‘New pathways’
Last week, I went to see the 4K restoration of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Princess Mononoke in a shabby big-chain IMAX theatre in the Baltimore suburbs. After throwing down $150 for tickets and concessions for four, we sat through 20 minutes of blaring soft-drink ads and trailers for Hollywood’s latest formulaic offerings — including a Jack Black/Jason Momoa vehicle based on the videogame Minecraft and a shot-for-shot live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon (a movie only 15 years old).
Then the theater darkened to reveal Miyazaki’s strange and gorgeous tale: Prince Ashitaka, the scion of a dying clan that lives in harmony with nature, becomes fatally infected by a hateful demonic spirit. He goes on a quest to find the source of his possession and to mend a rift between nature and man, in a world filled with humans hungry for the raw materials of the forest and the giant animal gods fighting to protect it. The film’s action is unsettlingly violent, its landscapes intricately layered, its imagery often dreamlike — and all of it was drawn by hand by the animators at Studio Ghibli, which Miyazaki founded. Miyazaki himself drew or retouched 80,000 of the film’s 144,000 animation cells, working to the point of exhaustion.
I realized that I may have been engaging in a dying tradition: Enjoying art out in public with other people — and enjoying art made by people.
Last week, OpenAI released a new ChatGPT-4o feature allowing anybody to make images of themselves, of famous sports stars, of bawling deportees (one of many images created by the Trump administration), all in Miyazaki’s iconic anime style. The internet trend raised questions about how the technology would transform the work of animators — and I wondered what art colleges are telling students about their craft and their futures.
Deborah Obalil, the president and executive director of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design, says she has heard reactions that run the gamut “from complete fear that this is going to replace what they do and how they’ve learned to do things to excitement at another toy to play with.”
When photography was invented, painters decried the mechanical process of capturing an image. “You would have thought you were reading about AI today,” Obalil says. Obviously, photography hasn’t replaced painting as an art form, but has become an art form in itself. The same thing could happen with AI — the distinction being whether artists “insert themselves into the process” to manipulate images in unexpected ways, she says. “They’re not simply putting in a prompt, getting an image, and then presenting that as their own work.”
Obalil says that art-and-design institutions are responding to AI in various ways, depending on the discipline. “Some faculty are embracing AI and encouraging students to experiment,” she points out, while others allow using AI as part of the research process but do not allow AI images in final work. “The same way large language models will hallucinate and return false information, image generators can return designs that are impossible to construct. That matters a lot in some disciplines and not at all in others. Like other technological changes, curriculum will evolve as industry expectations do.”
What AI means for copyright, how artists get paid, and whether they can control the use of their unique artistic style is a whole other matter. When shown an early version of AI animation in a 2016 documentary, Miyazaki famously told the dumbfounded software developers that he felt “utterly disgusted” by the computer’s rendering, calling it “an insult to life itself.” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who did not ask Studio Ghibli for permission to mimic its aesthetic (and who has a history of using images and likenesses without permission), called ChatGPT’s image generator a “net win” for society that allows more people to create.
Issues of ownership and payment aren’t new to artists, either — and they’re complicated. Artists are often the people who are “pushing the edge” of copyright, says Obalil, borrowing images or sounds and remixing them into new statements, new pictures, new music.
People will always paint, draw, or otherwise create for personal expression and satisfaction. If AI shuts down some routes to a career for artists — particularly around the production of images for commercial use — perhaps artists will find other ways to get paid for their work, by convening people and creating community or helping people heal.
“There’s a growing recognition, particularly on the medical and mental-health side, of the impacts on us as humans in positively creating and engaging with art and other creative forms, and I think that is going to continue to grow,” says Obalil. “There’ll be new pathways that open up, as perhaps some of the more production-related artistic pathways don’t necessarily close down, but shrink as an employment piece.”
