Infinte Remix: The Ghibli Moment
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Infinite Remix: The Ghibli Moment Transcript
We uploaded everything. Every song, every selfie, every secret.
And now AI is remixing all of it.
And we are astonished... and confused... and angry.
But this is only the latest chapter in a very old story.
We’ve always remixed. Nothing begins from scratch, everything begins from something else. Every melody, every shot, every move, gets passed on, sampled, transformed, made new.
But now there's a plot twist. And this plot twist is upending our ideas of creativity, ownership, and meaning — it hits hard.
Every second of every day, machines are remixing everything we've ever uploaded.
So we can now tap into our collective imagination and orchestrate it. This is called generative AI, gen AI: ChatGPT, Veo, Sora, Midjourney, Claude, and a flood of others.
Gen AI is simultaneously amazing. And so awful.
It's useful and exciting. It's also invasive and empty.
This is the AI experience. It's a warp speed journey through wonder and horror.
For better or for worse, AI is the new creative frontier. And it is the terrain we will navigate together.
I'll show you the big picture of what's happening.
What this means for your creative future.
When to embrace these tools.
When to resist them.
And most importantly: what should we make, when we can make anything?
Welcome to Infinite Remix.
My name is Kirby, and like you, I'm trying to figure out what it means to be creative when machines can create.
Let's start with the big picture. This all started 30 years ago.
The Great Upload
In the nineties, we began uploading ourselves, one kilobyte at a time.
We're emailing. We're chatting. We're blogging. There were a lot of cats involved.
We want to find our people. See what they’re doing. Show what we can do.
We want to matter, even if it's just for a second.
Then this happened.
We get the internet on our phones. We don't just go online anymore. We live there.
We upload every joke, every opinion, every stray thought. We confess, console, insult, perform, and sell and sell and sell.
Anything that's not bolted down becomes data.
In just a few decades, we sent hundreds of billions of terabytes upward into the cloud.
This was The Great Upload.
It's miraculous. It's monstrous. It's transcendent. It's radioactive.
We love it. We fear it. It changed us.
And for a while—not very long, really—it seemed like that was the whole story. We had this endless horizon of human creativity to explore and add to.
But then... the upload started to... I guess, dream?
This happened because of something called deep learning. Deep learning watches everything we’ve made, learns the patterns, and predicts what should come next.
It doesn’t feel, it doesn’t care. It predicts. But it’s so good at this that it can sort of create.
Deep learning transformed The Great Upload into generative AI. Not just an archive, but a remix engine.
When it works, gen AI feels like magic. It can pull ideas from thin air, remix your thoughts in ways you never imagined, and give you raw material that sparks something new.
Gen AI is creatively exciting. People are doing things we've never seen before. The results are hilarious, surreal, disturbing, sometimes beautiful.
And gen AI is just fun.
You can make your kid a Pixar character.
You can create a realistic video of whatever goofy thing you can think up.
And the cat memes have risen to new heights.
But of all the AI trends that went viral, only one felt like it truly meant something, only one touched something sacred. This was The Ghibli Moment.
The Ghibli Moment
I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.
Hayao Miyazaki
"An insult to life itself." This is what Hayao Miyazaki said in 2016 after watching an AI-generated animation.
But the truth is, Miyazaki was talking about something a lot more important than AI art.
Studio Ghibli and its visionary cofounder Hayao Miyazaki create highly stylized, densely human films that are widely beloved.
Their aesthetic requires painstaking manual labor. This four-second shot took 15 months to animate.
AI art, on the other hand, is fast, easy, and very good at mimicking styles.
In March 2025, the iconic Ghibli style collided with the gen AI behemoth.
ChatGPT got an update that could convincingly recreate the Ghibli look. And the internet ran with it, cranking out Ghibli-ized family photos and memes.
The backlash from artists and Ghibli fans was intense.
Al won’t make your photos Ghibli. Ghibli is hand drawn and each character has insane emotional depth. As scary it is to admit the result looks decent, it's nothing like Ghibli and will never be. Big fuck you to Al. This is a terrible advancement of technology.
Some of this anger was misdirected. Most people weren’t trying to replace Ghibli, or even make art. They were playing. They wanted to see themselves in this beautiful world, they wanted to be a part of something magical.
But the critique still stands. Something vital is missing from these images... and all AI art.
These outputs are undeniably impressive — the colors, the textures, it all looks right. ChatGPT was trained on greatness, and it shows.
But look closer and the cracks appear. A hand with four fingers. Things that look right at first but make no sense on closer inspection. Expressions that look simple and generic.
Now contrast this with that four-second shot from _The Wind Rises_.
Every frame was hand-tuned by Miyazaki himself.
Notice that everyone here has a story. A group struggling to move a cart. A panicked horse. A mother shielding her children.
In a Ghibli film, everything has purpose. Everything has meaning. Everything is cared for.
And you feel this when you experience their films. You can feel the life of another person. They were here.
You can also get this with a great song. A perfectly designed app. A meal made by someone who loves you. That sense that a person meant for this to matter.
These experiences have depth. You can sense the unmistakable presence of a human soul, shaped by their life, their taste, and their search for meaning.
AI images don't have depth. They resemble depth.
What AI gives you is the average of everything it’s seen.
And greatness stands out from the average, but even masterpieces have plenty of ordinary parts.
Master artists have worked this way for centuries.
The Renaissance painter Michelangelo painted the most important parts himself. But assistants filled in less important sections, like backgrounds and drapery.
Right now, that’s where AI is most impactful: helping with the ordinary.
With AI you can run your own workshop, your own studio, staffed with infinite, tireless assistants.
You may not make a Miyazaki masterpiece, but you can make something greater than what you could have done on your own, and perhaps even deeper and more meaningful.
And that famous Miyazaki quote? It's not even about AI art.
He wasn’t reacting to the technology — he was reacting to the content: this grotesque, flailing humanoid crawling across the screen.
After he watches this clip, he then talks about a close friend with a disability and how much he suffered.
What offended Miyazaki wasn’t how it was made. It was the lack of empathy, the lack of care, the lack of soul.
That's what he’s really afraid of. That's what we're really afraid of. Not machines, not styles.
We’re afraid of a world without soul.
Close
We are the very first humans to confront machines that learn from us... and remix us.
It’s a collective existential moment. And whether we’re amazed or afraid, many of us are saying the same thing:
“Yeah guys, I think we're cooked."
But to me, human creators seem very far from done.
I used gen AI more in this video than ever before. And it is light years from replacing me. Even this... is mostly me. It's my voice. It's based on video of me.
What AI did was change how I work. It's faster, weirder, more expansive. It extended what I could do.
That’s the future I see, a collaboration. A blend of human and machine, where AI handles the ordinary, and we bring the extraordinary: the depth, the meaning, the soul.
What we all need to do is something bold: let's see AI as it is—no panic, no hype.
Let's unpack what AI really can do. And use it to create work that matters.
Continue the Journey
Hi everybody—if this resonated with you and you want to keep going, I’ve got something for you.
I’m running a 5-week live cohort class called Infinite Remix Live, plus a one-time 3-hour workshop.
These are all about using gen AI tools like the brand new ChatGPT-5, Claude, Midjourney, Veo, and more to create faster and smarter while keeping your human voice at the center.
It's for creative professionals, marketers, educators, writers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs—and the creatively curious.
If you missed enrollment, no worries. You can sign up to get notified about future classes, explore our on-demand courses, or dig into some great free content.
Hope to see you there.
Infinite Remix Live — a 5-week deep dive with a small group.
Infinite Remix Spark — a single, fast-paced 3-hour session.