ChatGPT plays Ghibli well: Will genuine originality suffer?
- This OpenAI chatbot’s successful role as an artist raises questions of GenAI ethics and creative value. Given its potential market impact and economic effects, it’s time for human clarity on originality.
Ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, this chatbot has wormed its way into every other conversation with its wonders of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Over the past week, an online frenzy to post photos in the animation style of Japan’s Studio Ghibli has seen this tool’s usage surge.
If people aren’t ‘ghiblifying’ their photographs—feeding a picture into ChatGPT, i.e., and getting imagery that mimics the beautifully hand-drawn style of Hayao Miyazaki’s iconic studio—they’re busy debating the pros and cons of doing so. Some bemoan a loss of creativity and view it as open plagiarism, while others envision art being democratized by this embrace of technology and celebrate the fun it inspires.
Neither side will win this argument, which is as old as the printing press, if not older.
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Ethical concerns about the use of GenAI remain, the biggest being whether art produced by humans is fair game for AI models to be trained on. It also raises questions about the meaning of ‘original’ art and what GenAI means for creativity. How these are resolved could have a bigger impact than it may seem at first brush.
If art and creativity take a blow from GenAI adoption, the after-effects could run deep and wide. While the popular image of an artist as a person with a paint-brush and easel persists, creative industries encompass everything from advertising, gaming, performing arts and fashion design to craft, publishing and cinema.
Apart from their pursuit of lofty purposes, such as effecting a shift in view that makes the world a better place, artistic efforts generate hard economic value. Unesco estimated in 2022 that ‘culture and creativity’ account for 3.1% of global GDP and 6.2% of all employment.
The creative sector holds high potential but is also highly vulnerable. It is often overlooked by investors, as Unesco’s Reshaping Policies for Creativity report notes. Often, funding decisions are taken by managers with low empathy for human artists and their humane motivations, so GenAI output that masquerades as art may worsen the earning prospects of artists and cause job losses.
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In any case, art projects often depend on the patronage of those who ‘get it.’ While private patrons do exist, thankfully, state funding has always been scarce in a country that seems obsessed with science and technology, leaving the creative sector in their shadow.
A 2024 UNCTAD report ranks India among the world’s top 10 exporters of creative goods, with exports of $21 billion in 2022. While this report counts video games, some kinds of software and recorded media as creative products, jewellery and fashion accessories form the bulk of that figure.
Creativity, of course, is medium-agnostic. It is also born of original thinking, the very magic behind a country’s yen for innovation. For the Indian economy to excel in research and development, a premium must be placed on originality in every sphere. If the arts flourish, creativity and value generation could feed off each other.
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Yet, the arts seem at the mercy of a market that risks losing its ability to discern genuine novelty apart from a digital copy, and thus also its capacity to reward the real thing.
As for originality, the claim that AI could beat humans by learning more is suspect. Chatbots spout what they’ve been fed, and even if they remix it well, they lack the sentience needed for art. True human expression springs from the lived experience of being wholly human. By this axiom on the origin of art, no android or AI ‘artist’ can be expected to make the cut.
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