Sad story behind those Studio Ghibli memes Social media feeds
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Sad story behind those Studio Ghibli memes
Social media feeds were overrun this week with memes created using OpenAI’s buzzy new GPT-4o image generator in the style of Japanese anime house Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle).
There’s Aussie breakdancer Raygun doing her signature kangaroo move, that image of Ben Affleck looking depressed and sucking on a ciggie, gangster mode Vitalik and thousands more images all captured in the admittedly adorable Studio Ghibli style.
But there’s a much darker side to the trend.
The memes emerged as footage from 2016 resurfaced of studio founder Hayao Miyazaki reacting to an early demo of OpenAI’s image generation capability. He said he was “utterly disgusted” by it and that he would “never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”
Miyazaki added that “a machine that draws pictures like people do” was “an awful insult to life,” and PC Mag reported at the time that afterward he said in sorrow, “We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
While some might write him off as a Luddite, that would discount the incredible and painstaking attention to detail and craftsmanship that went into each feature film. Studio Ghibli animes contain up to 70,000 hand-drawn images, painted with watercolors. A single four-second clip of a crowd scene from The Wind Rises took one animator 15 months to do.
The chances of anyone funding animators to spend 18 months on a four-second clip seem remote when an AI can generate something similar in seconds. But without new artistic creativity being produced by humans, AI tools will only be able to remix the past rather than create anything new. At least until AGI arrives.
Humans require a ‘modest death event’ to understand AGI risks
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes the only way humanity will wake up to the existential risk of artificial intelligence/artificial general intelligence is via a “modest death event.”
“In the industry, there’s a concern that people don’t understand this and we’re going to have some reasonably — I don’t know how to say this in a not cruel way — a modest death event. Something the equivalent of Chernobyl, which will scare everybody incredibly to understand this stuff,” he said during an event at the recent PARC Forum, as highlighted by X user Vitrupo.
Schmidt said that historic tragedies, such as dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had driven home the existential threat from nuclear weapons and led to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which has so far prevented the world from being destroyed.
“So we’re going to have to go through some similar process, and I’d rather do it before the major event with terrible harm than after it occurs.”
Eric Schmidt on AI safety: A “modest death event” (Chernobyl-level) might be the trigger for public understanding of the risks.
He parallels this to the post-Hiroshima invention of mutually assured destruction, stressing the need for preemptive AI safety.
“ I’d rather do it… pic.twitter.com/jcTSc0H60C
— vitruvian potato (@vitrupo) March 15, 2025
Accent on change
AI Eye’s leisurely evening was interrupted this week by a cold call from a heavily accented Indian woman from a job recruitment agency checking the references for one of Cointelegraph’s slightly soiled former journalists.
The call center operator then got extremely frustrated with your columnists’ unintelligible Australian accent and curtly asked for the spelling out of words like “Cointelegraph” and “Andrew” — and then found it difficult to understand the letters being spelled out.
It’s a perfectly relatable problem. Journalists face similar issues interviewing crypto founders from far-flung parts of the world too.
But AI transcription and summary service Krisp is here to help, launching a new service in Beta this week called “AI Accent Conversion” (watch a demo here).
Any time someone with a heavy accent is having a Zoom or Google Meet call in English, they can flick on the service, and it will modify their voice in real-time (200ms latency) to a more neutral accent while preserving their emotions, tone and natural speech patterns.
The first version is targeted at Indian-accented English and will expand to Filipino, South American and other accents. Not coincidentally, these are the countries that multinationals most often outsource call center and administrative work to.
While there’s a danger of homogenizing the online world, according to Krisp, early testing shows sales conversion rates increased by 26.1%, and revenue per booking was up 14.8% after employing the system.
Bill Gates says humans not needed by 2035
Fresh from his success…
cointelegraph.com