Smelling the Sistine Chapel: Our Official Stance on AI.

Take It or Leave It Advice

Welcome back to Take It or Leave It, our weekend newsletter where we answer big questions from the creative community and try to offer something useful, honest, and a little unexpected.

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Alright, let’s get into it.

This week, we’re talking about something people have very loud opinions about:

AI.

And where we stand.

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Hi, Happy Hue.

It’s over.

We lost.

Not in a dramatic, doomsday kind of way. But in the way every generation eventually does—when a new tool comes along that permanently shifts the culture. Our parents lived through it. Their parents did, too. We just happen to be the ones holding the bag now, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what it all means while the world moves on without us.

AI is here. And it’s better than any of us imagined.

If you haven’t kept up, OpenAI just dropped GPT-4o, their latest model. It can see, speak, hear, and respond in real time. It can generate realistic voices, animated faces, and incredibly detailed images, all within seconds. And people immediately started using it to turn their photos into Studio Ghibli-style memes.

Which… yeah, I guess is fun? But it also stings a little when you realize Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli, is famously anti-AI. Like, deeply anti-AI. He once saw a demo of a machine generating creepy movements for animation and said:

“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

And now here we are. People replicating his life’s work with a prompt. Posting it for clout. Going viral. Ripping off the soul of someone who dedicated decades to his craft and doing it in seconds.

That’s what hurts. That’s what we’re all bumping into, whether we can articulate it or not. It’s not just that the machine can make things—it’s that it can do it fast. Faster than you. And sometimes, it looks good. Sometimes, it looks better than what you could’ve done with days or weeks of effort.

The first time I used an AI image tool, I typed in a description of a frame from a movie I’d been dreaming up. Something I’ve never been able to find the perfect visual reference for. And there it was seconds later. Exactly what I had in my head.

And I felt physically sick.