Member-only story
Ghibli memes are cute, but they scare me to death.
What’s the future of an artist?
The internet is full of Ghibli memes.
Sure, it’s cute. But it scares me to death.
If AI can churn out the lifetime work of Hayao Miyazaki, the heart of Studio Ghibli, in a second, what’s left for the future of an artist?

The day before OpenAI launched its new feature,
I was at a coffee shop. Ordered my usual, an iced latte.
I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me.
He was a software engineer with ten years of experience.
But he quit.
Signed up for a course to become a welder.
I looked him in the eye and saw the desperation.
I asked him why.
He said, “Thing is, in the software industry, they don’t need us like they used to. AI can code now.”
So, he laid himself off and picked something AI can’t replace — at least not yet.
So, what’s the future of the artist?
To me, we’re at an irreversible moment in humanity.
There’s no going back, no saying, “Stop using AI to create art,” because it’s already part of the mainstream.
The best way forward is to embrace AI and stop playing a game you can’t win.
Let’s talk about the game we’ll never win.
What is it? It’s the brute force game.
I know it’s hard to swallow.
A lot of jobs will disappear.
- The $25/hour writing gigs? ChatGPT will do them for fractions of a penny.
- The $2,000 proofreading projects? Grok will handle them for a buck.
- The $5,000/month ghostwriters? Replaced by Writers + Claude for $100 a month.
Everything that used to take 10 hours to create will take one second.