I think the cat is out of the bag when it comes to generative AI, the same way how various LLMs for programming have been trained even on codebases that they had no business using, yet nobody hasn’t and won’t stop them. It’s the same as what’s going to happen with deepfakes and such, as the technology inevitably gets better.

> Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, produces beautiful and famously labor intensive movies, with one 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.

It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.

A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.

AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way, but that’s the reality of it, no matter how much the artists dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows, others stick to tradition.

It's a very clear difference between a cheap animation and Ghibli. Anyone can see it.

In the first case, there's only one static image for an entire scene, scrolled and zoomed, and if they feel generous, there would be an overlay with another static image that slides over the first at a constant speed and direction. It feels dead.

In the second case, each frame is different. There's chaotic motions such as wind and there's character movement with a purpose, even in the background, there's always something happening in the animation, there's life.

Fundamentally I think this comes down to answering the question of "why are you creating this?".

There are many valid answers.

Maybe you want to create it to tell a story, and you have an overflowing list of stories you're desperate to tell. The animation may be a means to an end, and tools that help you get there sooner mean telling more stories.

Maybe you're pretty good at making things people like and you're in it for the money. That's fine, there are worse ways to provide for your family than making things people enjoy but aren't a deep thing for you.

Maybe you're in it because you love the act of creating it. Selling it is almost incidental, and the joy you get from it comes down to spending huge amounts of time obsessing over tiny details. If you had a source of income and nobody ever saw your creations, you'd still be there making them.

These are all valid in my mind, and suggest different reasons to use or not to use tools. Same as many walks of life.

I'd get the weeds gone in my front lawn quickly if I paid someone to do it, but I quite enjoy pottering around on a sunny day pulling them up and looking back at the end to see what I've achieved. I bake worse bread than I could buy, and could buy more and better bread I'm sure if I used the time to do contracting instead. But I enjoy it.

On the other hand, there are things I just want done and so use tools or get others to do it for me.

One positive view of AI tools is that it widens the group of people who are able to achieve a particular quality, so it opens up the door for people who want to tell the story or build the app or whatever.

A negative side is the economics where it may be beneficial to have a worse result just because it's so much cheaper.

> It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to

In this case, yes it is.

People do pay attention to the result overall. Studio Ghibli has got famous because people notice what they produce.

Now people might not notice every single detail but I believe that it is this overall mindset and culture that enables the whole unique final product.

To me the question of what activity/method is more "valuable" in the context of art is kind of missing the point of art.

>It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.

If they didn't spend a year on it they wouldn't be copied now.