🌎 The controversial Ghibli-style AI trend
We are at a turning point for the future of creativity.
Hey Freethinkers,
My first job when I moved to Los Angeles in my mid-20s was working reception at an animation studio. It specialized in fairly simple 2D animation — the kind you see used for a lot of Saturday morning kids’ shows — and a seasoned animator could generally produce about a minute’s worth of animation per week.
Studio Ghibli is an entirely different beast.
While my coworkers were doing all of their animating on computers, the Tokyo-based studio specializes in hand-drawn animation, and bringing its lush art to life is a time-consuming, painstaking process — a four-second-long scene in one of its films took an animator 15 months to complete.
Over the past couple of weeks, social media has been flooded with images that look like the work of Studio Ghibli’s artists, but that were actually generated in mere seconds by AI. This week, a new Freethink op-ed explores what this development means for the future of creativity and the role of humans in it.
Also on deck: Freethink Voice Peter Leyden revisits three periods in American history that bear striking similarities to what we’re seeing in the nation today — and that could help us know what to expect in the coming years.
Read on,
Kristin
FREETHINK FEATURES
The artifact isn’t the art: Rethinking creativity in the age of AI
Mere hours after OpenAI unveiled its latest image generator, engineer Grant Slatton took to X to show how he’d prompted the AI to recreate an image of his family in the style of Studio Ghibli. Soon, so many people were Ghibli-fying their own images that it was “melting” OpenAI’s GPUs, according to CEO Sam Altman. The trend brings to the forefront questions about creativity that have been lurking in the shadows ever since the start of the generative AI era, and in his new op-ed for Freethink, NYU Stern professor Ashish Bhatia shares his answers to them.
IN THE KNOW
Dire wolves are back. Sort of.
By @colossal on X
Dire wolves roamed North America for more than 100,000 years before succumbing to extinction around the end of the last Ice Age. This week, Colossal Biosciences announced that it has “resurrected” the species — or something like it, at least. Using cutting-edge CRISPR technology and ancient dire wolf DNA, the startup modified the genomes of grey wolves to produce three pups that look — and sound — a lot like they belong to the species that went extinct 10,000 years ago. The startup’s hope is that it’ll be able to use techniques developed for the dire wolf project to protect species on the brink of extinction, like the endangered red wolf.
MORE ON THIS STORY
FREETHINK VOICES
America is going through its every-80-year reinvention
by Peter Leyden
America is at a crossroads. Advanced AIs, cheap renewables, efficient bioengineering tools, and other transformative technologies are ready to scale up and reinvent the nation in the process. As unprecedented as this moment feels, though, it’s not the first time the US has faced such radical change. In the latest edition of his Freethink Voices series, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, Peter Leyden details three other times in America’s history when it was at a similar crossroads — and strangely, they always happen 80 years apart.
WORTH SHARING
The next era of psychedelics may be precision-designed states of consciousness
Psychedelic drugs — LSD, DMT, psilocybin, etc. — temporarily alter a person’s perception of reality, causing them to see, hear, or feel things that don’t exist. Evidence suggests the drugs may also have a positive lasting impact on mood and mental health, but translating them into medical treatments is tricky given that we still know so little about how they work. In a new feature for our sister site, Big Think, journalist Saga Briggs talks to a startup using AI to clear up some of the mystery.
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