Studio Ghibli and Sam Altman's Temper Tantrum

I am tired of writing about OpenAI and its open contempt for people who create things, but here we are, with another OpenAI led fad. This time, it is taking memes and photos and using imitative AI to make studio Ghibli like copies of them. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is doing this for no other reason than to harm the head of the studio, a man who is one of the public faces of AI opposition. It is tiresome and boring, the childish lashing out of an untalented, whiny little punk and in a just world, we would never have to hear this nonsense again.

Sam Altman is, in fact, a whiny little twerp. He recently tweeted, because of course it was a tweet, that he didn’t understand why so many people were so mean to him:

If Altman had been working on trying to cure cancer, people might hold him in a wee bit more respect. Of course, his funding might have been cut by DOGE because people who think like Sam Altman don’t give a shit about curing cancer for the rest of us. But Sammy didn’t spend a ton of time creating a cure for cancer, did he? Nope. He stole a bunch of IP from hardworking artists and then turned around and used that theft to create a machine that mimics their work. This is all blatantly morally wrong, and already found to be illegal. And for what? So, he can create chatbots that lie about the law, write less secure and accurate code, and maybe help you write an email? Oh, and create fads.

It is important to understand that the Studio Ghibli meme-fication is a fad. We have been here before — a few years ago, everyone was turning everything into Wes Anderson rip-offs. It was cute for a bit, but it faded. As will this. Because it is just a toy, not art, and people only play with one note, uncreative toys for so long. No one is using this to create art in any meaningful sense and so it will fade, to be replaced by another fad. Curing cancer, this is not.

And I am not going to argue with you about whether this is art or not. It is not. It can be fun, but merely copying things that other people have done, without actually adding your own skill, your own thoughts, your own emotion to the piece is not art. There is a reason that we hold forgers in contempt — they are adding nothing to art, merely making money off of other people’s work. Sound familiar? The world’s worst artist (me. This is me.) adds something to the work, no matter how derivative. Imitative AI merely copies. Studio Ghibli art is meaningful not because of its style, but because of the emotion the artist is intending to convey to the viewer and the way the art compliments and enhances the story. Cheap imitations can look cute, but they have no real emotional content, so they fade. Like the Wes Anderson imitations faded.

Altman knows this, and it seems to infuriate him. The fact that the head of Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, once said that AI tools were an insult to humanity explains why Altman is pushing Ghibli rather than some other form. It infuriates him that his imitative AI is not universally acclaimed as the same as real art. It prevents him from making money, and it upends his view of the world, where technologists are smarter and handsomer and better than everyone else. If you remember, Altman introduced the voice processing capability with a voice that was an imitation of Scarlett Johansson despite the fact that she explicitly denied the use of her voice. Altman could not stand that a creative person told him no, so he did whatever he could do to humiliate her, to insist that he has the power. Pushing Ghibli imitations is more of the same. It is the action of a tiny souled little twerp, stomping his foot in anger that the people he demands praise him see him for the, well, little twerp that he is.

Altman, in a just world, would never have been in position to allow his personality flaws such widespread airing. Imitative AI is an environmental disaster with no business plan, no route to improved AI, and little to no redeeming societal benefits. No normally functioning society would have let it get to this point. But since we live in a neo-feudalist late-capitalist society, all that matters is that rich people threw money at it in a desperate attempt to provide another business with exponential growth. Because we have turned away from democratic control of the economy, of society, really, we are forced to indulge these under-cooked children masquerading as geniuses.

Somewhere, deep in the part of his mind that he doesn’t allow himself to examine, Altman knows he is contemptible. He knows that people don’t like him not because they are jealous, but because he is a thief with contempt for human emotions and expression and that he is willing to destroy the planet to make himself a little bit richer. The push to get people to make Studio Ghibli imitations is a just another of his temper tantrums. Toddlers learn that nobody likes or rewards a temper tantrum, usually by the time they reach pre-school. I wonder how long it will take Altman to learn that lesson?