Over the last few years “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) has seemingly taken over all of our lives. No matter what type of program you’re using, there’s an AI aspect to it.
Trying to do a simple Google search? There’s Gemini with an AI overview.
Doomscrolling on TikTok? There’s now an AI tool.
Posting on Instagram? There are several AI tools for making stories and even the search bar has AI built in.
In the art space, AI is despised for reasons we’ll get into in a moment.
Me personally? I hate AI Slop™️.
I also hate that we’re not having honest conversations about this technology. And I think we’re putting the cart before the horse.
Why do I feel this way? And more importantly, what does this have to do with anime?
It’s a bit long winded, but walk with me while I explain the connection manga, anime, and AI.
Grab your sencha and let’s get into this week’s Sencha Session 🍵🫖
So, I want to say that I don’t hate the idea of AI.
I think that technology that makes our lives easier and more efficient is a good thing.
That being said, I hate the current implementation of generative AI, specifically, and the lack of truthful and candid conversations about it.
There are many issues including the fact that Google’s Nana Banana Pro and Sora are virtually impossible to detect if it’s AI generated or real, but for the sake of staying on topic and keeping this a reasonable length, I’ll address the two big ones that are relevant.
The biggest issue for me is the sheer amount of resources that AI uses right now.
If you didn’t know this already, AI uses a megaton of water. Not just any type of water though. It’s our precious drinking water.
It has been reported that a single use of an AI prompt of about 100 words uses one bottle of drinking water. Data centers use up to 5 million gallons per day, with a projection of billions of cubic meters of water being used within the next two years.
On top of that, the pollution emitted is greatly effecting the neighborhoods they’ve been built by—be it air pollution, light pollution, or sound pollution.
These data centers are located in primarily Black and brown neighborhoods and are already creating massive issues including health issues and causing a skyrocketing of utility costs.
The second issue I have is many of the current generative AI models were trained on content and ginormous data sets that weren’t theirs to begin with. This happened in a few ways: AI companies trained their AI models on stolen data and data scraping, users took intellectual property (IP) that wasn’t theirs and fed it to the AI models.
This was a major problem with artists who had their art fed into these learning machines and people would replicate their art styles.
Personally, I’ve seen the real life impact on artists that I enjoy.
I was Pinterest scrolling for hours, as I do when I’m building a new Pinterest board, and I saw an illustration that looked like something from Bao Pham, only it wasn’t her art. It turns out that someone had been feeding her art into an AI generator and it had ended up on the platform.
As an artist myself, I felt gutted.
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One of my degrees is in Fine Art with a focus in Photography. I’ve had my art shown in Tokyo Japan and I have two large prints from my BLACK: series in the private collection of my alma mater.
I know how much time it takes me to create an idea, shoot it, edit it, print it, not to mention the hundreds of hours of practice, or the amount of money sunk into things like supplies and equipment.
To just have someone take my art and feed it to an AI image generator to replicate my labor and creativity…? It’s unfathomable.
Earlier this year we saw it with the Studio Ghibli trend where people were creating Ghibli inspired images. It was cute and fun because movies like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro are super popular, but when you step back, it was a major violation of everyone who’d worked on those films.
Let’s be crystal clear: Hayao Miyazaki’s work, and the work of the Studio Ghibli animation team, was stolen for this trend. Without his art and their labor it probably wouldn’t have been possible.
That, my friends, is wrong.
And I know that people will say to me, well it was just for fun.
To that, I say, shame on you.
On Twitter (because I will never call it X), I saw an AI “film maker”, and boy am I using that term very loosely, post a clip of a “human” or “realistic” version of Princess Mononoke.
It was just a rip off of the work of Studio Ghibli.
It wasn’t an original idea.
No people were involved in it’s creation.
It wasn’t a live action production.
It was just generative AI.
It disgusted me.
A few years ago, I had the privilege and the honor of going to the Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka. If you’ve ever tried to get tickets, you know it’s virtually impossible.
It truly is such a whimsical place, kind of like going to Disney, only instead of Micky, there’s Totoro or the Cat Bus from Kiki’s Delivery.
My favorite part was going into a replica of Miyazaki’s creative studio, but my super favorite part was the room of hand mixed paints. I’ve never seen that many shades of blue or the other colors for that matter.
In this space, you could also see how dedicated he was to understand what he was animating. I would argue it approached obsessiveness, especially when I saw how he approached his water studies.
It depicted how water looks in different degrees of light. The color of the water. The shape of the water. If he could, he probably would have tried to collect the smell and taste of the water.
Don’t even get me started on the studies for locations. The places he visited as inspirations for places in his own movies to make them feel real despite being these clearly fantastical worlds.
There are an unimaginable number of hours that he and his team, for that matter, have put into these movies.
Did you know that The Boy and the Heron took seven years to make? And now you can have some asshole on the internet feed it into an AI generation tool to reproduce it while burning through a gallon of water.
Or even worse, a program that you’re using will take your work without your permission, automatically opting you into using your IP, to train their AI.
That’s my problem with generative AI.
That’s why I have a bone to pick with AI companies.
That’s my gripe with the lack of acknowledgement about these tools.
This isn’t like using AI to detect potential development of cancer in the body. This isn’t using an AI model to predict potential severe weather because of the climate crisis. This isn’t using AI to be your assistant for overwhelming tasks. This is plain theft of people’s work and it feels no one wants to acknowledge the real harm that is being done.
Already there are people who are looking to make AI movies and I think that’s sad.
Call me a puritan if you’d like, but I still truly think the whole thing about art is creating it yourself. No matter if it looks like shit or if it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. The point of art is human expression.
And can they even claim that their AI movie is original? So many models have been trained on other people’s art and it’s pulling from that data.
Not to mention that this would effectively vaporize any opportunity for artists to be hired and paid for their work.
And that, ladies, gentlemen, and friends is the other big elephant in the room.
Companies are using AI to cut costs and that includes the talent needed to make the product that they want to sell.
Why hire a team of animators, when you can just put in a prompt to Sora to create the anime of your dreams.
Only, the issue is, the reason why you even have a decent model that doesn’t look like the hot garbage of only a few years ago, is because people have been putting in thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of existing anime style art into these learning machines.
To the point of the Studio Ghibli trend, this fall, the studio, and other animation studios reached out to OpenAI to demand that it not allow users to train their model on their work.
It’s so sad that it takes major studios to force these companies to do the bare minimum, but not surprising.
There are virtually no laws on the books to wrangle AI in. There is no law requiring AI generated content to be labeled as such, and clearly there are no laws saying that you cannot just take someone else’s work and put it in the machine. (At least none that I know of.)
The general public isn’t off the hook either. People are using generative AI to create art that they would normally have to pay for. To circumvent having to hire and pay an artist, people are just generating an image.
When I’ve brought this up in conversations around AI, I’ve been yelled at.
Not everyone has the money to pay someone!
So that means you should just…use stolen work? What did you do before AI? You probably went to Google or free stock images.
Maybe crack open Photoshop or Canva like you used to and make the image yourself. Picsart is also still a thing. (Yes, I’m aware that both Adobe, Canva, and Picsart have generative AI tools, but that’s not the point.)
With all that aside, I do wonder that once we get a hold on how we’re going to treat generative AI, is there a way that AI can be actually beneficial to artists?
I’ve seen various conversations that there are positive, non-harmful ways that AI can actually help animators and artists.
Things like repetitive tasks may be an option, but wouldn’t that also take away that opportunity from people who may be on a lower skill level? Maybe in that case more time and money can be spent training them on more advanced tasks and hiring other artists.
I don’t know what the answer is.
People who work in that industry should be able to have a place to dictate what the rules should be established around using AI.
It would be helpful if there were industry standards like ensured job security, like just because a company uses AI doesn’t mean job positions will be eliminated to increase profits. That would be a huge win and a massive weight taken off the shoulders of artists and really anyone who works in an industry that uses AI tools.
But just because there isn’t a solid answer right now doesn’t mean that we should just let AI run rampant the way that it is.
Right now, animators, mangakas, and artists in general need to be protected and advocated for.
Until then, more AI companies need to be held responsible for how they’ve operated up until now. I’m talking about monetary compensation especially if you’ve seen AI generated images that have clearly been trained on your IP.
There need to be more guardrails and ethnical policies implemented. It’s actually kind of ridiculous that they’ve been able to just do whatever they want for as long as they have, but that’s also the nature of law I suppose.
It would also be super cool if we could just like not…rip through all of our drinking water like that. I’m sure that there are people looking into how we can maybe turn the heat into something useful like a way to heat homes or something useful.
I’m just hoping change comes sooner than later.
:*・ﾟ ₍ᐢ•ﻌ•ᐢ₎:*・ﾟ welcome back to another Sencha Session!!! 🍵
So, yeah, I don’t like generative AI all that much. I know it’s kind of controversial especially in some spaces, but I wanted to make it clear about how I feel about this new technology.
I would be more comfortable with AI if it was being used more responsibly and if it wasn’t wreaking havoc, but alas, that’s how things are right now.
That being said, I think that if we set up some rules of engagement, AI could actually be another great technological tool.
Unfortunately that may come after the AI bubble pops.
What are your thoughts on generative AI? Do you use AI? Do you try to limit how much you use it?
How do you feel about artists having their IP stolen? Are you an artist who has had their art stolen?
Thoughts on AI movies?
Sorry for all of the questions, I just want to know what your feelings are.
But, that’s all I have for y’all this week.
As always, please do all of the engagement things, like, restack, and subscribe!!! It let’s Substack-senpai know that I am like the coolest anime content creator on this platform.
okloveyousomuchbyeeeeeee~*
dani-chan 🌱
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