Peer pressure made me do it.
The picture attached is our Storywise RnD team. Cartoon version.
I uploaded a photo and let ChatGPT ‘cartoonize’ us. I’m the handsome guy with the silver hair (not grey – how dare you!) and the matching shoes.
Last week, everybody - literally everybody - was uploading photos and ‘Ghiblifying’ themselves. Even Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador. I think this trend was driven by the OpenAI launch of native image generation in the ChatGPT-4o model. During the demo, a presenter took a selfie of himself, his colleague and Sam Altman and then prompted ChatGPT to ‘Make it into an anime frame.’ The results were amazing but also sparked a lot of discussion around copyright considerations, especially since Studio Ghibli's co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki, has previously expressed disapproval of AI-generated art. It feels a bit like OpenAI were trolling him.
There is a great lesson here for the creative writing industry, particularly at this inflection point when Meta has been exposed for training its LLM (Lama) on thousands if not millions of books that were downloaded from Libgen, the piratebay of books.
Observation 1:
As a creative tool, the ability to edit photos and artwork using simple prompts is amazing. In just a week, I’ve used it multiple times both for both work related tasks and to amuse my family. I know I am borrowing styles that were created over many years by famous artists and illustrators. Weirdly though, I am also discovering them and I actually just rented a Studio Ghibli movie called Spirited Away to see what the fuss was about. Many others like me have been exposed to Ghibli illustrations for the first time. That seems like a big upside to me.
Observation 2
The creative process should always begins and end with the creator. When metamorphosing your work into something breathtaking or bizarre, the starting point is still the source material that you created. How it gets transformed into the best, most outlandish versions possible depends on you. Ghiblification lost steam after a few days, but the new image variations people are coming up with are even more amusing, imaginative and delightful.
Personally, I can’t wait to see the next iteration of AI tools.