'Ghibli AI Trend is Superficial' | Opinions on What makes art valuable?

The trend of Studio Ghibli AI images has grown overnight with the new feature in Chat GPT where a picture can be transformed within minutes with a prompt instead of artists having years of experience spending days to create one.

One perspective can be , "Yeah it's fun that people can create them and can just enjoy the end results". That is what has been done. We step in prediscovered/invented technologies and step forward to solve bigger problems. The same has been with calculators, radios, computers, cooking utensils and many others.

An art is valuable not only on what it does to its viewer but also to the creator. An artist while creating art becomes divine. They connect with time and make something truly stunning. People see the work of Hayao Miyazaki as hard work and so does Hayao Miyazaki himself. But I believe he loves it. Hard work of creation is never a struggle for an artist. People see his hardwork, praise him but don’t see the beauty of the hard work he has invested.

Life is just life. The hook of our break can slip any time and our whole idea of ‘mine’ and owning up things becomes a joke. Living life isn’t about trying to rush and run for cheap thrills. A person can create a Ghibli style image within a few minutes. They can share it on their socials but a person drawing a Ghibli style image is about living. It’s about observing the soft blend, about color and living the moment they are drawing with every rub on the paper. The mindfulness the artist feels and the journey, adventures that come makes it beautiful.

“Style”, everything has its own style (manner of action). This article that you are reading right now has its own style. AI can grab it and make a piece of writing in this style precisely but a person doing it will feel the mindfulness, will feel the impact on their subconscious. The process will make the writer live in that moment. To feel productive, to feel happy and most importantly a sense of self-love and expression.

Art is a way of self-love and living life. It’s not meant to be perfect, it’s not meant to be ‘style’ and it’s not meant to be concluded within minutes. A handcrafted dress can have unstitched parts, unparalleled stitching or unsymmetrical design but its value lies on the energy the tailor made with. The energy of love, time, hard work that the cloth holds.

Yes, art is beautiful but it’s not only beautiful because of its result but the fact that the artist was a human being who did it by embracing and loving it. A poem by AI can be far more well structured than a human being but the thoughts, time, experiences, imaginations the human went through will make him/her calm, peaceful, self-reflective, add life to him/her and the poem itself.

We have been the supreme creature and it’s only a matter of time something living/dead comes with more hands and legs and outsmart us, So maybe it’s not only about being born as living, maybe it’s not about being ‘faster’, ‘efficient’, ‘productive’. Technology will progress and the set of what we are capable of will grow (and there is nothing wrong in it) but ‘Studio Ghibli’s art’ isn’t only the images at the end just because it’s tangible, it's the life artists get and give while making it.

The trend can be tried but if Ghibli’s art was valued properly it could have been a trend with more fun and memories rather than a superficial trend. I guess at the end ghibli is also about hand drawn drawings.

I believe the ghibli style trend of people actually trying to draw a true ghibli style drawing and showing their journey. Maybe that way Hayao Miyazaki could have added a smile on his face.