A few weeks ago, OpenAI pulled off one of the greatest corporate promotions in recent memory. Whereas the initial launch of ChatGPT, back in 2022, was "one of the craziest viral moments i'd ever seen," CEO Sam Altman wrote on social media, the response to a new upgrade was, in his words, "biblical": 1 million users supposedly signed up to use the chatbot in just one hour, Altman reported, thanks to a new, more permissive image-generating capability that could imitate the styles of various art and design studios. Altman called it "a new high-water mark for us in allowing creative freedom." Almost immediately, images began to flood the internet. The most popular style, by a long shot, was that of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki and widely beloved for films such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. James Cameron's stance on artificial intelligence has evolved over the past few years, and he feels Hollywood needs to embrace it in a few different ways. Cameron joined the board of directors for Stability AI last year, explaining his decision on the "Boz to the Future" podcast last week. "The goal was to understand the space, to understand what's on the minds of the developers," he said. How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow." He continued by saying the shift to AI is a necessary one. James Cameron wants Hollywood to implement AI more for big-budget films. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I've always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see – 'Dune,' 'Dune: Part Two' or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films – we've got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half. That's about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? Cameron doesn't think films are ultimately "a big target" for companies like OpenAI. "Their goal is not to make GenAI movies.

If asked to come up with a quintessentially "human" work of art, one could do worse than to name a film by Studio Ghibli. The Japanese animation studio, founded by the legendary eighty-four-year-old director Hayao Miyazaki, is known for its hand-drawn imagery, lushly organic color palettes, epic narratives, and evocation of both the emotional ambiguities of childhood and the twisting path to becoming an adult. We American millennials were blessed to have the films translated and distributed in English just as we were growing up, and so movies including "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke," and "Spirited Away" are nigh-universally recognizable touchstones of our youth. Any Ghibli imagery is primed to make us feel a combination of pleasurable nostalgia and mournful shivers, evoking the doomed forest creatures, greedy bathhouse ghosts, and missed connections featured in Miyazaki's cinematic story lines. Unfortunately, that sense of poignancy quickly erodes when you are bombarded with thousands of Ghibli-esque copycat images, as we all were online last week, thanks to OpenAI's latest version of its ChatGPT tool.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Since OpenAI released an update earlier this week that improved ChatGPT's ability to generate images based on detailed requests, a dark evil has infected the internet, responsible for the shriveling of souls and the wanton destruction of life and nature itself: Studio Ghibli A.I. slop. Social media has been flooded with images of the most random shit imaginable rendered in the signature style of Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary animator and co-founder of the Japanese company Studio Ghibli, renowned for hand-drawn animated films such as Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and My Neighbor Totoro. X in particular, Elon Musk's land of the rising bot, is rife with viral posts extolling the virtues of an innovation that steals human-made creations, chews them into paste, and spits out the reassembled remains, stripped of any of the originality, spirit, and labor that makes art art. It's been 24 hours since OpenAI unexpectedly shook the AI image world with 4o image generation.

The animation displayed by Kawakami included a sequence where humanoid characters grotesquely contort themselves as they move around by using their heads as feet. "This is the result of teaching it to'move faster,'" Kawakami said. "Basically there's nothing like sensitivity to pain, and it lacks the concept of the head being important, so it's using the head like a foot for movement." The presentation was to showcase efforts by the CGI team at Dwango Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where Kawakami serves as chairman, in exploring nascent field of image processing using artificial intelligence. Aired on Sunday as part of NHK's documentary series "NHK Special: Hayao Miyazaki -- The One Who Never Ends," the program reveals the decorated animator and director's journey as he takes up animated shorts following his retirement from full-length feature animations in 2013.