Learning to convert pixels into spirit
Five fragments for the week of March 31, 2025
Hello from the end of March. If you think in quarters, tomorrow’s for you.
Along with much of the internet, I got swept up last week in the Studio Ghibli + OpenAI craze and all its facets. The moment has passed, but the capabilities remain.
So here are five fragments from a moment in time—an unusually singleminded edition, drawn from a pool of dozens of bookmarks pulled from an ocean of thousands of posts I let wash over me.
The Ghibli aesthetic is so comforting because it gives a lived-in beauty to realistic scenes like a cluttered kitchen or laundry lines in the breeze, it shows our world exactly as it is but with a softness. Nothing special needs to happen yet everything is felt: other anime styles like kawaii infantilize reality or they create this feeling of escapism, but the cuteness of Ghibli has this maturity to it because it has the emotional texture of slowness, as if saying “even this mundane thing is worth noticing”
– Sherry on X, March 27, 2025. I found this beautiful.
was talking to a friend about ai slop & we realized something, before ai, the internet was already drowning in human generated slop. mass produced, engagement optimized content has always been the default.
ai just makes it cheaper & faster. in a way, ai slop might even be more engaging, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the game. people have always gravitated toward whatever holds their attention, regardless of how it’s made. the supply side is incidental. what actually matters is that humans like it. that’s the interesting part.
– @signüll on X, March 28, 2025. That’s the interesting part! (Revealed preferences rule everything around us.)
I would strongly bet that whoever is the internet's leading “commission me to draw you ghibli style” creator is about to have one very bad week, AND THEN a knockout successful year.
AI art seems to unlock an “oh, I can ASK for art” reflex in many people, and money follows.
– Dave Kasten on X, March 28, 2025. The economic argument here may or may not be wishful thinking (time will tell), but “oh, I can ASK for art” does seem like it surprises people.
the way that studio ghibli makes you feel is a non-renewable resource, like oil. it comes directly from the films that were produced.
yesterday, 99% of that oil was extracted and burned.
– Ben Hylak on X, March 27, 2025. This has been looping in my mind ever since I read it—feelings as non-renewable resources.
what we care about in a photo is accuracy of its spirit, not pixel accuracy. [miyazaki] is an incredibly emotionally attuned man trying to capture the spirit of things in pixels (his best piece, “spirited away”). learning the reverse process is learning to convert pixels into spirit
miyazaki will agonize over a caterpillar or child walking trying to understand its essence, to convert it into an animation with no regard to pixel accuracy. his movies start with frames not stories. it’s unsurprising we chose him for training the pixel -> essence translation
his overall stories are fine but I think his legacy was the training set of expressions of laughing, flying, fighting, of bugs and radish spirits that will inspire a lot of incredible work going forward. he showed us how to render the essence of things, the movies were a wrapper
– Nick Cammarata on X (1, 2, 3), March 26, 2025. I’ve never met Nick, but in general I find his takes to be pure of heart, and so what might read as dystopian in another context (“we chose him for training the pixel -> essence translation”) reads more sweetly to me here. He showed us how to render the essence of things, the movies were a wrapper.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com