What I Learned at Ghibli Day

Thoughts after a week of reflection

I.

It's been a week. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Ghibli Day—as we might as well call it, given that OpenAI didn't bother to name the model that set it off—was special. Full of unexpected joy (especially for spouses of AI nerds) and also full of excess. That day, I had a bittersweet insight: humans don’t know how to deal with abundance.

We think we do. We treat it as something good by definition (who doesn't want full supermarket shelves, for instance?) and rare (modernity gave us a kind of surplus unknown to any other era; we should be grateful). But we’re not built for it. And that’s something we don't want to understand: we didn’t evolve for abundance; we evolved for scarcity.

Now, sure, you could still argue that abundance is better (you won't catch me saying otherwise; I'm merely acting as the devil's advocate here). But here's the thing: a circumstance we’ve developed no evolutionary tools to face might be more dangerous than the old foe we’ve outgrown and whose shenanigans we know by heart (literally, our DNA knows).

So we end up in this fragile spot where, for once, that proverb I usually dislike suddenly makes sense: Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Especially when already knowing might save you.

But this wasn’t about survival. Art is great—the most quintessentially human thing we do—but it isn't a matter of life or death. What happened on Ghibli Day was a sign that we don’t grasp moderation or restraint—still, it didn't kill anyone.

And it’s worth saying: to me, there’s a difference between people who privately shared tender images with loved ones and those who, maybe nudged by visibility or virality, flooded the feed. Also worth remembering: no single person—not even the one who, by luck or fate, kicked off the trend—bears responsibility for what Ghibli Day became.

It was all of us. Each acting out of harmless, innocent self-interest. But together, we proved that we don’t know how to handle opulence with elegance. Ghibli Day was just a small-scale replay of the tragedy of the commons. Then again, maybe that’s also going too far. The original tragedy is about selfishness and its terrible consequences for human sustenance. Ghibli Day didn’t kill anyone.

Except it did.

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II.

It was not as much a murder as the beginning of a slow degradation, like the disease that takes years to claim you, but from day one you know it's inevitable. Perhaps the worst kind of disease. Like Alzheimer's, it fades you away until the part of you that notices is also gone.

An anonymous Twitter account captured the phenomenon well:

Artists do and did spend thousands and thousands of hours over lifetime developing and refining this, and all artistic styles. That's what it takes. So what happens when you can reach 90% of perfection with .001% of the effort?

Perfection vanishes. There's no place for it anymore. At best you're left with cultural ossification, which was already the trend before AI by the way. Endless repeats and rehashes on the same formula, never *quite* as good as the original, but never terrible enough to justify the incredible expense and risk of doing something new.

At worst you're left with constant degradation. Everything is 90% as good as what came before, because each round of AI facsimile comprises the majority of the training data for the next round of AI generation.

Artists don’t fear irrelevance. They fear dilution.

It’s not that abundance will make us forget art exists. Art lovers will still love it. And those with deep enough pockets—an increasingly tiny group—will still pay for it. What abundance will do is slowly wear down our sensitivity. A slow degradation, where each new thing is 90% as good as the last. But there's so much of that 90% stuff that it satisfies our hunger for the rarer 100%. And it's free!

90% isn’t terrible—if you don’t think too hard about them, those Ghiblis are a joy to look at—but it’s not something to aspire to, either. Our poor memory will take care of the rest. By the time we’re down to 50%, we’ll have forgotten what 100% ever felt like. It'll be like a homemade homeopathic remedy, inadvertently diluting away not the tumor but the cure.

This has happened so many times throughout history that I don’t think anyone needs convincing that it can happen again. Art used to feel sacred—scarce by nature, the singular output of a craft that couldn’t be rushed—but nothing stays safe from the reach of the ambitious technologist, especially those determined to reject that old proverb I mentioned earlier.

“Abundance at 90% quality,” he will tell his children, “is still better than being forever enslaved by imposed scarcity.”

And his children will grow. “Abundance at 90% quality,” they will repeat to their own, “is still better than being forever enslaved by imposed scarcity.”

And the children of his children: “Abundance at 90% quality… —you get it.

Once it reaches 10% or 20% of its original essence, where it'll stagnate, sustained by market forces that won't accept less than that, it will be too late to reverse the process.

III.

“Why would we want to reverse anything, though?” the technologist asks. He knows well that the counterfactual is not a perfect Ghibli, but no Ghibli.

Miyazaki could never make as many Ghiblis as ChatGPT did, however perfect his are. Not even in a thousand lives. Do you want to… erase that? That's not very “good person” of you.

An hour into Ghibli Day, the counterfactual was already worse. So much joy spread throughout the world! So many happy spouses and kids and Mike Tyson.

You don't want to upset Mike Tyson, do you?

Ok, I accept this is a good argument. Then choose: degradation of art or a joyful world. Because, apparently, you can't have both.

Do you think we can? Can you draw a line that lets this kind of overflowing joy exist while still preserving the innate value of real art? Can you—you, reading this now—handle this kind of limitless abundance in your own life? Can you override your instincts, those ancient reflexes shaped in times so bitter with scarcity that they left you unable to stop wanting more? Can you find moderation in the middle of all this madness?

Can you enjoy the sunrise like the first time?

Erik Hoel says we’re knee deep in a “semantic apocalypse”. Scott Alexander says we can perhaps survive it by separating the cultural systemic problem from our personal relationship with meaning and joy. “[G. K.] Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse,” Scott says, “is to will yourself out of it.”

I'm not sure where I stand. I don't think Moloch will let us trace this compromise for free. Moloch—responsible for our ancient fights against scarcity throughout evolution and thus our inability to deal with abundance while preserving our sanity; responsible for the tragedy of the commons, the original and the many incarnations that came after; responsible, I have no choice but to believe, of Alzheimer's disease and all other diseases—won’t let us.

If you personally can't draw that line, as Scott suggests—if you can’t enjoy every sunrise as the first, despite knowing it’s great that the sun still rises every morning—then this was all a very bad idea. Ghibli Day was a bad idea.

Even our technologist will recognize in private that, at times, imposed scarcity may be better. I'm pro-abundance and pro-freedom and pro-AI and still feel this abstract uneasiness with our collective behavior during that fateful day a week ago.

At times, I realize, progress is not worth the cost of progress. We just have to be wise enough to decide which times are those.

Was this one of those times? We will see.

I just hope we are wise enough—collectively, to avoid the systemic apocalypse (or failing that, fight it), and individually, to know how to draw that line and learn to enjoy every sunrise like the first. Until the last one.

Is this crossing the line, or am I just re-learning to enjoy the sunrise once again?