After the recent controversy over Ghibli art, many are saying that the artist has no future while others say, that people prefer human art when compared to AI art. What's your opinion on it?
Last Updated: 02.07.2025 04:31
Of every 20 BFA degree holders - only 2 and out of 20 MFA’s only 1 works in the digital and animation industry. This is because not every BFA and MFA is a good artist. We have depended on computers and digital forms of art even before AI.
However AI fails to compete against professionally skilled artists like Johannes Vermeer or Hayao Miyazaki who now have very little market demand in the real world.
Original question - After the recent controversy over Ghibli art, many are saying that the artist has no future while others say, that people prefer human art when compared to AI art. What's your opinion on it?
Many young students and early professionals primarily focused on character art, concept art, and graphic design — this is the industry demand. This is where AI is becoming more competitive.
People who see AI as a threat to human artwork — want to keep the animation industry at their artist-community level, and try to restrict its growth and potential.
The seniors don’t want the unskilled to get upskilled with AI. If you visit any gaming or animation company - you can see highly paid professionals restricting their juniors or freshers from attaining their skill level, there’s more criticism and less teaching for improvement. My neighbor works for a popular animation company and this is how the work culture is.
One way to look at it is to find out how many art-based degree graduates have ended up working in their designated industry.
AI is an ethical threat to human artists who are engaged in character, concept, and graphic art. LoRa-style models are replacing humans.
Let’s break the bubble — Technology has been impacting the art world for many years. Artists in the education and professional fields have been aware of AI tools being developed for creative work for a very long time, it’s not a shocker — yet they chose to take up a fine arts degree and work in the gaming and animation industries.
When we say “human art” — we have to understand that professional artists differ from artists with professional degrees in art. The art schools and colleges teach with pencils and color sketching while students rely on computers to improve their weaknesses, enhance their skill sets, and grow their artistic abilities. Go to any gaming, digital, and animation company — they don’t recruit just based on pencil sketching skills, you need to know how to use computers and AI to digitally enhance the output.
People who are professional fine art degree holders, who work in designated industries - in gaming and animation use AI to enhance their images. They use AI to generate images, that are based on character art, concept art, and graphic design — this has been the case for many years.
This directly targets human artists for their visual style. This model is built from learning the human visual style of art. Ethically it gets controversial since it learns from humans and takes over their jobs.
People who say artists have no future due to AI — who are they? — They’re not fine art degree holders, but other degree holders who work in the art industry. They want to keep the “human skill” within the digital and gaming industry level - as a community - because it’s their job to design a style and keep it consistent. Now AI is not a direct threat to their job - but amateur artists who use AI will.
There’s another form of AI art — LoRA artist-style models
Ghibli’s art is character-based — Kaguya and Shizuku are characters. Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are used to identify color, create visual appeal, and correct figure/form for these characters.