Depending on how you look at it, OpenAI just dropped either a blessing or a bomb. The company’s latest image generation model, ChatGPT-4o, became available to the public last week, and nearly everyone on the internet rushed to try it out. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman described the response as “biblical,” with demand so high that servers buckled under the weight, forcing staff to stay up all night just to keep the system running.

I tested the model myself and was floored. Genuinely shocked. It’s a massive leap forward from its predecessor, DALL-E. What used to be a somewhat clunky process—translating an idea in your head into an image—now takes just a few keystrokes. Especially if, like me, you can’t draw to save your life. It’s not perfect, but it handles tricky prompts surprisingly well, even things like legible text and full-blown fake ads.

For example, I jot down cartoon ideas in my notes app from time to time, but I’m a terrible illustrator and impatient with Photoshop. With a quick prompt and a couple of tweaks, I was suddenly looking at a New Yorker-style cartoon…

A chill ran down my spine thinking about the implications for illustrators, graphic designers, and visual artists. Not to mention the unease already lodged in many writers’ hearts last month when The Guardian published a short story penned by ChatGPT. (Verdict: meh, but still!).

I pushed further…A couple more ideas from the notes app, and a few more prompts, and boom: fully rendered images.

AND

I have to say the thrill of what was possible overtook me for a short while, especially because the internet felt alive with this same buzzing energy. Like me, people were ice-cream scooping cobwebbed ideas out of their brains and turning them into something visual.

But nothing took over the collective feed quite like the flood of family photos and memes that people had transformed into Studio Ghibli-style illustrations, channeling the soft, hand-drawn magic of My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away. (Understandably, Studio Ghibli’s founder, Hayao Miyazaki, has called this AI tool an “insult to life itself”).

I am not an AI doomer, but this moment gave me real pause. It felt like a tiny psychic rupture. A chill about the future of creativity, human labor, and maybe most unsettling, the value of creative output itself. What happens when the thrill of making becomes the thrill of typing? What is art when the barrier to entry is gone?

A Few Pieces Helping Me Make Sense of all this:

• “Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse” in the Intrinsic Perspective — 

  Erik Hoel
  revisits his eerie 2019 prediction of a “semantic apocalypse,” as the internet floods with AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style images that feel delightful at first—but slowly erode the meaning of the original art. In this haunting essay, he explores how generative AI saturates culture with imitations so potent they trigger a kind of collective semantic satiation, leaving us estranged from the real thing.

• “Hayao Miyazaki’s AI Nightmare” in The Atlantic — Senior Editor Damon Beres speaks with Ian Bogost (Atlantic staffer, academic, and video game designer) about the flood of Studio Ghibli-style images. They explore why the images feel both delightful and vaguely cursed—raising questions about authorship, fandom, and whether anything rare can stay special. The piece doesn’t moralize so much as wonder: What do these images actually mean, and what do they say about us? Bogost argues that instead of rushing to outrage, we should stay curious.

• “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” in The New Yorker — This 2024 essay by Ted Chiang, the award-winning sci-fi short story writer, reflects on what truly makes art and writing meaningful in an age of generative AI. Drawing on Roald Dahl’s 1953 story about a fiction-writing machine, Chiang explores how tools like ChatGPT ape style but not intention, replacing creative labor with low-effort mimicry. He argues that art isn’t about novelty alone; it’s about choices, effort, and the human desire to communicate something real. As AI floods the world with fast content, Chiang urges us to remember that meaning comes from intention.
  

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Other Interesting Stuff

• “Meet the People Fighting the ‘Crisis in Sperm’” in GQ — Men have been worried about their fertility for time immemorial. But there’s perhaps reason to believe that the sperm panic of the moment—declining counts, rising anxieties, and tech-fueled fixes—isn’t entirely unmerited.

  Rosecrans Baldwin
  explores how the world is addressing the “spermpocalypse” — everything from billionaires bankrolling personal breeding projects to group masturbation retreats in the woods. He traces how declining sperm counts, potentially tied to chemicals, diet, and age, have collided with cultural anxiety, reproductive tech startups, and good old-fashioned male denial. Along the way, he meets scientists, sperm bros, and donor-conceived half-siblings who challenge our ideas of family, responsibility, and legacy. The takeaway? Sperm may be dumb, but ignorance is dumber—and it’s probably time men start paying closer attention to their own biology.

• “Mann Men” in LA Review of Books — In this essay from LARB Quarterly, Clayton Purdom dives deep into the world of Michael Mann’s cinema, tracing a lineage of “Mann men”—obsessive, professional, emotionally walled-off figures who live for their work and wear greatness like armor. Through close readings of Thief, Heat, The Insider, Miami Vice, and Ferrari, Purdom explores how Mann’s characters navigate systems of power, sacrifice personal connection, and pursue mastery at all costs. It’s both tribute and critique, reflecting on what these men reveal about masculinity, labor, and the fantasy of perfect control.

Also in my queue…

• I need to watch the Netflix limited series Adolescence, which I’ve been told is a chilling meditation on masculinity. I’ll report back.

• The film Magazine Dreams follows a troubled bodybuilder chasing fame while unraveling under the weight of isolation, obsession, and rage.