The Forbidden Apple named AI

It happened one morning that the usually bustling bazaar of social media went into a tizzy when a language model chatbot started churning out animated images of humans, in a popular animation studio style. All it took was for a user to upload their picture and command the chatbot to turn it into ‘Ghibli’ style, and hey presto! Users had never looked dreamier, softer and more presentable. And before we knew it, millions of users had bitten into the forbidden apple named AI, to try the bot’s newly launched image generator. The result: average active users went above 150 million, a global outage of the chatbot due to seam-tearing demands, and a deluge of unrecognisable faces on social media.

But, two pertinent questions hung in the air, unanswered. What are the long term implications of uploading our pictures/faces on a bot stitched together by AI? Also, in an attempt to turn the sans serif font of life to serif, did our hunger for instant gratification treat Ghibli as just another filter, and not prompt us to learn about this legendary animation studio?

Ghibli

The only reading people do these days is limited to the SEO snippets that search engines offer, or anything that a chatbot produces in a nutshell; but nothing to beat a reel or a short video that users have come to rely upon, without the effort of verifying the information. The blind belief that we have placed in this medium is eerily questionable as users, filled with hubris, dole out nuisance value in the name of general knowledge.

Some, who made an attempt to decode Ghibli, are now describing it as a Japanese company that makes ‘cartoons’. Others are still wondering how to pronounce this word; is it Jhi or Gi? Do they even know that the word Ghibli is not even Japanese?

Based in Koganei, Tokyo and founded on 15 June, 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli, deriving its name from the Italian influence of a Libyan Arabic name for a hot desert wind. Centered around feminism, pacifism, and environmentalism, Miyazaki does not sit with a tight story but develops the narrative as he goes. Up until 1997, every Ghibli film animation was drawn by hand. Technology was adopted later on but there’s a balance between what can be created manually and through computers. Featuring holistically strong female protagonists in his films, this ace animation legend dubbed as ‘The Godfather of Japanese Animation’ and ‘Kurosawa of Animation’ draws references from real life while creating his characters. Spending countless days and nights etching every single line and crease, Studio Ghibli’s films portray an indelible passion for animation that a chatbot one fine morning decides to mimic, to boost its revenue and visibility. Oscar Wilde rightly said that ‘Mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness’. 

Implications

We are not yet aware of impending copyright issues that the chatbot in question might face, but let’s take one look at the implications that experts think we might have brought upon ourselves, feeding the bot with our pictures.

Cybersecurity experts warn us of potential security breach, as most users never read privacy policies before using a platform; 87% to be more precise as per a recent study. This makes us question if our pictures are deleted or stored for a longer time. Some of this data is also used to train the AI models to recognise facial construction and anatomy; in short, Ghibli yesterday, our faces tomorrow. Our pictures not only carry our faces but also our geolocation, time stamp and other metadata. Some of this data could be sold to data brokers or advertisers. What’s scary is that these bots now have pictures of children across all age groups from across the world which can cause a cataclysmic security nightmare. 

Conclusion

It’s not a sin to want to look dreamy with large curious eyes but let’s remember this famous quote from Harry Potter and The Chambers of Secrets, “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain”. When something goes ‘viral’, let’s pause, think, learn, verify, and dive in only when we are sure about it