I went to see Princess Mononoke a few nights ago, and it hammered in how stupid AI art fans are. I never respected any of the rising interest in generative AI, especially once the extent of theft these models were trained off of became apparent, but hoo boy. All these people on social media feeding their faces into a machine to get Ghibli-themed gruel plopped into their open hands, completely ignoring the actual artistry behind every single second of animation Studio Ghibli created over the years! There’s no recognition that beyond an art style is a story. Behind that story is a person. A group of artists, writers, editors, and a director like Hayao Miyazaki working together to express an emotion, or present an argument. This trend is a watering down of humanity’s inherent impact on art for it to be worthy of interaction. The source of power behind art is the artist’s input, and the conversation that happens between the artist and every single person who interacts with their work.
Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines is all about those potential outcomes. Penny, an artist working for a massive tech corporation, is tasked with creating pitch illustrations for a mysterious robot that her co-worker is set to present on Monday. Only starting to work on the art the Saturday night before, Penny goes through a variety of misadventures, including eating burgers with an android alien girl, dreaming her OC into reality, and uncovering the true reason why that robot is being made. It’s a goofy story, full of over-the-top characters, but there’s a heart to it throughout, and that heart beats for art.
The game’s main creator and steward of the Endless Monday universe, hcnone, bares their emotions fully within this game and the small zines that led up to it. In those zines, hcnone interviewed fellow artists about their craft, further humanizing others who spend hours and hours of their lives to express the things they love to the world. Across those conversations, and in Dreams and Deadlines, hcnone expresses a love of creation and the creator, and openly casts aside those who would turn that into an assembly line.
Penny does not want to work on pitch illustrations. She would much rather draw art of her favorite cute girl Tiger-chan, who is a hot babe in a safari outfit with tiger features, calls everyone “baby”, and gets coconuts dropped on her head. The assignment is consistently looming, but Penny is unable to bring herself to complete even a single piece until she starts having her adventures.
After an escapade, Penny comes back to her desk and draws one of the six illustrations asked of her, notably in the blobby, often unappealing style of formless humanesque homunculi seen in business magazines. Even with her art style stifled by corporate mandate, Penny still allows her experiences to shine through, basing each one on the friends she has interacted with and the misadventures she has pulled herself through. Penny’s life shines through each piece, no matter how much she had to sand everything down for the suits. Being able to see Penny’s inspiration take shape turns those corporate tasks into art that actually brings forth conversation between Penny and her co-worker, when AI generated material could have been accepted in the presentation “just fine” but wouldn’t have mattered before or after that short showcase.
Penny later finds out that the robot she is tasked with advertising, the Zinebot 6000, is actually built to replace her and the other creatives at the office. It, much like the AI programs so popular today, can spew out hundreds of images in seconds. The villain Blythe wishes to eventually use the technology to fire everyone in the office, making it “perfectly efficient”. Penny and her friends are able to thwart this plot, but this feels like an unavoidable reality for artists in the real world. Corporations will always want to make things cheaper, and right now AI art circumvents labor laws and rushes projects forward without care for aesthetics. However, none of that art comes from the soul, and it’s incredibly easy to tell. Besides the mistakes AI generation leaves in its swiftly spat out messes, any closer examination reveals the lack of any emotion behind these simulated brushstrokes.
Dreams and Deadlines recently got an expansion, called Overtime, that continues to hammer in the point hcnone made with the original. Skye, an ex-worker at the office and the person the Zinebot trained its dataset off of, writes in another of her own zines about how the lack of purpose and human spirit makes the creation of machine generated art worthless. Another co-worker, Hana, laments that emails written by a machine assistant are completely pointless, as the person reading would be giving said emails an inordinate amount of effort. Instead of interacting with the world, corporations want to streamline everything to maximum efficiency, without acknowledging that doing so makes the entire process moot.
Overtime questions the validity of artistic dreams in the era of AI art. Skye left the office to become a YouTuber, and that hasn’t taken off. She realizes that one dream may not be viable, but even met with the realities of having to pay to live, she still searches for new dreams. Penny incorporates her friends more directly into her current assignment, and pushes others around her to stop ignoring the creative aspects of their lives. Revisiting Penny and her buddies reminds us that it is never too late to chase that dream, and that even with corporations trying to remove creativity from the world, they will never fully succeed.
When I see the AI Ghibli generations, I see a lack of understanding of what the films of Hayao Miyazaki are trying to say, and ignorance of how they say those things. When I see hcnone’s art, I see someone who lives and breathes the act of creation, who wants to lift others higher, and who friggin loves burgers and air fried food. I will continue to support the individual artist over the machine, as nothing an algorithm can create will move me as much as Dreams and Deadlines and its new epilogue did.
