I think this article entirely misses the mark and misrepresent the article it itself quotes by Erik Hoel re: Ghibli.
It's not about making something that used to be difficult and scarce (obtaining lapis lazuli for creating the ultramarine pigment) into something that is readily available (synthetic ultramarine), but about saturation and cheaping of semantic meaning.
Studio Ghibli's movies are not valuable because they are scarce, they are valuable because there's meaning and joy in them that is not for instant gratification or cheap meme-making. Flooding the internet discourse with Ghibli memes is not "making the scarce more available", it's producing knock-offs that have the potential to saturate our collective minds and make them "inured" against the real Ghibli.
It's not about being a luddite or rejecting technological progress, it's about not wishing to see our culture destroyed with noise that drowns everything else. And yes, pop culture IS culture.
By the way, it's not about Ghibli, TFA-within-TFA also mentions Nabokov, just in case someone goes "I didn't like Ghibli to begin with, so what?".
The words I had in mind were 'dilution', and 'cheapen'. I also recalled Miyazaki's stance on GenAI (he detests it) and thought one couldn't come up with a better stunt to insult him than by flooding the Internet with imitations of his work.
One could say that it also raised awareness of Ghibli movies to people who didn't know them (and I know quite a few who never heard of him). So I'm not sure it's all black. On a different angle, it shows how silly humanity is and thirsty for models has become - and let's all now make Ghibli pictures because it's cool is just the latest tiktok dance, performed by some who claimed they'd never dance on tiktok.
I think it does change things by how you are introduced to things and what parts of culture you associate it with.
I have the upmost respect for Bill Waterson for not merchandizing Calvin and Hobbes and the cultural memory of the work is better for it imo.
>Flooding the internet discourse with Ghibli memes is not "making the scarce more available", it's producing knock-offs that have the potential to saturate our collective minds and make then "vaccinated" against the real Ghibli.
I feel like this claim rests upon several unstated claims that don't seem rigorously proven. What does it take for an art style to be "saturated" in culture? What would it mean for a brain to be "vaccinated" against it?
Hoel presents the case of semantic satiation, the idea that the repeated use of a word leads to a loss of meaning and a preoccupation with the syntax and structure of the word itself, as an analogue. But semantic satiation is a very short term effect. Having once engaged in semantic satiation does not permanently make words lose their meanings.
Similarly, I am really skeptical this short term fad of using OpenAI's current image model to replicate Ghibli's work will permanently cheapen the semantic meaning of Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away. Hoel quotes a twitter user that apparently feels this way, but I really think people are being hyperbolic about a short term experience. Having not been on twitter much the last week, I've only been dimly aware of the phenomenon and I would guess that it won't even make it to May as a mass phenomenon, though I'm sure a handful of people will remain obsessed with it. I just don't see how that could ruin a great work of art either for me or for the culture at large.