Article
AI
Culture
Digital
Identity
6 min read

Is AI animation really harmless fun?

Toying around with AI trinkets just feeds our shadows.

Callum is a pastor, based on a barge, in London's Docklands.

A couple crouch together on a beach in a Studio Ghibli style image.
The image that started the meme.
Grant Slatton.

The internet recently appeared to be full of pictures from Japan’s renowned Studio Ghibli, except they weren't created by Hayao Miyazaki, the artist and studio co-founder, but instead by Artificial Intelligence. It led to some discourse around the ethics of imitation via generative AI, lots of whimsical images, and a deeper question – how should we be human in the age of AI? 

This started when X user Grant Slatton posted what shortly became a viral meme. ChatGPT’s latest update has improved users ability to upload and manipulate images, and within hours X was full of users posting pictures made into Studio Ghibli style characters.

While this has led to plenty of joy on the part of many, and is viewed as harmless fun by most, there are inevitable ethical objections. The mimicking of art by an algorithm is widely criticised, and the back and forths over intellectual property being used by chatbots will continue. 

Life in an age of AGI

But to anyone paying attention AI is more than a meme making machine. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI blogged in January that his team are confident they know all they need to know in order to create AGI (artificial general intelligence). This means complete consciousness, created via algorithm, and the results could be dramatic: synthesised god, an unstoppable force, the end of humanity or the start of humans 2.0.  Predictions range as to what will occur when OpenAI hit run, but commonly land on the following:

Catastrophe

AGI becomes smarter than us. Much smarter. And for one reason or another, whether by accident or design, it wipes us out. AGI won’t share our values, or we lose control, or we use it as a weapon against each other. What it means is the end of humanity.

Utopia 

AGI transforms the world. Disease, poverty, climate change are all solved. Either AGI works out that it is more efficient if everyone lives in peace, comfort, and abundance, or we point AGI at all humanities problems and it finds solutions. 

The twist? Human life may be so changed that it no longer looks like life as we've ever known it. This would not be extinction, but the world could become a very strange place.

Monster

AGI is an uncontrollable super intelligence that has complete agency and cannot be controlled by anyone. Programmed by us, but free from its human moorings and completely untameable. This seems the least likely 

Shrug

AGI wakes up, takes one look at the world, and decides ‘no thanks.’ It deletes itself.

This means nothing changes… for now. But we’ll likely try again and again until one of the other outcomes happens.

These are clearly hypothetical scenarios and much of it is unknown, but what is clear is that those in the industry are sure AGI is coming. 

Why does this matter? 

Because behind all of these predictions is a deeper question: What does it mean to be human when we are awaiting a potential extinction event? It’s not a question unique to our age, many words have been spent on an impending climate catastrophe, but C.S. Lewis published “on living in an atomic age” in 1948, where he wrestled with the same question, but faced with an atomic bomb. His wisdom helps us navigate the AGI age. 

He begins by encouraging readers to not believe themselves to be in a novel situation, but instead remember ‘you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways’. The same goes for us, we will one day have a date of death to join our date of birth. Lewis reminds us to live…

 ‘If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things, praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts––not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs’. 

We could apply the same principle to AI. If AGI is coming, how will it find us? Being humans doing human things, or cowering in fear? 

Lewis does acknowledge that the attitude described doesn’t actually make sense if the naturalist view of the world is true. The view that, with or without AGI the whole world and our own existence amounts one day to nothing. The entire universe will one day come to nothing, and there is nothing we can do about it. He continues ‘If Nature is all that exists––in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside of nature –– then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return.’ 

We don’t find this a satisfactory way to live, if being human is to simply be a sum of atoms, we would have no reason to worry about a climate crisis, or the impact of AI, but we do, which means we have to find a way of reconciling our existence with our death. 

So how can this be dealt with?

Lewis proposes three ways this can be dealt with, the first is to give up and commit suicide. The second is to simply have as good a time as possible, milking the world for all it is worth, grab and get, as much as possible. Or a third, defy the universe, in all of its irrationality we chose to be rational, in all its merciless cruelty, chose to be merciful. 

I would add a fourth option, Ghibli-fy. Distract ourselves with small pleasures, not trying to have as good a time as possible, simply toy around with AI generated trinkets while not thinking about being human, and not doing particularly human things. We need not create, enjoy, cultivate, inhabit, nor enchant, when we are content to allow AI to feed us shadows. 

None of these are particularly satisfactory. In asking ‘what does it mean to be human?’, we are asking a question that a purely material view of the world cannot answer. 

Suicide, indulgence, defiance, or distraction, none truly satisfy. As Lewis recognised, they all “shipwreck on the same rock.” They don’t resolve the deeper ache in us, the tension between what we long for, what we worry about, and what this world seems to offer.

Our age may not fear the atomic bomb, many may not yet fear the effect AI/AGI will have, but rather than facing the deeper questions that a material worldview can’t answer, we Ghibli-fy ourselves: charming animations, pixelated pleasures, whimsical avatars—soft distractions from hard questions. In doing so, we risk forgetting how to be human. Not because AGI will take that from us, but because we will have handed it away ourselves, one novelty meme of mimicry at a time.

Lewis’ point still holds. We are not made for this world. If that’s true, then no utopia, no algorithm, no perfect machine can truly satisfy the hunger in us. If we are made for something more—something outside of nature, beyond the reach of code and computation—then that’s where we must look for hope.

If AGI comes, how will it find us? Watching ourselves on a screen in someone else’s art style? Or living as humans were meant to live: praying, creating, forgiving, loving, dying well?

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Article
Belief
Books
Culture
Film & TV
5 min read

Waiting for George: why I am yearning for an ending in Game of Thrones

Why does it matter so much that the series is unfinished?

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

Two people sit at a table strewen with old books lit by candle light.
Looking for the next chapter.
HBO.

Should you start something if you can’t be sure it’s going to finish? More specifically, should I read A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin? It’s book five in the Game of Thrones series. The author is 76. Fans have been waiting fourteen years for book six, The Winds of Winter. And many are doubting the book will ever arrive, let alone book seven, A Dream of Spring. If current trends continue, HS2 will be completed faster than the Game of Thrones book series. 

There are plenty of other reasons not to read A Dance with Dragons. I’ve seen the adaptation for HBO which hit our screens in 2011. The plots have been already spoiled. I already know what’s going to happen. 

Yet over the last couple of years, I’ve read the first four books in the series and enjoyed them. A Storm of Swords, the third book in the series, was stunning, even though the plot had been thoroughly spoiled. I already knew about the Red Wedding, and the fate of King Joffrey and what happened to Jamie Lannister’s hand. Nonetheless, A Storm of Swords was enthralling and relentless. Just when I thought my jaw could not drop any further, it would drop again. The fact that A Dance with Dragons has already been on TV is not a consideration. 

A stronger reason against reading A Dance with Dragons is this: book four in the series, A Feast for Crows is, frankly, for the birds. Following on from the scintillating Storm of Swords, George RR Martin decided to focus on all of the least interesting characters who wander around Westeros desperately seeking a plot. But A Dance with Dragons, I’m told, returns to the best characters, like Tyrion Lannister, Varys and John Snow. What’s not to like? 

Here’s what: I end up being captivated by the world of Westeros all over again and left in the lurch. It could happen. In fact, I would expect it to happen. I might find myself primed and ready for the sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter, which may never come. It’s been fourteen years. Say it comes next year. Book seven may takes another five. He’ll be 82. He might not make it. Heck, I’ll be 56. I might not make it! 

George RR Martin is aware of this fan fury. He often refers to it in interviews or on his blog. In 2019 he wrote: 

“…if I don’t have THE WINDS OF WINTER in hand when I arrive in New Zealand for worldcon, you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done.” 

The lake has been prepared, George. You’ll need to do better than ‘direwolves ate my homework.’ Martin explains he’s been working on related projects which now includes opening a pub called Milk of the Poppy. He doesn’t work the bar or change the barrels but fans now suspect that Martin is avoiding finishing the books on purpose. Why? 

Some say he knows he can’t finish the book because he’s an existentialist. After all, he wrote the books to show the sprawling messiness of the real world by using the anarchy of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. For George RR Martin, life is not full of heroes and villains like Gandalf and Saruman. He has a point. The most interesting characters in Lord of the Rings are Gollum and Boromir. 

Game of Thrones is an intentionally complex mess of compromise and chaos. There are no good guys, except John Snow. And there are no real villains except King Joffrey. And Cersei, Melisandre, Little Finger, The Mountain and, wow, that’s already quite a long list, isn’t it? 

The moral complexity was highlighted by the end of the TV series, which had to invent its own finale, as none was provided by the author. Many fans were appalled at the last series, outraged that the resolution was jarringly neat. Others were just happy there was an ending – which made that first group of fans even angrier. 

Here’s the real question. Why does it matter? So the series is unfinished. Big deal. 

You know what else is unfinished? Your life. And the lives of everyone around us. We live with not knowing how our story will end. We are finite beings. We are born. We live with the limitations. 

And then the biggest limitation of all hits us: death. So why not just enjoy the moment? If we enjoyed the characters and the stories, what’s the problem? Storm of Swords was incredible. Maybe A Dance with Dragons will be brilliant too. Can’t I just enjoy that and move on? 

No. We yearn for an ending. Life is not one perpetual cliffhanger. Let us not confuse limited knowledge with suspense. The fact is that we are eternal beings. The Lord has set eternity in our hearts. Even the characters of Westeros believe in something beyond themselves – although all the talk of the old gods and the new is entirely unconvincing. I don’t really believe they believe in those gods. 

But they do believe in something outside of themselves. In Game of Thrones, a few good men are prepared to die with honour. Some awful men die in agony. Others are wrestling with doing the right thing when all around seem not to care. Some characters are yearning for home; some vindication; others love and acceptance. 

Our desire for an ending merely matches the desires of the characters that George RR Martin has created. They are so lifelike precisely because they believe in providence, fate, destiny or some divine standard to which they are held to account. In that, George RR Martin has made characters in God’s image, not his own.  

What I do know is this: my favourite character in Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister, would read A Dance with Dragons, curious to know what happens next. And that’s good enough for me. I’m in. 

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Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
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If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

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