AI Ghibili Filters and the future of Creative Work

You must have recently seen these images taking over X as well as many other platforms lately. They're actually made by AI with just a single click, and that should really be a worry for the creatives as making art is a tenacious process which requires a lot of time and effort to make.

It's the Ghibli filter inspired by a Japanese studio known for hand-drawn frames and subtle emotional gestures. Now, ChatGPT4 can recreate that depth in minutes with a prompt. Even Elon Musk joined the trend. Sam Altman changed his profile picture and with that half the world has started to go woth the trend in such a way that even the Server GPU's are melting.

It's like a shift in creative power, and we've seen this before. Canva empowered non-designers with drag-and-drop design, generating $2.5 billion in revenue in 2024. Not by replacing artists, but by removing the need to rely on them and I feel like this new use of AI will once again create a brand new dynamic where making Art will be more accessible to the General Public.

This is how AI might scale. Goldman Sachs estimates that 26% of creative tasks could be automated in the near future. For many, AI would become a co-pilot, helping unblock creative blocks, recommend styles, and reimagine aesthetics, while some might just fail to adapt with the new and upcoming technology and with time, might just fade away.

But all is not well here as there's a darker side too. Over 400 artists in the US have already filed complaints against AI platforms for using their original work to train models without consent and if I am not wrong, that will most definitely come under copyright infringement.

When artistic style becomes training data, plagiarism becomes scalable.

So what will become valuable in the future?

That is something that only Time will tell.