Does OpenAI's latest marketing stunt matter?

At the end of the day, OpenAI’s latest viral marketing stunt—a ChatGPT 4o update that allows users to generate images, including ones in a style that barely resemble’s that of animation company Studio Ghibli—is ultimately a distraction. Let me explain.

Yes, this stuff is an “insult to art itself” as Brian Merchant points out in his invocation of Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki’s earlier comments on early AI art tools (“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself”). Firms hawking generative AI powered are dead-set on eviscerating legal barriers obstructing their god-given right to "ingest copyrighted works into their training data" and will vomit up any answer that resembles something reasonable—much like their products. If you do not let us do this, China will surpass us is an increasingly popular and successful one.

As a result, artists are left shit out of luck. As Merchant writes:

OpenAI and the other AI giants are indeed eating away at the livelihoods and dignity of working artists, and this devouring, appropriating, and automation of the production of art, of culture, at a scale truly never seen before, should not be underestimated as a menace—and it is being experienced as such by working artists, right now.

On top of the exploitation of artists and their livelihood, we get to consider what this does to our role in cultural production. How does being flooded with slop that does not but does resemble significant cultural products—because it is superficially trained off the form of various works of art, as well as those inspired by or derived from it, as well as commentary about it—affect our own internal response to those same pieces of art, even when presented in their original slop-free context?

Erik Hoel chimes in here, warning we are entering "the semantic apocalypse" or following down the path of "semantic satiation" whereby a word loses meaning if it is said over and over and over and over and over again:

The semantic apocalypse heralded by AI is a kind of semantic satiation at a cultural level. For imitation, which is what these models ultimately do best, is a form of repetition. Repetition at a mass scale. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Repetition close enough in concept space. Ghibli. Ghibli. Doesn’t have