates a work of art of that magnitude. You can get "make this meme is the style of Ghibli" from an AI and it can imitate the most facile properties of the style but that still requires the style to imitate. AI is never going to generate the genius of Hayao Miyazaki from first principles, that isn't even possible.
the process is not important for art, although it might have value for people. art is a subjective experience, one that comes to life in the obeserver.
I’ve worked for multiple companies and only one demanded I enroll my personal phone in their device management. I pushed back in a public channel and they reconsidered the policy. I left shortly after so not sure where that landed.
Everywhere else I’ve worked I’ve had slack/teams/email/pagerduty whatever on my personal device without issues. It hasn’t felt realistic to ask for a dedicated work device for that.
People are still eating them, they’re just people who weren’t willing to pay extra for non-antibiotic chickens.
There’s a withdrawal period for livestock medication for all slaughter, so no one should be eating animals that were recently medicated. IIRC it’s 30 days for LA200, the antibiotic I used for my flock.
I’m not sure, most of the people I know who like true crime/murder porn are not exactly “morose”. (But I do find their interest unsettling.)
When I was a kid, some teens who were into darker themes (not all but definitely some) had a phase where they were interested in serial killers. It always struck me more as shallow “edgy teen” posturing than anything else. After Columbine this demographic moved on to other interests, as even a performative interest in real-world violence could lead to official harassment.
> It always struck me more as shallow “edgy teen” posturing than anything else
Comment OP here: it was exactly this; the safest, most boring possible way to be transgressive. I didn't talk about it as much as other kids who were like this, so I didn't have to stop once people started to actually care/respond, but I did go from keeping my Harold Schechter books on my bookshelf to in a special box in my closet. Merely knowing about these things gave me a little secret thrill like I was some sort of badass with extreme psychic warding able to go into some secret space that most people couldn't stand. In reality I was just desensitized cuz abusive mom and I'm really glad I grew out of it before I got to the part some kids get to where learning isn't enough and they start experimenting.
