What AI anime memes tell us about the future of art and humanity

is editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of the Decoder podcast , and co-host of The Vergecast On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about AI, art, and the controversial collision between the two — a debate that, to be honest, is an absolute mess. If you’ve been on the internet this past week, you undoubtedly know that controversy was just kicked up a notch by the Studio Ghibli memes — pictures cribbing the style of the legendary Japanese film studio. These images, powered by OpenAI’s new image generator, are everywhere; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even been posting some examples to his personal X account. And they’ve widened an already pretty stark rift between AI boosters and critics. Brian Merchant, a good friend of The Verge and author of the newsletter and book Blood in the Machine, wrote one of the best analyses of the Ghibli trend last week. So I invited him onto the show to discuss this particular situation and also to help me figure out the ongoing AI art debate more broad ... Read full article.