Prepare to have your job Ghiblified away

With each passing day, the frightening forecasts inch a little closer to reality

If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.
Bill Gates, mid-1990s

With AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace — great medical advice, great tutoring… it’s completely new territory.
Bill Gates, mid-2020s

We’ve reached the stage where AI advances are coming so thick and fast that it’s a struggle to keep up. Despite shelling out US$200 a month for ChatGPT Pro, I wasn’t even aware that I had access to a funky new image-generation feature until a few days ago. I might still be unaware of its existence if there hadn’t been a social-media brouhaha about people ‘Ghiblifying’ their selfies and memes.

To Ghiblify an image is to render it in the distinctive style of Studio Ghibli, founded by acclaimed Japanese animator and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. You may remember him from such films Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke or My Neighbour Totoro.

The tl;dr version of the story is that up until about a week ago, only Miyazaki and his well-trained underlings could produce what the New Yorker has described as “hand-drawn imagery, lushly organic color palettes, epic narratives, and evocation of both the emotional ambiguities of childhood and the twisting path to becoming an adult”.

Now anybody can, which is the reason you’ve seen a shedload of images mimicking Miyazaki’s style all over the interwebs. Unsurprisingly, the 84-year-old Miyazaki is unhappy about this turn of events. Indeed, he’s on record opining that AI-generated art is “an insult to life”.

As a fellow content creator even deeper in the dark, dank pit of technological obsolescence, I empathise with Miyazaki.

But, hey, whaddya going to do?

Once technologies are invented, they rarely get uninvented. AI has been able to write as well or better than most humans since it dropped in late 2022. Now it can provide a reasonable facsimile of the work of great artists, such as Miyazaki. And if it isn’t already, AI will soon be able to do the work of academics, engineers, doctors, lawyers, singer-songwriters, you name it.

Those who argue AI won’t be able be able to fix a clogged S-bend anytime soon are correct. But only if anytime soon means the next couple of years. After that, even the ‘brawn’ jobs humans currently do will likely be taken over by AI-equipped robots.

More bad news
It seems rising panic about a looming AI apocalypse – or at least an imminent labour-market Götterdämmerung – is spreading from the Substackian Wild West to the more circumspect legacy-media mainstream.

Nonetheless, I fear you may still believe I’m being alarmist, dear reader. So let me share just a small selection of the articles and blog posts I’ve read this week.

Prof G Markets, 31/3/25
Headline: AI Is Quietly Shutting Gen Z Out of the Labor Market

Precis: AI-driven automation is accelerating job losses for Gen Z, with youth unemployment rising globally. Entry-level roles are disappearing, managers prefer AI or experienced hires over young workers, and more graduates are stuck in jobs not requiring degrees

Money quote: Entry-level jobs that once served as stepping stones are vanishing. In fields like law, finance, and tech, tasks traditionally assigned to junior staff are either being fully automated or completed more quickly by fewer workers using AI. One study found that developers using AI saw a 26% boost in productivity, and, in the months after ChatGPT’s release, freelance job postings for software and web development roles fell 21%.

Renew the Republic, 2/4/25
Headline: AI and Oil Wells: Will AI Destroy the Middle Class and Democracy?

Precis: AI risks [further] concentrating wealth and power, as often occurs in oil-rich autocracies. Once the middle class completely disappears, you can wave goodbye to democracy too

Money quote: There’s no logical reason AI couldn’t in fact create such a utopia, but I doubt it. I worry it could just as likely throw us into a dark age of deprivation and oppression. This isn’t because I think AI will become conscious and super-intelligent and then oppress or kill us—although, honestly, that’s a concerning possibility. It’s for the same reason it’s a disaster when a small and poor country discovers oil

AFR, 2/4/25
Headline: Canva shocks employees with AI-related job cuts

Precis: Canva instructed staff to use AI tools for productivity before laying off most of its technical writing team, the first redundancies in its history. Employees feel betrayed given the assurances they were given

Money quote: Employees who spoke to The Australian Financial Review, under the condition of anonymity so they could speak freely, claimed the technical writers diligently followed the direction to use “any and every” generative AI tool in their work. Staff members said they had been assured by the company that the use of AI wouldn’t lead to a loss of jobs.

Capital Brief, 2/4/25
Headline: AI anxiety: The tech sector may be the canary in the coal mine for job losses caused by its own rapid development of artificial intelligence

Precis: New AI tools like OpenAI's image generator are intensifying fears about job automation, affecting roles from marketing to software development. Startups increasingly replace junior staff with AI

Money quote: We might not be actually seeing a truly seismic shift just yet, but there have certainly been movements. Writing for our Ideas section this week, Side Stage Ventures investor Elli Hanson described the phenomenon of early-stage startups “filling junior and even some mid-level roles with AI instead of humans”

Should we Gen Xers count our blessings?
None of the articles listed above impacted me quite so powerfully as a recent New York Times thinkpiece. Let me sketch out the basics, then explain why Generations Y and Z – or whatever monikers the young people go by these days – are about to experience the lack of upward social mobility familiar to so many members of Gen X.

New York Times, 28/2/25
Headline: The Gen X Career Meltdown: Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete

Precis: Gen X creatives, now in their 40s and 50s, face career obsolescence as industries like media, advertising, and photography are radically transformed by digital technology and AI. Once sought-after skills have lost value, leaving many economically displaced, emotionally disoriented, and grappling with midlife reinvention in an economy that prioritises youth and efficiency

Money quote: In “Generation X,” the 1991 novel that defined the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas Coupland chronicled a group of young adults who learn to reconcile themselves to “diminishing expectations of material wealth.” Lessness, Mr. Coupland called this philosophy.

For many of the Gen X-ers who embarked on creative careers in the years after the novel was published, lessness has come to define their professional lives.

If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.

“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.

As a 53-year-old former print journalist, the article really hit home with me. But upon reflection, I’m beginning to worry that post-Gen X generations may soon come to view my age cohort with the kind of surly resentment Gen Xers have long reserved for Boomers. (In fact, I fear Gen X and Boomers have already merged into one contiguous blob of property-owning old people in the youngsters’ heads.)

As Steven Kurutz’s superb piece details, life hasn’t been all beer and skittles for we Xers. Especially in comparison to the prosperity the Boomers continue to so self-righteously enjoy. Nonetheless, many of us did somehow manage to find entry-level positions in creative industries. Some of us even moved up the ladder a few rungs and made a reasonable living for a decade or two there.

Most of the magazines and newspapers I once worked for or contributed to have collapsed. Those that survive are barely hanging on. The only business model for surviving publications seems to be employing a smattering of Boomer or Gen X marquee names and a marginally heavier smattering of unpaid or underpaid twentysomethings. I’m not as familiar with the other industries Kurutz references, but I gather they frequently function in a similar fashion.

Only now, AI has made all those unpaid interns and underpaid early-career employees a costly, unnecessary indulgence. ChatGPT, or one of its competitors, can now do all the grunt work the junior burgers once did for a fraction of the cost.

Businesses soon won’t even need a handful of middle-aged superstars to parade around, as this week’s Ghiblification contretemps illustrates. And as Kurutz notes in his elegiac meditation, almost all the non-marquee names were long ago hurled on the scrap heap. Or at least propelled into the hellish limbo of an unwanted midlife career change.

Like I keep saying, winter is coming.