Ghibli images aren’t really about copyright or ethics, they’re about unexamined questions of power. Who gets to make images? What gives them meaning? And what is their value when machines can produce them at scale?
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Information Age Iconoclasm
For our entire lives we have been living through a revolution, the opening era of the ‘Information Age’.
It can be hard to remember this, surrounded as we are by the flat texture of the future mundane: smartphones, AI-generated media, 3D printing, VR and ubiquitous connectivity.
When I was growing up in the 90s, it all felt new. The Information Age sat right at the surface. Dial-up tones, email, mobile phones, the World Wide Web. The future flickering into view over the millennium marker.
But it’s been since the 1970s, that we’ve shifted from an economy of tangible goods to one abstracted into information, and now we’re facing deeper consequences; cultural, social, and epistemic.
The Information Age doesn’t just change what we know. It changes how how we know, value, and construct shared meaning
At the heart of this shift is a migration of value—from the object to its context. Once, value resided in things: a crafted object, a physical book, a unique performance. But the digital revolution made information infinitely replicable and instantly distributable. Suddenly, the object matters less than its circulation.
Napster-era cracks reappear in AI debates. Revealing that Industrial-era symbolic systems, like copyright and IP, can’t cope with digital information’s physics. Perfect copies at zero marginal cost shattered older models of control. But instead of starting again, we patched things up and limped on.
Now generative AI arrives, not copying, but compressing. And from that compression emerges text, images, and video from vast, scraped datasets. What’s produced is not an imitation but a synthetic original.
Which raises questions we’ve long deferred: What is originality? Who owns a style? What counts as authorship in a world of infinite images?
What we’re experiencing isn’t just technological disruption.
It’s something older, deeper: Iconoclasm.
Literally meaning image struggle.
Ghibli images aren’t really about copyright or ethics, they’re about unexamined questions of power. Who gets to make images? What gives them meaning? And what is their value when machines can produce them at scale?
We are in the first Information Age Iconoclasm. A cultural reckoning over representation, authorship, and the role of images in society. A slow, ongoing struggle. Not unlike the Byzantine Iconoclasm of the 8th and 9th centuries, which lasted nearly a century.
That struggle wasn’t just about the presence or absence of the divine, but the metaphysics of image itself. A conflict over what images mean, who gets to create or destroy them, and what power they hold. Ours is similar, but it’s about indifference. The soullessness of the machine-made image.
Shannon’s Information Theory, which underpins all digital communication, is concerned only with transmission of information, not meaning. Protocols don’t care what bits mean. This neutrality creates an environment where all Art, Poetry, Film, Images, Text, become flattened into “content”—indistinguishable in form, even if wildly different in consequence.
Upon this vacuum of meaning, platforms were built. They shape attention through feeds, trends, metrics, and algorithms. In doing so, they become the dominant environments of context. And in this world, the frame is more powerful than the content itself.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve struggled with images.
Photography, film, and recorded music all arrived together at the end of the Industrial Age. Cultural engines of the 20th century. They changed how we saw, how we remembered, how we imagined.
But within decades, they were digitised. Analogue became fluid, copyable, endlessly editable. A symbolic layer of culture abstracted into bits.
And now we’re living through the next phase of that shift. As Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst say: “All media is training data.” Generative outputs aren’t just more media,they represent one of the first truly computer-native mediums. And in doing so, they reframe the entire structure of originality and authorship.
When photography emerged, questions of craft, intention, and subjectivity arose. Sound familiar? But concern didn’t last. People flocked to have their portraits taken, and once artists could afford to experiment with cameras, they did what artists always do: they expressed themselves.
They staged scenes, added effects, and subverted the supposed objectivity of the camera. Painters used photography in their workflows. The argument wasn’t won—it was metabolised. ‘Is photography art?’ became irrelevant, art simply moved through it.
The same will happen with AI. But the difference this time is scale and speed. Image generation doesn’t just alter how we make images, it alters what an image is, ontologically. Thus, iconoclasm.
AI raises the stakes of our image struggle. It compresses the whole of media culture into latent space and reconstitutes it on demand.
Holly and Mat again:
If your art already exists, in some embedded vector form, before you make it, what does originality even mean? What does it mean to create?
The Ghibli crisis is just the beginning. Focusing on the outputs alone misses the point.
So how do we respond?
We must recognise that revolution is not over. We are in the Information Age.
We must cultivate context literacy and we must maintain a distinction between the infrastructure and the experience, between machine and meaning.
We are living through a moment that future historians may describe as a cultural rupture. A context war. How this plays out will shape new definitions of truth, authorship, creativity, and trust, perhaps for centuries to come.
The question is not whether this will happen.
It already is.
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