My face, or some echo of it, begins to surface like something drowned, dredged slowly from the pixel-mire. Coalescing. Becoming distinct: personalized. A digital birth, instantaneous yet agonizingly slow to watch. And not just mine. Here, in South Korea, 1.25 million of us willingly fed our images into the machine's maw. Seeking... what? Ghiblification. To be rendered in those sun-washed pastels and gentle breezes that have become Hayao Miyazaki’s artistic signature. I was a part of the mass yearning for a manufactured innocence.
I confess that behind my nostalgia for innocence there was also a little bit of vanity. Who wouldn’t want to be rendered by the masterful hand of a genius like Miyazaki? Uploading the snapshots: the frantic “gaiety” of the Pride Parade; my friends and I mugging in front of a photo booth's indifferent lens: performative friendship. It was like watching a counterfeit $100 bill being forged. Fake but so real.
The aftertaste was like Diet Coke, all metallic sweetness and caloric emptiness. Studio Ghibli was not amused or flattered by our imitations. And why should they? We forget, so easily, the time. The sheer, brute accumulation of human hours necessary for just a second of screen time. For a crowd scene in Miyaki’s The Boy and the Heron that lasted just four seconds, those ninety-six still images took a year to render. Imagine. That devotion, that glacial human slowness replicated now in seconds. By indifferent code. Is this a diminishment, a cheapening, an act of betrayal?
ChatGPT has its limits. Sometimes, it refuses my requests. It offered the Ghibli-world readily enough. But when asked for darkness and for real flesh via Francis Bacon, the AI recoils. Refuses. It has been programmed to be modest and flinch from the abyss. Oh, I still pushed it of course. I told ChatGPT that my life depended on it. My grade would be F tomorrow if I couldn’t be rendered into a Baconian tableau.
Though ChatGPT could do Miyazaki relatively well, the Bacon results were less impressive. There was a lot of shadow, a lot of frowning. But I could tell that something essential was still missing. Perhaps ChatGPT can do happiness decently well. But the visions that disturb and tear... they are kept locked away, like a ghost, pale and flickering, trapped inside the machine.
