Rabat – If you’ve spent any time on social media in recent months, you’ve likely stumbled upon an image that stopped you in your scroll. Perhaps a sun-drenched field, a quiet moment in a train carriage, or a wide-eyed child gazing at a mysterious spirit in a forest.
At first glance, it’s unmistakably the work of Studio Ghibli, the legendary Japanese animation studio known for its lush hand-drawn worlds and emotionally intricate storytelling. But look again. Many of these images aren’t scenes from My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away. They weren’t drawn by human hands at all. They are the product of AI.
These Ghibli-esque creations are generated in split seconds by AI tools trained on massive datasets, some of which have scraped visual patterns from decades of animation history without consent or compensation. Users can now simply type a phrase, “girl in a Ghibli forest” or “Ghibli-style apartment kitchen at sunset,” and receive a convincingly crafted image that mimics the aesthetic language that diligent artists painstakingly developed over many years.
Studio Ghibli, a bastion of artistic integrity that has long rejected digital shortcuts in favor of meticulous hand-drawing, now finds itself unwittingly co-opted into a technological movement it has never endorsed. This clash between tradition and automation is a cultural fault line. At its heart is a fierce debate about what we value in art: is it the labor, the time, the human spirit that infuses a drawing? Or is it simply the final image, reproducible and endlessly customizable?
For some, AI-generated Ghibli art represents the democratization of creativity, an exciting moment where anyone can engage with a beloved visual style. For others, it signals the erosion of artistic authenticity, a flattening of craft into algorithmic mimicry.
And the stakes are becoming increasingly urgent as we hurtle further into an age where machines can replicate not only how art looks but how it feels. Are we witnessing the evolution of artistic expression, or its commodification beyond recognition?
AI imitates Ghibli / Art imitates life
Studio Ghibli was co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki, an artist known for his insistence on the value of craftsmanship, the slowness of drawing by hand, and the soulfulness of narrative told through art.
In a 2016 documentary, “Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki,” the Japanese animator and filmmaker is presented with an AI-generated animation. Visibly shaken by its grotesqueness, Miyazaki tells a quiet story about a disabled friend.
“Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability,” he said. “It’s so hard for him just to do a high five; his arm with stiff muscles can’t reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting.”
Reacting to the demo, he concludes: “Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted… I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
The issue here goes beyond the surface level of aesthetics. It is existential as art is essentially hard to define, frame, or categorize.
AI-generated Ghibli images participate in what cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard would call hyperreality, where simulations replace and eventually erase any sense of the original. In these AI images, we do not see the influence of Ghibli’s ethos; we see its empty shell. A style stripped of its inner spirit, made infinitely reproducible. What is offered has nothing to do with homage, and everything to do with hyperreal noise: a deflation of meaning into surface spectacle.
Artists’ statements
Several artists and creators around the world have voiced their unease with this phenomenon, especially in places like Morocco, where local art scenes already contend with fragile ecosystems.
Moroccan visual artist Islam Zouanat condemns what he sees as a brutal appropriation. “It’s neither a revolution nor a threat. Just ignorance. A spit on what makes Ghibli’s soul,” he tells Morocco World News (MWN). “A style is sacred. It’s rare. And now it’s turned into a gadget, a vulgar marketing tool.”
His concern lies not only in aesthetics but also in ethics. “It’s a violation of copyright,” he says. “AI regenerates in seconds what took years of emotion and genius. This isn’t progress, it’s disgusting.”
Also speaking to MWN, Moroccan medical student and poet Amalou Ouassou adds a broader cultural critique. “Allowing AI to generate so much creative media for public consumers corners artists outside of the creative spheres. If the stories people consume no longer come from other people, human culture becomes a machine loop,” he laments.
Ouassou emphasizes the lack of credit and financial compensation, adding: “We already saw how little the industry values human labor with last year’s writers’ and actors’ strikes. Now they’re trying to erase the artist entirely.”
For Moroccan musician Youssef Lakhdar, the problem is more elemental: “A machine can replicate what exists, and do it well, but without the sensitivity that comes from being human. It can’t create something new as good as Ghibli. That’s the limit.”
These perspectives are not just reactions to a new tool, they are responses to a seismic cultural metamorphosis. A defense of the artist in an age increasingly invested in their marginalization.
As a journalist and creator, I also find myself questioning this newly digitized version of the world. I struggle to swallow how everything around me seems to evolve at lightning speed, devoid of the depth and substance that once gave meaning to our work and our existence.
Art, in its truest form, is increasingly overshadowed by the demands of instant gratification and endless reproduction, leaving little room for the slow, deliberate craft that once defined creativity. To quote Slavoj Žižek, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.” This resonates deeply with me, as it feels as though we are witnessing the demise of authentic art trapped within a system that rewards speed over depth, convenience over soul.
The world spins faster, but the essence of what it means to create seems to slip further away.
Death of the artist (revisited)
When Roland Barthes declared “the death of the author” in 1967, he was launching a revolutionary theoretical provocation that dismantled the traditional authority of the creator over the meaning of their work. His essay argued that interpretation lies not with the intentions of the author but with the active engagement of the reader.
Perhaps, that once-metaphorical death has taken on a literal and unsettling dimension. The author, the artist, the creator, previously de-centered in theory, is now being erased in practice. Not just marginalized, but mechanized. Not just questioned, but substituted.
In AI-generated art, the creative subject disappears entirely, replaced by an algorithm that stitches together fragments of other people’s labor. The machine does not think, dream, feel, or imagine. It computes. What is marketed as innovation is mimicry at scale; a visual pastiche generated by ingesting vast quantities of existing work, often without consent, compensation, or attribution.
Human labor has become raw material, training fodder for a system that neither acknowledges nor respects the conditions under which those original works were produced. In this process, creativity is hollowed out. And what remains are flattened surfaces, images without intention, expression without origin, style without substance.
To call this creation is to misunderstand what creation entails. True artistic labor involves risk, failure, contradiction, emotion, and a lived relationship to the world. It is dialogic, shaped by historical pressure and personal obsession. It is imbued with voice, even when that voice is fragmented or unstable. In contrast, the outputs of AI image generators are uncanny simulations. They are expressions of no experience, born of no urgency, committed to no vision. They replicate style without thought, aesthetic without interiority. What remains is not a multiplication of voices, but a silence disguised as abundance.
Barthes’s original question, “Who is speaking?”, was never meant to erase the artist but to open the field of interpretation. Today, the question becomes even more troubling. Is anyone speaking at all?
As art becomes increasingly automated and the boundaries between simulation and creation dissolve, we may be entering an era not of post-authorship but of post-expression. It is a moment when the gesture of taking risks is replaced entirely by endless recombination, a circulation of echoes detached from any origin or intention.
It is also strikingly paradoxical that the same forces undermining human creativity are also entirely dependent on it. They absorb its inventions, rework them, and mold them into a flood of content noise, drowning us in the very deluge we can hardly escape.
Hyperreality, culture of infinite (re)production
Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality is particularly relevant here. When AI can produce millions of Ghibli-style images, each more “Ghibli” than the last, the original no longer matters. We enter a world of simulacra, images without reference, meaning without history.
“Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal,” Baudrillard wrote in his acclaimed book “Simulacra and Simulation.”
Hyperreality disorients. It produces a reality where we can no longer distinguish between the authentic and the artificial, because the simulation becomes more appealing than the truth. In the case of AI-generated Ghibli art, what we admire is not the creative process, the labor, or the emotional weight; it is the spectacle. The image as pure dopamine.
And in a world driven by algorithms, this is all the system needs: more images, more clicks, more resemblance. Not meaning. Not art.
What are we really consuming?
This debate is bigger than the dichotomous allegory of technology versus tradition. It implies intention, labor, and meaning. Human creativity is fundamentally about error, limitation, and depth, qualities that are not just absent from AI-generated work but impossible within it.
The cultural moment we are in values acceleration. But art resists acceleration. True creation demands time, vulnerability, and patience. In a world of generative ease, we risk losing our appetite for difficulty, for nuance, for imperfection. And with that, we lose art.
What we are witnessing transcends the democratization of creativity and takes a U-turn to become its trivialization. If we are not careful, the dominance of AI-generated media may result in more than just aesthetic fatigue; it may lead to cultural starvation.
The allure of AI-generated art, with its ability to mirror the complexity of human creativity, carries with it the danger of undermining the very nature of what it means to be an artist.
At its core, art is more than the production of aesthetically pleasing objects or images. It is an expression of human experience, an engagement with emotion, history, and culture. Artists do not robotically reproduce; they innovate, question, challenge, and provoke. Art is deeply embedded in the context of lived experience, the labor of thought, the vulnerability of creation, and the uniqueness of individual vision.
And AI, for all its capabilities, lacks these human elements. It processes data, regurgitates patterns, and assembles new combinations, but it does not create in the true sense of the word. It cannot infuse its works with the complexities of human suffering, joy, or confusion, nor can it imbue them to communicate something unique and personal.
Art or ‘art’?
Unfortunately, we are knee-deep in this situation. The boundaries between the genuine and the simulated, between the original and the reproduced, are blurring.
We are at risk of abandoning the notion that art is the product of human labor, that it is born from specific historical and cultural contexts, and that its value lies not just in the final product but in the process of creation itself.
As AI generates more images, more music, and more literature, it invites us to reconsider the meaning of creativity. In a world where anyone can produce content with a few keystrokes, what becomes of the artist? What becomes of the individual voice that once defined creative expression? The very essence of artistic struggle, the long hours spent refining, the difficult moments of doubt, the painstaking revision, risks being lost in favor of instant gratification.
However, it is not yet time to surrender to this shift. The creative process, no matter how digitized or mechanized it may become, will always retain its human roots. The real challenge ahead lies in how we, as a society, define the worth of art in the face of such changes.
Can we preserve the cultural and emotional significance of creation when the very tools of creation are automated? Will we continue to value art as a reflection of human experience, or will we reduce it to a disposable commodity, easily replicated and endlessly recycled?
The post Death of the Artist Revisited: Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Meaning appeared first on Morocco World News.