The new trend

On a regular evening as I was scrolling through Instagram, I saw a few images that popped up on my feed. They were neither celebrities' paparazzi shots nor clickbait trend images. They were Ghibli art images. I was seeing these kinds of images for the very first time and I was truly fascinated. 

Before my mind could comprehend the trend and decipher as to how these Ghibli images were being made, my Instagram was flooded with loads of these images. Whichever account I opened- either a celebrity's or a friend's account- everyone was dabbling in this newfound trend of 'Ghibli art images' and I remained a mere spectator to all the buzz surrounding it.

What is this Ghibli art? It is a distinctive visual style that is associated with Studio Ghibli- an animation studio- based out of Japan. The craze for Ghibli art is really high due to the expressive characters, vivid backgrounds and the colour palette used, but most importantly, people started loving it so much due to how aesthetically it transforms their facial contour.  In fact, the trend became so popular that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, started requesting people not to put too much load on the servers as their software was not able to keep up with the excessive demand. Little did he realise that a harmless trend of generating Ghibli images would spread like wildfire across the globe creating record-breaking engagement.

After a few days, I too managed to hop on to the trend by creating 'Ghiblified' images of mine which managed to garner a lot of attention. 😁

In the midst of all this newfound excitement of generating beautiful images, I stumbled across an article that spoke about one of the original creators- Hayao Miyazaki- and his opinions on Ghibli art. While reading this, there were two lines that caught my attention: 'the use of AI to generate animation is an insult to life itself' and 'hand-drawn animation is the only way to breathe life to a character.' 

While I was slowly trying to read and wrap myself around this new discourse surrounding Ghibli art, I saw that the netizens were in a frenzy and divided into two halves. One half was busy making Ghibli edits and cashing in on the latest trend, while the other was discussing about data security, how privacy is a myth and how the Ghibli trend doesn't credit the original artist.  

In the midst of all this chaos regarding whether Ghibli edits should be made or not, something called as 'reverse Ghibli art' started trending. How does this work? You upload an image of yours and convert it to Ghibli. Once that is done, you ask AI to add another person (based on the description of yours) in the Ghibli image it generated. Then, convert that image back to normal. Once you finish all these steps, you can see the face of a real person AI adds to your picture.

Maybe AI has one staple real face each for a man and a woman that it will generate when you do the reverse ghibli, but this raised a lot of flak from people. Concerns of data privacy and ethics came back to the picture- how safe is our data? Aren't we going too far by consensually giving AI firsthand access to our personal pictures? By doing that, won't our data be vulnerable to all sorts of attacks and misuse? How far is it correct to give access to our data despite knowing the risks associated with it? With all these questions, the trend became the subject of all sorts of scrutiny and dissection from people.

In this situation, there are two stances that you can take. Either don't upload any image of yours and don't participate in any trend due to data privacy concerns. But if you are participating in the trend, you will have to upload your images in order to generate your personalised Ghibli image.
If you are going with the second option, you are giving AI access to your pictures, so make sure you don't share sensitive pictures- but again, not sure if this will guarantee you complete protection, so be cautious.

Every situation has its own pros and cons. We can do two things- either avoid taking any kind of risk or take calculated risks. The choice between the two is something we have to take based on the way we perceive the current situation and our own thought process.

One last thing that I would like to mention here is- AI is not originally creating these images using its brain. AI is not a human- it is developed by humans. If AI is able to generate these Ghibli art images, it is because Mr.Miyazaki and his team worked really hard to create hand-woven animation in Ghibli style. Let us respect that and give credit whenever we are using this. Not only now, but in any situation for that matter, let us give credit to the original artist because if it weren't for that person, we wouldn't be having everything on our fingertips.

Whichever side you pick- whether you are pro-Ghibli art or anti-Ghibli art, we are defined by the kind of choices we make. Nobody is going to judge you for participating/not participating in a trend. Maybe by not participating you might experience FOMO, but again it is a consensual choice that you have to make.

Which side are you all on? Do you want to generate Ghibli images or are you against it? Let me know your views in the comments.

                                                           - Anusha Sridhar