Create image
My LinkedIn feed is full of people posting about the new ChatGPT–4o image generation capabilities.
If you follow any aspect of AI and tech, your feed will probably be like mine – full of Studio Ghibli-style memes, as well as examples of graphic design, data visualisation, and image editing capabilities. Where the examples are still not perfect, they’re undoubtedly impressive. And it’s important to remember that these technologies will keep getting better. What we’re seeing now is the worst they will ever be.
As well as creating a convincing Ghibli-style portrait, ‘create image’ can turn me into a Greek statue, or change the context of an existing picture, placing me into a new detailed context and scene. You need to be a paying OpenAI customer to test this out more, but the free service will let you experiment with it. This does feel like a big step on from early AI image generation – which I thought was impressive at the time.
More difficult questions to answer…
As this Forbes article explains, the surge of Studio Ghibli-inspired images goes against the philosophy of the legendary animation studio and director Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki has also criticised AI’s role in animation.
To be clear, this is AI trained and copied directly from an artist’s personal style and life work. It has re-ignited the debate about AI using copyrighted materials and what this means for the future of human artists and creativity.
Since first experimenting with AI images, I’ve not been comfortable using them. The quality justified that, even without the environmental costs, and the question of copyright and the impact of artists having their work stolen.
But, there are now better examples of AI being used within an IP, without breaking copyright… Like the AI Coca-Cola Christmas advert in December 2024 – I wrote about this at the time.
In summary here, quality is now much less of an argument around AI image generation and how this feeds into film and animation. Undoubtedly, this also changes professions like graphic design (which was my original design training and work as a junior designer).
We are seeing game-changing technology. However, we’re left with many unanswered questions beyond what the technology can now do. The most important being: what should we be using this technology for? And, what do we lose in terms of art and real creativity because of it?
I’ve deliberatively not used AI images in this post, and you still won’t find me using them on this blog for now.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.