In another life I'm also an illustrator, and sometimes I get to work with wonderful local institutions like the theatre La Chapelle in Montréal, for whom I made the poster for the 26/27 season.

Little academic milestone: this week I got my first ever citation in another paper! And I couldn't be happier that it's about artists, creative labor and machine learning. 🎉📚

Hello, I finally updated my website to include my research. julienposture.com/research-1

If you want to know more about the AI side of style transfer and how it aligns with capitalist extraction in the creative industry, take a look at our #chi2025 paper: arxiv.org/abs/2409.17410

If this week has taught us anything, is that styles are never "just" styles. They are at the core of our cultural, political and economic lives and how we think about, and do things with them has a tremendous impact on our lives. (A real Miyazaki sketch to cleanse your feed.)

First off, it is not random that OpenAI decided to make an example of beloved animation studio Ghibli. Culturally, Ghibli stands for craft, integrity, and humane stories against Open AI corporate, mechanistic slop. Here, copying style = appropriating/displacing cultural value.

This week the world got Ghiblified, pointing once more that styles are more than mere surface, but essential parts of our cultural, political and economic lives. My PhD is about the political economy of how humans and machines see style in the US illustration industry, and I have thoughts! 🧵1/

I'm so excited to share our paper for #chi2025: "Copying style, Extracting value: Illustrators' Perception of AI Style Transfer and its Impact on Creative Labor" As an anthropologist, I'm delighted to be able to contribute to interdisciplinary conversations on AI and art! arxiv.org/abs/2409.17410

This is my last weekend before returning to Cambridge to write my PhD dissertation. Between me and the void stands coffee, pastries, books. But it's drawing all these things that has done the best job at alleviating my stress.