This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

This week, OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o, one of the models powering ChatGPT, that allows the program to create high-quality images. I’ve been surprised by how effective the tool is: It follows directions precisely, renders people with the right number of fingers, and is even capable of replacing text in an image with different words.

Almost immediately—and with the direct encouragement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—people started using GPT-4o to transform photographs into illustrations that emulate the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films at Studio Ghibli. (Think Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away.) The program was excellent at this task, generating images of happy couples on the beach (cute) and lush illustrations of the Kennedy assassination (not cute).

Unsurprisingly, backlash soon followed: People raised concerns about OpenAI profiting off of another company’s intellectual property, pointed to a documentary clip of Miyazaki calling AI an “insult to life itself,” and mused about the technology’s threats to human creativity. All of these conversations are valid, yet they didn’t feel altogether satisfying—complaining about a (frankly, quite impressive!) thing doesn’t make that thing go away, after all. I asked my colleague Ian Bogost, also the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, for his take.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Damon Beres: Let’s start with the very basic question. Are the Studio Ghibli images evil?

Ian Bogost: I don’t think they’re evil. They might be stupid. You could construe them as ugly, although they’re also beautiful. You could construe them as immoral or unseemly.

If they are evil, why are they evil? Where does that get us in our understanding of contemporary technology and culture? We have backed ourselves into this corner where fandom is so important and so celebrated, and has been for so long. Adopting the universe and aesthetics of popular culture—whether it’s Studio Ghibli or Marvel or Harry Potter or Taylor Swift—that’s not just permissible, but good and even righteous in contemporary culture.

Damon: So the idea is that fan art is okay, so long as a human hand literally drew it with markers. But if any person is able to type a very simple command into a chatbot and render what appears at first glance to be a professional-grade Studio Ghibli illustration, then that’s a problem.

Ian: It’s not different in nature to have a machine do a copy of a style of an artist than to have a person do a copy of a style of an artist. But there is a difference in scale: With AI, you can make them fast and you can make lots of them. That’s changed people’s feelings about the matter.

I read an article about copyright and style—you can’t copyright a style, it argued—that made me realize that people conflate many different things in this conversation about AI art. People who otherwise might hate copyright seem to love it now: If they’re posting their own fan art and get a takedown request, then they’re like, Screw you, I’m just trying to spread the gospel of your creativity. But those same people might support a copyright claim against a generative-AI tool, even though it’s doing the same thing.

Damon: As I’ve experimented with these tools, I’ve realized that the purpose isn’t to make art at all; a Ghibli image coming out of ChatGPT is about as artistic as a photo with an Instagram filter on it. It feels more like a toy to me, or a video game. I’m putting a dumb thought into a program and seeing what comes out. There’s a low-effort delight and playfulness.

But some people have made this point that it’s insulting because it’s violating Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki’s beliefs about AI. Then there are these memes—the White House tweeted a Ghiblified image of an immigrant being detained, which is extremely distasteful. But the image is not distasteful because of the technology: It’s distasteful because it’s the White House tweeting a cruel meme about a person’s life.

Ian: You brought up something important, this embrace of the intentional fallacy—the idea that a work’s meaning is derived from what the creator of that work intended that meaning to be. These days, people express an almost total respect for the intentions of the artist. It’s perfectly fine for Miyazaki to hate AI or anything else, of course, but the idea that his opinion would somehow influence what I think about making AI images in his visual style is fascinating to me.

Damon: Maybe some of the frustration that people are expressing is that it makes Studio Ghibli feel less special. Studio Ghibli movies are rare—there aren’t that many of them, and they have a very high-touch execution. Even if we’re not making movies, the aesthetic being everywhere and the aesthetic being cheap cuts against that.

Ian: That’s a credible theory. But you’re still in intentional-fallacy territory, right? Studio Ghibli has made a deliberate effort to tend and curate their output, and they don’t just make a movie every year, and I want to respect that as someone influenced by that work. And that’s weird to me.

Damon: What we haven’t talked about is the Ghibli image as a kind of meme. They’re not just spreading because they’re Ghibli images: They’re spreading because they’re AI-generated Ghibli images.

Ian: This is a distinctive style of meme based less on the composition of the image itself or the text you put on it, but the application of an AI-generated style to a subject. I feel like this does represent some sort of evolutionary branch of internet meme. You need generative AI to make that happen, you need it to be widespread and good enough and fast enough and cheap enough. And you need X and Bluesky in a way as well.

Damon: You can’t really imagine image generators in a paradigm where there’s no social media.

Ian: What would you do with them, show them to your mom? These are things that are made to be posted, and that’s where their life ends.

Damon: Maybe that’s what people don’t like, too—that it’s nakedly transactional.

Ian: Exactly—you’re engagement baiting. These days, that accusation is equivalent to selling out.

Damon: It’s this generation’s poser.

Ian: Engagement baiter.

Damon: Leave me with a concluding thought about how people should react to these images.

Ian: They ought to be more curious. This is deeply interesting, and if we refuse to give ourselves the opportunity to even start engaging with why, and instead jump to the most convenient or in-crowd conclusion, that’s a real shame.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In 2023, Donald Trump posted that electric-car supporters should “ROT IN HELL.” Now he is showcasing Teslas on the White House lawn. Yesterday, the president stood with Elon Musk and oohed and ahhed at a lineup of the electric vehicles, saying that he hoped his purchase of one would help the carmaker’s stock, which had halved in value since mid-December thanks to a combination of customer backlash and general economic uncertainty. (The stock has rebounded by 7.6 percent since yesterday.)

Trump does not own shares in Tesla, as far as we know. He has said that he is supporting the carmaker because protesters are “harming a great American company,” and has suggested that people who vandalize Tesla cars or protest the company should be labeled domestic terrorists. But he also seems interested in helping his friend, the special government employee Elon Musk, maintain his status as the wealthiest man in the world. Yesterday’s White House spectacle was, my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote, “a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency.”

If any other government official had similarly promoted a friend’s product (especially on hallowed White House grounds), they would have been in clear violation of the specific regulation restricting executive-branch employees from using their role to endorse commercial products or services, Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. But the president and the vice president are exempt from that regulation, as well as from some of the other ethics rules that govern federal officials. Norms, in this case, are the primary lever for holding the commander in chief accountable.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his appetite for overturning norms and pushing ethical bounds, so his latest stunt as a Tesla salesman is not altogether shocking. When Trump learned in 2016 that U.S. presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that restrict other government officials, he seemed delighted. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told The New York Times then. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever.”

Despite the lack of legal restriction, modern presidents have generally moved assets into blind trusts, which are controlled by independent managers, in order to diminish any perception that they are profiting from the office (or that they are making policy decisions to boost their own investment portfolios). Trump has shuffled around his assets since taking office but in general has chosen to put his family in charge of managing them. Trump recently said that he’d transferred his shares of Truth Social into a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr., a move that is “irrelevant from an ethics point of view” because the money could still flow to him, Clark told me. And with his own family controlling the trust, Trump likely knows exactly where his money is and can make decisions that would increase the value of his holdings.

Presidential conflicts of interest, or even the appearance of them, can undermine public confidence (nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that all or most elected officials ran for office to make money, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found). Trump may not be directly profiting off Tesla, but the problem with him hawking cars poses the same issue as other potential conflicts of interest: What’s good for Truth Social or Trump’s meme coin or Tesla is not necessarily what’s good for the country, and Trump has so far not inspired confidence that he will prioritize the latter.

Musk, too, hasn’t assuaged concerns that he will separate his business interests from his role in the Trump administration: Musk’s corporate empire relies on government contracts. And the federal firings he is overseeing through his DOGE initiative are already reshaping agencies that regulate his companies.

After he sat in the Teslas and complimented them in front of cameras yesterday, Trump told the press that he would buy one of the vehicles and pay with a personal check. That relatively small financial commitment makes a big statement about the president and where his priorities lie: with the interests of his friend, the billionaire.

Related:

The Tesla revolt The crypto world is already mad at Trump. (From January)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk looks desperate, Charlie Warzel writes. DOGE is courting catastrophic risk. Don’t trust the Trumpsplainers.

Today’s News

In response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, the European Union announced that it will impose tariffs on $28 billion in U.S. exports, and Canada added 25 percent tariffs on approximately $20.7 billion worth of U.S. goods. The Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, remains in ICE detention after his procedural hearing. He was arrested earlier this week in an effort to deport him over his role in protests against the war in Gaza. The Department of Education fired more than 1,300 employees yesterday, leaving the department with roughly half the workforce it had before Donald Trump took office.

Evening Read

Caroline Gutman / The New York Times / Redux

The Man Who Owned 181 Renoirs

By Susan Tallman

Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The FAA’s troubles are more serious than you know. Academia needs to stick up for itself. The Iranian dissident asking simple questions Throw Elon Musk out of the Royal Society.

Culture Break

Netflix / Everett Collection

Watch. There’s nothing else like Mo, Hannah Giorgis writes. The Palestinian American sitcom (streaming on Netflix) is the first of its kind—and takes its humor very seriously.

Read. “As much as I love the [sci-fi] genre, I always have this desire to betray it at the same time,” Bong Joon Ho, the director of Mickey 17, told David Sims in an interview.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.