What Studio Ghibli memes tell us about the future of art and humanity

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about AI, art, and the controversial collision between the two — a debate that, to be honest, is an absolute mess. If you’ve been on the internet this past week, you undoubtedly know that controversy was just kicked up a notch by the Studio Ghibli memes — pictures cribbing the style of the legendary Japanese film studio. These images, powered by OpenAI’s new image generator, are everywhere; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been posting some examples to his personal X account. And they’ve widened an already pretty stark rift between AI boosters and critics.

Brian Merchant, a good friend of The Verge and author of the newsletter and book Blood in the Machine, wrote one of the best analyses of the Ghibli trend last week. So I invited him onto the show to discuss this particular situation and also to help me figure out the ongoing AI art debate more broadly as it continues to collide with legal frameworks like copyright.

Merchant and I tend to agree a lot more than we disagree when it comes to the technology industry. So I did my best to really take the other side here and push on these ideas as hard as I could. Technology and art have always been in a dance with each other; that’s part of the founding ethos of The Verge. So I think it’s important to put AI in that context — not least because we can see the obvious joy regular people find in using some of these tools to express themselves in ways they might not otherwise be able to.

But there’s expressing yourself, and then there’s churning out AI anime slop that is designed to evoke classics like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro in a way that devalues and even outright steals from actual human artists. Add in the way the Trump administration jumped on the trend by “Ghibli-fying” a deportation photo, and it’s not hard to see why a lot of folks perceive this tool as utterly grotesque and offensive. Or “an insult to life itself,” as Ghibli cofounder Hayao Miyazaki once famously said of an AI demo he witnessed in 2016.

So you’ll hear Merchant and I really go back and forth, digging in on what this all means — for art and artists, and for a creative economy that has long since transitioned from the world of physical scarcity to one of limitless digital supply. And, most importantly, we spent a lot of time talking about how we should feel using these tools at all when they might pose very real threats to people’s livelihoods and the ongoing climate crisis.

I’ll warn you: there are no easy answers here, and I don’t think Brian and I came to a single conclusion. I don’t even think we wanted to. But I think this conversation helped me consider more clearly how to think about AI and art. Let me know what you think.

If you’d like to read more on what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:

_{Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}