>Flooding the internet discourse with Ghibli memes is not "making the scarce more available", it's producing knock-offs that have the potential to saturate our

>Flooding the internet discourse with Ghibli memes is not "making the scarce more available", it's producing knock-offs that have the potential to saturate our collective minds and make then "vaccinated" against the real Ghibli. I feel like this claim rests upon several unstated claims that don't seem rigorously proven. What does it take for an art style to be "saturated" in culture? What would it mean for a brain to be "vaccinated" against it? Hoel presents the case of semantic satiation, the idea that the repeated use of a word leads to a loss of meaning and a preoccupation with the syntax and structure of the word itself, as an analogue. But semantic satiation is a very short term effect. Having once engaged in semantic satiation does not permanently make words lose their meanings. Similarly, I am really skeptical this short term fad of using OpenAI's current image model to replicate Ghibli's work will permanently cheapen the semantic meaning of Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away. Hoel quotes a twitter user that apparently feels this way, but I really think people are being hyperbolic about a short term experience. Having not been on twitter much the last week, I've only been dimly aware of the phenomenon and I would guess that it won't even make it to May as a mass phenomenon, though I'm sure a handful of people will remain obsessed with it. I just don't see how that could ruin a great work of art either for me or for the culture at large.