The USSR had some absolutely incredible art used on their propaganda posters. But if you use that for anything outside of ironic Russian themes (e.g. a goofy game set in that era, some silly snack that claims to be Russian-inspired), people will think you're an unironic communist and you instantly turn away loads of people.
When a dominant political force uses AI "art" for everything they do and the style becomes apparent, anything that looks similar to that instantly disgusts loads of people. You can argue "well that's their fault for being disgusted", but pattern recognition and being conditioned to associate certain images with "bad" goes far deeper than the conscious and it's a base instinct in animals.
If you think Ghibli is now tainted by association with Trump based on this image, I don't know what to tell you. That sounds preposterous in the extreme.
More like "AI art in the style of ____" will be tainted by association. I can almost hear the complaints to the editor to every boutique indie blog post and company listicle with AI filler at the top. For me at least it cheapens the feeling of the blog post itself - "if the author couldn't be arsed to get any real art/pay for a stock image, what about the rest of the content?"
People know the "NFT style", and when people see any sort of image like that, they instantly think "annoying crypto scammer."
There's now the "AI image" style, which people are becoming more aware of. And people associate that with scammers, very confused old people, weird porn, and the right.
Most of the ghiblified stuff is from AI/cryptobros and right wing movements (with heavy overlap on those groups). People possess pattern recognition and will become aware of the pattern each time they see these images.
The USSR had some absolutely incredible art used on their propaganda posters. But if you use that for anything outside of ironic Russian themes (e.g. a goofy game set in that era, some silly snack that claims to be Russian-inspired), people will think you're an unironic communist and you instantly turn away loads of people.
When a dominant political force uses AI "art" for everything they do and the style becomes apparent, anything that looks similar to that instantly disgusts loads of people. You can argue "well that's their fault for being disgusted", but pattern recognition and being conditioned to associate certain images with "bad" goes far deeper than the conscious and it's a base instinct in animals.