AI filters don't replace art any more than instant ramen replaces food
Reducing Studio Ghibli to an AI filter shows everything wrong with how we now see art and creativity
Zeitgeist is a series of essays tracing the intricate connections between tech, culture and human experience.
A couple of days ago, OpenAI released a new ChatGPT model capable of turning any picture into a specific art style. Since then, my Twitter timeline has been flooded with hundreds of posts of people turning their photos into “Studio Ghibli artwork”. The problem is twofold. One, the new model is obviously capturing a style with no sense of narrative or storytelling that Studio Ghibli is known for. Two, some of these art styles aren't even Studio Ghibli—more like watercolour and pastel—which shows people don't even know what defines Studio Ghibli's art style.
This zeitgeist is perfectly captured in this screenshot of recent Google Trends data. The trending searches are all about the quickest path to creating something superficially similar to Ghibli's work, without any interest in understanding what makes their artistic approach meaningful or distinctive. The Hindustan Times even calls it “ChatGPT's ‘Studio Ghibli’”. It’s a misattribution that shows how readily we're willing to transfer ownership of artistic styles from their original creators to the AI tools that imitate them.
There's a concerning collapse of nuance happening here. We're seeing cultural flattening where “Studio Ghibli style” has become a catch-all term for any anime-adjacent art with soft colours or watercolour effects. This surface-level imitation without understanding the underlying principles reminds me of what happened with Van Gogh's style—people often reduce his work to swirly strokes without acknowledging how those techniques expressed his unique vision of the world and his emotional state.
The ability to distinguish between genuine Studio Ghibli aesthetics and general anime-inspired watercolour styles represents a deeper understanding of artistic literacy. Art relies heavily on aesthetic ecosystems. Their power goes beyond any single image; it's in their distinct aesthetic worlds. Yet we're reducing universes that took years and many minds to develop into Snapchat filters, and worse, we're happy to accept that that's all there is to these styles.
This pattern reduces our ability to recognise and appreciate quality in general—not just in art, but in design, media, and visual communication that we interact with daily. You don't know why certain colours work together, or why shadows need to fall at a certain angle to indicate a time of day, or what the significance is of a character's hair going from brown to white over the course of a movie. Sure, you could say all of that doesn't matter. But you can apply that reasoning to anything. “The purpose of food is to give us energy and nutrients, so let's all eat bland nutrient pellets and get on with our lives”. Or, “The purpose of college is to get a degree, so let's use an LLM to pass our exams instead of actually applying ourselves”.
Oddly, this reminds me of the discourse about porn. There’s been plenty of studies that show how constant exposure to pornography can dull sexual response and create unrealistic expectations. I feel like it’ll be the same with AI-generated art: the endless flood of images risks desensitising us to the subtleties of artistic expression. Porn strips intimacy of its emotional and relational context; AI art generation strips creation of its cultural and personal meaning. The sheer volume and accessibility of content leads to quick consumption rather than deep appreciation, and quality gets lost in quantity. Both reduce rich human experiences to purely visual consumption; both can make the real thing seem inadequate by comparison.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should
This rush to generate without reflection has darker implications too. One user on X (fka Twitter) turned a photo of the horrific murder of George Floyd into a cute Ghibli-style image. That feels to me like a prime example of how defaulting to AI generation can strip away human judgment and cultural sensitivity. That’s not to say Studio Ghibli never talks about difficult topics, because they do. But they do it through carefully constructed narrative frameworks that provide appropriate context and respect for the weight of these issues. Grave of the Fireflies depicts war trauma, but rather than making war ‘prettier’ or more ‘palatable’, the film creates a specific narrative space for processing difficult truths.
There’s a crucial difference between making difficult topics accessible and making them consumable. Converting a documented instance of racial violence into a style associated with whimsy and childhood wonder for internet clout doesn't make it more approachable, it trivialises it.
Look at this post from the White House's official X account: an actual photo of a detained immigrant converted into ‘Studio Ghibli style’ art. When the highest office in one of the world's most powerful nations reduces law enforcement and human suffering to cutesy memes, we've moved beyond bad taste into something genuinely dystopian. This goes beyond cultural flattening and misappropriation, it's institutional trivialisation (and of course the style isn't accurate).
Aside from being poles apart from the ethics and values of Miyazaki and the entire Studio Ghibli franchise, these images spread rapidly without context, they shape public perception of what's acceptable and inadvertently normalise insensitive depictions. They also become attached to the Studio Ghibli canon, which is even more dangerous for their reputation. The whole "just because you can doesn't mean you should" argument becomes painfully relevant here. Without taste and human judgment, there's no understanding of what's appropriate or respectful.
And don’t even get me started on how the large corporations profit from this cultural strip-mining and us literally helping them profit from it by filling our timelines with the resulting slop. We may as well let burglars enter our homes and help them load up the van with your things, maybe offer them a cup of tea for their hard work.
Luke Plunkett says it best: “Companies like OpenAI are hoping that the longer their tech can stay out there, the more it becomes part of the background noise of the modern internet, and the more likely it is that they themselves will become part of the fabric of the modern internet, and not a bunch of raiders stripping the place for its creative wiring”.
The 'accessibility' argument is a cop-out
Some people have argued that this AI-generated content is a good thing because it introduces new audiences to Studio Ghibli, potentially bringing more viewers to their work. But I wonder if that's actually the case? They're being introduced to a surface-level impression that might actually prevent them from engaging with the actual films and their deeper artistic and narrative elements. I think the Google Trends screenshot is a clear example of that: no one’s looking for “Studio Ghibli movies”. Our focus on output and our rush to produce content often comes at the expense of genuine engagement, simply because we cannot take the time to learn, engage, and let things breathe.
Another argument I’ve seen crop up about AI art generation is that it removes the barrier to entry to art. I’m not thoroughly convinced by that, either. You still have to pay 20 dollars a month for a subscription to a model that can generate quality images. It’s like renting an ability. That same amount can get you a good set of paints and a drawing book that will last months, has no token limits or downtime, and can be preserved for as long as you choose.
Sure, it’s not equal to dropping millions of dollars on art school. But I’d argue that many prolific artists haven’t done that, either. They’ve just sat down with their supplies day after day to bring something to life. What, then, is the real barrier to entry? I think what people often mean by “barrier” is actually the time and effort required to develop skills. Art has always been accessible—people just didn't think it was because they didn't want to put in the effort or make bad art before they got to good art.
AI removing the barrier to entry to creation is like saying we've removed the barrier to entry to mountain climbing by installing a lift to the peak. Yes, more people can now reach the summit, but have we actually made mountain climbing more accessible, or have we fundamentally changed what it means to climb a mountain?
If creation is the process, the labour, then the creator themselves is the end product, not the art they produce. The art is proxy, a stand-in for all the growing, learning, and perspective-shifting the creator has gone through during the process of creation. I think perhaps people forget why we create art in the first place. Sure, one aspect is getting eyeballs. But there was always the foil to that, i.e., creating to grow, or for the sake of creation, or to document. I fear, with AI, that the convenience of generation is compromising the other benefits that art truly has for us. Is the Sistine Chapel beautiful only aesthetically, or is its beauty enhanced by Michaelangelo’s effort? Conversely, does the ease and speed of perfect art generation make it less meaningful—just another pretty picture in an infinite feed?
Art has historically been much more than what meets the eye: a means of documenting human experience and perspective, a process of personal growth and discovery. The benefit of AI is in mass production. It might give us more images, but it might also make us poorer in terms of personal growth, cultural understanding, and human connection.
The problem with a lot of common arguments against relegating art creation to AI is that they don't resonate with a society that values output over effort. Nobody wants to take the time to learn a skill—or pay someone who has the skill—if they can generate the result in just 5 minutes and for under 20 dollars. Artists are consumers, but not all consumers are artists, and so they’re perfectly happy with a perfect “on spec” image. People don't want to develop the underlying skills to tackle new challenges, or work through the creative difficulties.
But again, the looming risk of that is that everything starts feeling and looking the same because true breakthroughs often come from deep understanding and novel combinations of knowledge. This has already become pretty obvious in the software world and will slowly creep into art and other creative spaces. The shortcut to an aesthetic image ultimately limits our capabilities in ways we might not recognise until it's too late. But because these degradations are gradual and systemic, they're hard to see at the moment. By the time the impacts become obvious, we may have lost something difficult to recover.
Who serves whom?
I want to be clear: this isn't an argument against AI, or against people having fun with new technology. These are tools for humanity, after all, and unbridled joy is a massive part of what makes us human. But what I’m wary of is when tools start shaping us instead of us shaping them. The question isn't whether to use AI or not—it's about understanding what we're gaining, who we’re profiting, and what we might be unconsciously losing in the process. Because once cultural literacy and artistic understanding erode, they're much harder to rebuild than they are to maintain.
We need to examine our own motivations here: are we creating to express something genuine, to document, to grow—or to get attention from strangers on the internet? Is being seen was more important than having something to say?
Perhaps we need to be more precise with our language, and differentiate between ‘generating’ images and ‘creating’ art. The former might produce beautiful outputs, but the latter involves a transformative process that changes both the art and the artist. As
noted about writing with AI (and I think this applies equally to art): AI is great at execution—except for “the very tip of agency which is actually making creative decisions about what's worth creating at all and why, and what to prioritise/ emphasise for a given purpose.” This is almost the essence of creation itself.In the long run, it'll all depend on what we value more: the convenience or the skill.
If you’ve made it all the way here, thank you for reading! This essay marks the start of a new section of Kindred Spirits called Zeitgeist, dedicated to tracing the intricate connections between tech, culture and human experience. There will definitely be plenty of overlap between Zeitgeist and Kindred Spirits because, ultimately, they both seek answers to the same question: How do we exercise more agency over what we do, choose, consume, make and become? While Kindred Spirits looks inwards, Zeitgeist will look outwards, at the external influences that impress upon us.
But this argument has been made over and over throughout history and was proven wrong everytime someone made it, in the subsequent years, decades and centuries. Evolution in the medium or tool never made art cheap -- in fact, it made it better. People today have access to a professional grade camera in their smartphones -- that's didn't lower the quality of video content. In fact, we are living through an explosion of high quality content. One simply can't keep up with great content coming out on YouTube, Instagram and our streaming services. Today is the era of peak TV -- great TV series are being produced, more dollars being invested, more viewership being acquired. But great movie making was never impacted negatively because all people were handed a professional camera and anyone could now shoot a video. Rather, think of these tools as a ramp -- inviting many to engage more deeply with the craft. Figma or Photoshop didn't damage design, but made it better!
This is one of your finest writings, Sindhu. Every sentence, every line, and every word hits home. Your views strengthen the need for a wider societal discourse. By the way, I couldn't hep but notice this might be one of the very few (or the first?) publication of KindredSpirits that starts with a capital letter!