OpenAI's Creativity Heist and What Survives

Not all heists are acts of democratization of stolen goods.

Last week, OpenAI’s new image generator flooded the internet with Studio Ghibli knockoffs. And boy, did humanity show its true colors.

Sam Altman started with a humble brag about their "melting GPUs."

Due to "overwhelming demand."

Translation: "We're making so much money violating artistic integrity that our servers can't keep up!" Silicon Valley's version of "suffering from success."

Then, a few days later, another celebration post: One million users in ONE HOUR.

That was how many people rushed to make AI-Ghibli selfies.

Instagram and Twitter became identical Ghibli galleries overnight. Millions proudly displayed their creativity by creating the exact same thing. Nothing reveals your originality like having the same idea as 999,999 others.

What really disgusted me was that Altman has the trophy prominently displayed as his profile image. Why has he not been arrested yet for publicly flaunting a stolen good?

You likely have read people quoting Hayao Miyazaki. If you haven’t seen this original video, you should. Just to feel a fraction of Miyazaki’s heartbreak through this screen.

He was in a presentation, showcasing what appears to be AI-generated animation.

Hayao Miyazaki began by mentioning,

I have a friend with a physical disability… Doing a high-five with him, you know, it's very difficult… Thinking about him, you know, I just can't watch this thinking it's interesting… The people who make this, about things like pain, you know, they make it without thinking about that at all, right?

He then went on and remarked,

It is an extreme... insult to life itself.

If you don’t know how serious it was, having the legend of an industry in Japan show you their profound disgust for your work, one presenter wept.

Another presenter tried to save the scene: "Well, in the same way that humans draw, a machine that draws pictures... is what we want to build."

… silence.

In an interview afterward, Hayao Miyazaki sighed:

Somehow, it feels like the end of the Earth is near, doesn't it?… That's because humans themselves are losing confidence.

The 84-year-old master animator watches his life's work become digital confetti.

I can not think of any worse torture in your old age. Everything you cared for, worked for, overnight turned worthless. Now it is barely the cheapest 10-second entertainment to everyone who generated the Ghibli-styled image, tossed away right after.

Reminded me of this:

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a sultan. The palace becomes a circus.— an old Turkish proverb

This isn't merely sentimental lamentation. It's a reflection of a deeper economic and technological shift occurring beneath the surface.

So let’s move on and talk about something people have not yet discussed: the Economy of Creativity. If we disregard the copyright infringement for a moment, the technology itself, generative AI, still has some economic value.

I have drafted many components to explain the concept of the economy of creativity.

Before diving deeper, let's start with an overall concept: what are the specific tasks involved in creating something? Understanding this process will help us see which creative stages gen AI has disrupted, and which ones are likely to remain intact until better technology appears.

Shall we?

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Four Stages Cycle In a Creativity Factory

Let's be clear about two things.

First, the creative work is never like "art appears from nowhere." It's a process…