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LONDON: Another leap forward for ChatGPT’s capabilities is, inevitably, accompanied by a wave of people using these capacities to produce knockoffs of work by great artists . The latest artist to have been the topic of media commentary and much of OpenAI’s own promotion – Sam Altman has even changed his X avatar accordingly – is Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli. Social media is awash with images purporting to be in the same style as Miyazaki’s work.
I use the word “purporting” quite deliberately because most of what is produced “looks like” the output of Studio Ghibli in the same sense that I “look like” Will Smith. The colour and the shape (to a rough approximation) are about right. But take another look with anything resembling care and attention, and what is clear is that the two look nothing alike.
Characters do not make eye contact with each other. Patterns of light and shade, or detailed depictions of the imperfections in wood or stone, are largely absent. Generative images can make something that is hard to understand concrete and visible.
But they also show us risks that we need to guard against in ourselves. A recent YouTube video “reimagining” Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings, nominally in Miyazaki’s style, was a case in point. Stop and pause during The Boy And The Heron and you will see lovingly drawn facial expressions for each of the sinister parakeets.
Look at pictures of the orcs in the AI-generated trailer and they are all one and the same. DEPRESSING AND ALARMING I’m not saying that generative artificial intelligence cannot be used to make art. If someone takes the time and care to refine the detail of every image, using generative commands with the level of finesse with which you might use a paintbrush or mouse cursor, then that can become a form of art – albeit one that sounds like pure hell to produce.
But producing something that has as much in common with Miyazaki’s artistry as I do with Will Smith is not art, and it is depressing and alarming that so many people think it is. It’s depressing because someone who looks at a knockoff and doesn’t appreciate the beauty of the real thing is not enjoying life to its fullest extent. If you think you like Studio Ghibli but you are letting the quality of the art pass you by, you are denying yourself the full pleasure of the company’s work.
It is alarming because the most exciting uses of AI in the workplace and in public policy involve turning tasks that take many hours into ones that require much less time to execute, though still involve important judgments. Such advances have the potential to significantly increase productivity and prosperity. They are particularly significant for the state.
In education, for example, replacing marking and administration, a huge drain on the most important and valuable resource in a classroom – the time and energy of the teacher – is one area that the British government is looking at. And in healthcare, a Palantir trial has already freed up hours of clinical time by transforming tasks that took doctors hours to complete into comparatively brief ones. A TOOL TO BE USED JUDICIOUSLY However, to protect against mistakes, we need to remember to treat AI not as a magical force capable of providing us with certain answers, but rather as a highly effective tool to be used judiciously.
Already there is good evidence that many of us do not do this – and that frequent use of chatbots actually leads people to become lonelier and more dependent on them. Research also shows that the weakest novice programmers become not better at programming, but more complacent in their incompetence due to their use of generative AI. The problem of trusting too much in the machine – whether that machine is something on a computer, like the flawed software that wrongly convicted UK Post Office workers of fraud, or a pen-and-paper algorithm such as a set of sentencing guidelines – is not a new one.
Our tendency to turn devices that make our lives easier into things we imbue with undeserved authority is not new. What is new is that alongside the transformative potential of AI to change our lives for the good comes the risk that it will have a catastrophic impact if used in a blind and unthinking way. What the rise of AI provides, ironically, is a reminder of an old truth: That the most important and future-proof curriculum is one that teaches you knowledge and understanding rather than skills – and that to impart understanding is to encourage us to look more deeply at things, whether it is the detail in an animated pavement or the proposal that a clever machine has written up.
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