ChatGPT’s new image generation is incredibly good. Too good. You can see it in the thousands of Ghibli-ified photos all over the social web. Hayao Miyazaki is going to come out of retirement again to tell us how we’ve all lost the plot on creativity.
When we look back on this moment, it will be a clear turning point for AI. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. AI will transform nearly everything, including art. What does this mean for us?
In a previous life, I thought for sure I would be an animator. I studied CS in school but I was already coding professionally, burned out on my CS classes, so I switched gears to study art instead. I applied to CalArts and was rejected. I worked on short films in my spare time. But life happens, and I’ve been happy with my career as a software developer.
The animation industry has seen several significant technological progressions. I remember watching The Great Mouse Detective in the movie theater when I was 10 years old. The 3D-animated gears in the clock tower scene were stunning. Today, I remember the characters, and I remember that scene, but not much else. Blending 2D and 3D was clearly something new, obvious even to a kid.
Going back further, before 3D animation, much of the progress was related to the ink and paint department:
- In the 1940s, women at Disney would trace the animator’s drawings onto cels with ink, then paint the other side in color. It’s a tragic bit of history that many of these women were very talented artists and should have been allowed to be animators.
- In the 1960s, drawings were Xerox-ed directly onto cels, eliminating the tracing and cleanup in ink.
- In the 1990s, hand-drawn coloring was replaced with CAPS at Disney, developed in partnership with Pixar, making the ink and paint department completely digital.
Toy Story ushered in a new era of 3D animation, where everything on screen was generated with a computer. Hand-drawn art was still needed, for concept art, character design, and storyboards. And we still love hand-drawn animation. This year’s Oscar-winning short film is a beautiful traditionally animated film.
So is AI-generated art just another step on this progression? No. It is profoundly different.
We should mourn the loss of what AI replaces, even as we make room for what’s to come. I’m both sad and excited. It is bittersweet.
If we try to hold on to the way the world was before the ChatGPT update this week, it will slip through our fingers. Instead, I’m thinking of how we can use this tool to expand what is possible. Lean into what makes art uniquely human.
There is precedent for using technology to strengthen the human element in art. By Xerox-ing the pencil lines directly on to cels in the 1960s, the ink and paint department no longer needed to trace a character’s outlines with pen, where subtle changes in line quality might be lost. Animators embraced the Xerox change because their original pencil lines were preserved exactly as intended on screen. It was not only a cost savings, it was a return to a more authentic version of the animator’s intent.
That is what we must look for. Not what we’ve lost, but what we’ve gained. There will be a way to create something extraordinary with this technology. I don’t know what it is yet.
And there will always be a place for human art. Vincent van Gogh’s paintings are not valuable because of what they look like. They are unique and priceless because of who he was. A life, with all its struggle, love, and tragedy.
AI can be creative when it hallucinates. But we don’t value AI creativity the way we value human creativity. AI is a blob of bits and vectors and tokens without soul. It’s a tool for us to do something with.
When my wife and I moved to the new house this year, I framed the original drawings I have of Scrooge from Mickey’s Christmas Carol. They cannot be recreated by the most advanced AI because they represent something bigger, capturing a moment in time and a film that will be watched for decades to come. I don’t actually know which animator drew them. But I know it was a great artist who — like Hayao Miyazaki — left their mark on the world in a way that AI never can.
