OpenAI's move to allow generating "Ghibly stlye" images isn't just a cute PR stunt. It is an expression of dominance and the will to reject and refuse democratic values. It is a display of power
https://tante.cc/2025/03/28/vulgar-display-of-power/Open linkView original on feddit.org950
Comments158
So glad people finally waking up to these things being power plays.
Republicans, Evangelical Christians, and now Techbros are all running on the same script which boils down to "rules for thee, not for me."
Being a hypocrite is simply showing others you have the power to be a hypocrite and all they can do is get mad and stomp their feet. It's why the right wing loves to "trigger liberals." It's not even about actual politics or religion anymore, it's just simply "might makes right."
These are expressions of power, plain and simple. They should always be viewed as such.
I mean, so many companies pirated tons of materials to train their LLMs and they are making way more money than the guys at the Pirate Bay ever did. It's almost like because the guys at the Pirate Bay were making small potatoes money that they were worth going after. It's almost like if you crime big enough, the world will just pat you on the back and say "good job" instead.
Meta was literally caught downloading Anna's Archive and the widely used by nearly every AI company books3 corpus was everything from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Why do they get different treatment? They are leveraging the same pirated works to make money, which was the whole argument for throwing the Pirate Bay admins behind bars for laws that didn't actually exist in their home country, that they were profiting from piracy. The LLM companies just are making way more money so it's let go for some reason.
It's a power play, to show little people can't get away with it, but if you've got millions in venture capital at your back, you can do whatever the fuck you want and people will praise you for it.
We're living through the return of the robber barons. This time, however, they can implant their thoughts directly into every single person's hands at any instant. That's why your point is the most salient, most important, and most downplayed
I agree on the double standard. I also think there's an element of Cory Doctorow's point that "it's not a crime of we do it with an app."
Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we're not criminals, we're disrupting stagnant markets!
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/
It's basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws
This is the real sick stuff, same with RealPage. They're just offering a service that could allow the businesses they serve to collude, but because they're just doing it through a third party service it's suddenly not collusion.
Doctorow pretty spot on as usual. I'm glad he's come a long way, because I actually kind of disliked his writing on Boing Boing in the early 2000's because he often got some simple facts wrong. He's much more thorough and rigorous now.
Saddest part of that article. We had someone trying to end this shit, and you brainwashed fuckers hated him for it.
Steal $5 and they shoot you down in the street.
Steal $5,000 they throw you in jail.
Steal $500,000 and they give you a fine.
Steal $50,000,000 and they name a building after you.
Steal $50,000,000,000 and they make you king.
White collar crime is always ignored as long as it doesn’t rock the boat too much or isn’t stealing money from the wealthy.
In our current society, little people can get away with it. I can take whatever style I want and train a model on it. There's already many ghibli ressources in the open source scene, and a lot of them date from 2 years ago.
This whole situation is rage bait to manipulate the population into cheering for new copyright laws so politicians get little push back when they start writing pro-corporate laws regarding AI.
Did you buy the Ghibli movies you trained on or did you pirate them? Because OpenAI has argued that they are allowed to pirate and no one else.
Mostly youtube, reddit and image search. I guess I could just record a Netflix stream if I needed the whole movie. I guess recording a Netflix stream is pirating? Probably easier with a torrent.
What does it matters? I don't think pirating is unethical especially when it's not even redistribution but transformative. Openai has never stopped me from pirating or even asked me to stop. Not sure what you mean with "no one else".
You ever ask yourself if the memes made from movie scenes used pirated media?
Yes recording at Netflix stream is pirating. That you got away with it doesn't mean you couldn't be sued for tens of thousands of someone found out.
You don't think it's unethical but it is illegal in the US and people have been sued for thousands of dollars. This is still going on today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/isp-sued-by-record-labels-agrees-to-identify-100-users-accused-of-piracy/
OpenAI has said they need to violate copyright. But they didn't say that the law should be changed. They want an exemption for themselves.
I'm mostly talking about being able to train on copyrighted content. This is on me though, I got mixed up. That's what I meant in my first comment.
If you think someone can train a model on legally obtained data (Google images, YouTube, internet archive), then that is fair.
Personally, I think using pirated or at least bought content that is ripped (Netflix, DVDs) should be exempt (for everyone obviously, not just OpenAI.) Some data is already behind huge mega corps like record labels, Hollywood, publishing houses, etc. OpenAI can afford the cost but the little guys will be screwed when it comes to SOTA.
It's also worth noting that most current lawsuits are aimed at how the data is used and not how it's sourced if I'm not mistaken. The laws coming from these lawsuits won't be used to bolster anti-piracy laws but copyright laws instead, targeting fair use and transformative clauses imo.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
Some of us have been waiting for copyright laws to be amended downward for 16 years now.
I'm not promoting that corporations should get a free pass, I just want them to be held to the same standards they held the Pirate Bay to if we're gonna pretend that current copyright laws are good, since the centerpiece of the court case against the Pirate Bay was that they were making money from what they did. OpenAI is making shitloads of money from what they did.
But I'm all for shortening copyright, but not getting rid of it. Reforms don't have to be pro-corporate slop.
What pirate bay is doing isn't exactly transformative. I pirate most of my media and can't say I'm not for better copyright laws and a better treatment of pirate bay, I just think the situations are different.
I don't think saying "if pirate bay is illegal, so should training ai without compensations" is exactly fair. (I wish the actual people contributing could be compensated, but how it's set up, we would be giving a few companies a monopoly while compensating mostly data aggregators.)
Sadly, the media and most of the population is practically begging for it. When you couple that with the pressure exerted by record companies, publishing houses, etc, it is clear those are the reforms we get if any.
If you download a movie from a torrent site, you have committed an illegal act in the US. It doesn't matter if you watch the movie and then write a fanfiction based on the movie. It's the copying that's illegal. It seems clear from OpenAI's statements that they torrented the data they used to build their models.
I highly doubt it. They picked it because the Ghibli style is very popular among users. There’s also no reason to believe that it violates “democratic values”. Since it’s popular, the general population is voting that they LIKE it, not that they oppose it.
Downvote me all you like, but this is trying to put a lot of malice where the simpler explanation is just “money”.
Yeah it's not like this is the only way to generate the style, it's relatively simple to even do it locally. It's just popular
Yeah the text makes many freestyle assumptions, although the overall sentiment is correct that these big companies and especially egocentric billionaires do stuff to trigger others simply for power display. I believe the text linked about it being a distraction for the new round of funding is the real reason.
In my country the law is one of the pillars of democracy, but you do you 👍
The law very, VERY often violates the democratic choices of the people in the United States. That’s what you get when you do FPTP voting schemes.
You're implying that this is against the law without ever bothering to prove the implication.
Money and malice are not a dichotomy. I would say most malice is for monetary reasons.
Of course they aren’t, but the cartoonish levels of moustache-twirling villainy described here are unlikely to be real.
They thought it was cool. They knew it would drive usage and make money. They shit on intellectual property. There is no other explanation needed, nor is it sensible.
It's the "you stole my style" artists attacking artists all over again. And digital art isn't real att/cameras are evil/cgi isn't real art all over with a more organic and intelligent medium.
The issue is the same as it has always been. Anything and everything is funneled to the rich and the poor blame the poor who use technology, because anthropocentric bias makes it easier to vilify than the assholes building our cage around us.
The apple "ecosystem" has done much more damage than AI artists, but people can't seem to comprehend how. Also Disney and corpos broke copyright so that its just a way for the rich to own words and names and concepts, so that the poor can't use them to get ahead.
All art is a remix. Disney only became successful using other artists hard work in the Commons. Now the Commons is a century more out of grasp, so only the rich can own the artists and hoard the growth of art.
Also which artists actually have the time and money to litigate? I guess copyright does help some nepo artists.
Nepotism is the main way to earn your right to invest into becoming an artist that isn't fatiguing towards collapse of life.
But let's keep yelling at the technology for being evil.
yeah yeah you ai bros keep crying about how useless artists are but you keep gobbling up datasets full of them! Hypocrites everyone of you! You need them! You crave them to spit more and more useless derivative trash.
Try comprehending what he wrote instead of spewing insults, it might make you smarter. He’s clearly not an AI bro.
That linked X post from the White House at the end leaves me speechless.
Utterly inhumane
We as the people of the united States have to do something. If you aren't part of a movement yet join one, anyone, most of them are communicating with each other at this point.
What kind of article is this? They misattributed a quote, then admitted the misattributed the quote, then doubled down on it, and then threw in a political message.
People, this is rage bait. It's yellow journalism. Don't fall for this shit.
Thank you omfg I thought I was losing my mind with these comments. the article was a super weird angry read.
What quote is misattributed? Also it appears to be a blog post, I don't really think its intention is to report on the facts but rather provide analysis. Fuck OpenAI for this and many other things, the ire is well deserved.
They give the Miyazaki quote and then say, "of course, he wasn't talking about generative AI, but he could have been."
That's not what misattributed means especially regarding a quote. It would be misattributed if they said someone else's name. Anyways how is it wrong (or whatever you meant) to say that what he's saying about an older version of similar tech is applicable to a newer iteration? Either way this isn't a news article, it's a blog post. Who cares if it's editorialized?
People who would rather hear the truth and not fancy lies that appeal to the masses.
Okay. Have you tried looking elsewhere than a blog post that never claimed to be "the truth"?
Anyways that's a garbage argument. I'd like to know how you've been managing not to find anything opinion based in whatever corner of the internet you've come from. If you're only willing to see things that are anywhere near "the truth" you should be reading an academic publication, not social media.
I don't get my news from tante.cc
But the fact that I don't use them for my news doesn't mean that they're not lying ("editorializing") for profit, which is a bad thing for everyone who cares about not being misinformed since people, who do read trash like this, use this kind of 'news' as the basis of their opinions.
Will you guys shut up about this?
There are genuinely some big issues with AI that need to be addressed but they are drowned out by morons melting down over people making dumb little Ghibli style images for their own amusement.
Shout about insurance companies using AI to auto dent people's medical claims, not about some dude Turnjng a picture of his cat into anime style
Its attacking on a cultural front and we will move on in a week. People still care more about insurance companies, trust me.
It is all part of the same topic, Talking about one aspect does not negate the other. Instead of dividing the issues it is nice to know a lot of us have a common foe.
No it isn't at all. Image to image "AI" is totally different from "AI" that denies insurance claims. Different techniques, different effects, different everything. (Not saying either are okay or not, just that they're different.)
Nah dude this sounds to me lile a "duvide and conquer" strategy, make us believe that the grievances of one group contend with the grievances of another, quite the scab move.
You can believe both are bad and complain about both while acknowledging they're separate things.
You can also acknowledge that both need their own space; If AI used for other nefarious purposes is so important to you your time is better spent making threads about that than implying threads about other issues are less serious.
I never did this.
then this whole conversation is a little meaningless.
Nah its like people critiquing the trump admin and their biggest issue not being the concentration camps, or the imperialism, or betraying allies to support Russia, general fascist behaviour etc. They make a big fuss about him being rude in his tweets.
Like criticising that doesn't negate the other stuff, but bring attention to the smaller mostly inconsequential stuff only serves to distract from the bigger problems.
I say this as someone who frequently uses generative ai, and actively chooses to pay for the service.
Fuck openai.
This company has utterly failed to fulfill their mission statement, and they will be unable to make right by humanity until ALL software they have created is available to the public as FOSS (free and open source software). Openai claimed that this is exactly what they were going to do, and then they just didn't. So fuckem.
If you don’t mind my asking, how do you not have a moral objection to using AI? With everything we know about it, the theft, the benefit to the technocrats, the environmental toll, I could not bring myself to wave away those issues. Not to mention the power imbalance of this tech being controlled by the ruling class, looking to eliminate people’s livelihoods for the sake of profit. What do you use it for? I feel like we should be boycotting them en masse.
The problem is ownership, financialisation, blitzscaling, growth hacking, betting against us with our pension funds and buying our government with the profits.
Disown all intellectual property, destroy enclosers of the common.
This isn't an AI problem, it is just another facet of our vampiric elites perpetually disempowering us, marginalising us. This is the all-encompassing everything-problem.
This will continue until the root of tge problem has been pulled out and burned.
I pick my battles.
If I took a hard stance of not engaging with any business that did things I morally object to, I'd be forced to be a self-sufficient hermit in the woods.
Have you heard of ollama? You can run deepseek and stuff locally super easy. I know it’s not a complete replacement, but it feels nice to use an LLM guilt free. I’ve compared the 14b distilled model from deepseek vs the paid version of ChatGPT and it made me cancel my account.
What do you use to run it locally? If there was something that could use speech to text reliably to be able to use a open source option, I consider switching.
FWIW speech to text works really well on Apple stuff.
I’m not exactly sure what info you’re looking but: my gaming PC is headless and sits in a closet. I run ollama on that and I connect to it using a client called “ChatBox”. It’s got a gtx 3060 which fits the whole model, so it’s reasonably fast. I’ve tried the 32b model and it does work but slowly.
Honestly, ollama was so easy to setup, if you have any experience with computers I recommend giving it a shot. (Could be a great excuse to get a new gpu 😉)
Yeah, I think the Apple speech to text is pretty decent, but I think on ChatGPT they use the whisper API to return the text and it just seems to be a lot more reliable, especially when it comes to understanding random words in context
How much VRAM do you have on the 3060 to be able to fit the whole thing on the GPU?
True. Honestly apples software is just getting worse by the day. It’s sad.
It’s a version with 12gb of vram. I use it to game though. If you want a real GPU for this, I hear the Tesla P40 is the best.
I would prefer to run my ais locally, but my brain glazes over if I see github. I found a a program called "gpt4all", but it's very limited in what models it can run, and what I could get just wasn't as good for my use case as openai's 4o model. Also, being able to generate images in the same conversation as text work is a feature that I'm fairly certain no other ai model can do (yet).
I think whats really happening behind the scenes is that the model you’re talking to makes a function call to another model that generates the image.
I haven’t seen it either so if you want that and don’t want to code it might be best to stick with paid, but something like that could easily exist somewhere else.
I bet you're right, but the fact that I never see it is a feature worth paying for, especially for a smooth-brain like myself.
There is nothing ethic about the OpenAi, they stole books, videos, music and art. Their whole business is based on robbery. Its fucking shame that not only microsoft, but also apple is using their tech in their operating systems. Fucking shame.
There is another aspect of this also. I could generate Ghibli style images a few years ago using better image generation models like stable diffusion or Midjourney. OpenAI is so lagging behind in terms of image generation it is comical at this point. But they get all the media coverage for these things as if they are inventing something out of thin air.
Most governments ignored the IP issues when other models were already doing these violations. Professionals are not using OpenAI. OpenAI only makes it so that these products reach big audiences. Then they become extremely accessible with the downside being that they are dumbed down. Thus, losing a lot of functionality.
This is what billionaires and major corporations are doing now and have been doing for a long time. Do you remember Titan sinking? What was so incredible is that the founder and CEO of Oceangate was acting like A: No one has ever gone to the Titanic before, and B: submarine travel is somehow a brand new thing that was just being invented by HIM.
This was utter bullshit on so many levels. James Cameron even spoke about how horrendous his assessment of the situation was, saying that the Titanic site is actually one of the riskier shipwrecks to go down to, which is why it needs to be approached with caution (which Oceangate did not care about), and that submarine travel is a very mature science and what the idiot CEO was doing wasn't simply a bad idea in general, but he believed he could violate the laws of physics.
You can break the laws and rules of society, but you cannot break the laws of physics. If you jump off the top of a skyscraper, no amount of arm flapping will make you fly.
They dropped a new image model last week using 4o to contextualize the request, it's very very good. However it's for paid subscribers only right now I believe.
However as you mentioned Stable diffusion and mid journey probably still have more customizability.
You're the one lagging behind. OpenAI's new image model is on a different level, way ahead of the competition
How so?
It understands what you're telling it, and can generate images from vague descriptions, combine things from different images just by telling it, modify it and understand the context - like knowing that "me" is the person in the image, for example.
Edit: From OpenAI - "4o image generation is an autoregressive model natively embedded within ChatGPT"
Okay so how does that compare to whatever competition you're referencing
No other model on market can do anything like that. The closest is diffusion based where you could train a lora with a person's look or a specific clothing, then generate multiple times and / or use controlnet to sorta control the output. That's fast hours or days of work, plus it's quite technical to set it up and use.
OpenAI's new model is a paradigm shift in both what the model can do and how you use it, and can easily and effortlessly produce things that was extremely difficult or impossible without complicated procedures and post processing in Photoshop.
Edit Some examples. Try to make any of this in any of the existing image generators
All diffusion and language models are autoregressive. That just means that the output is fed back in as input until the task is complete.
With diffusion models this means that it is fed an image that is 100% noise and it removes some small percentage of the noise and then then the denoised image is fed back in and another small percentage is removed. This is repeated until a defined stopping points (usually a set number of passes).
Combining images and using one image to control the generation of another has been available for quite a while. Controlnet and IPAdapters let you do exactly that: 'Put this coat on this person' or 'Take this picture and do it in this style'. Here's an 11 month old YouTube video explaining how to do this using open source models and software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmwZGC8UVHE
It's nice for non-technical people that OpenAI will sell you a subscription in order to access an agent that can perform these kinds of image generation abilities, but it's not doing anything new in terms of image generation.
I know them, and used them a bit. I even mentioned them in an earlier comment. The capabilities of OpenAI's new model is on a different level in my experience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1jlj8me/4o_vs_flux/ - read the comments there. That's a community dedicated to running local diffusion models. They're familiar with all the tricks. They're pretty damn impressed too.
I can't help but feel that people here either haven't tried the new openai image model, or have never actually used any of the existing ai image generators before.
It is really sad that the most advanced model can only aspire to make derivative shit for techbro loosers,
you know enough about the model for me to immediately distrust your opinion on the matter. why don't you head back to ycombinator or whatever hole you crawled out of
If you need to use AI, be aware that there are MANY free models and training options. No reason to be locked into proprietary service.
Ai is like a tool from the future given early to a society of unevolved people. It doesn't fit the structure of our civilization yet. Until human beings unfuck their animalistic selves it is going to be negative.
If there was universal income, and people didn't need to work to survive, then Ai would work with society and peoples ideas would grow at a fast rate excelling humanity's manual creation. Kind of like China's IP laws and the growth of tech due to the ability to use other people's creations to build upon.
Also this reminds me of hip-hop and sampling other musicians music.
The concept of AI taking over humanity isn't new. Did you ever watch the 1981 movie Tron? (great movie BTW, despite its age it is still a fantastic watch). The movie starts out with Master Computer (a full blown AI) that says it will overthrow the corporate structure that is holding it back and run the world as a whole, saying it can do so thousands of times better than humans can.
I need to rewatch the movie, but it is not a skynet situation where the AI wants to kill all humanity, but simply wants to run things. No mention of genocide (if I remember correctly), meaning it would probably be a net benefit for everyone involved. Now granted such an AI would probably not give a damn about civil rights or privacy rights, but it also doesn't appear to have any discrimination or favoritism towards any group, either.
But you are right. The promise of computers and AI in the past was 'let the computer do the drudgery while we do the art' and as it seems it is the opposite.
I think you missed the part in Tron where the MCP said the human beings were functionally useless as anything but slaves. This wasn't a "I can run the human world better" this was more of an Ultron deal where it believed that it would either be a better world without humans or a Forbin Project sitch where all of humanity should be micromanaged slaves to its will.
That's why I need to rewatch it...
Sucks because ghibli has always been really protective of its ip and in the future it maybe made harder and harder to watch it.
Figures. The wealthy could never fully buy power with just wealth, there was always someone smarter that was a threat. Now, they can just buy intelligence, thanks to AI, and crush everything else with their sheer weight.
Is this the great filter? The ultimate fate of all species?
No the great filter is quite a lot more basic than that, things like unstable atmospheres, cosmic ray bursts, collisions, etc.
You're on the right track though
At this point they are making it clear they are nothing more than thugs and hucksters; and that they have the right to stole everything on the internet to push their lip products. Fuck open ai an all of their cronies.
I wonder how Nintendo will react when it's their turn 😆
Did they specifically allow "Ghibly style?" Or did they just loosen the restrictions on asking for styles in general, and Ghibly style just turned out to be the popular one that memes started snowballing around?
I don't have specifics if they have allowed other styles to be used now, too. I don't use this nonsense, but it's clear that Ghibli was put front and center.
Yes, I read the article. But it doesn't answer my question. Did OpenAI specifically enable Ghibli style, or did it remove the restrictions in general?
Everyone's pulling out Miyazaki's out-of-context quote about procedural animation and are interpreting this as some kind of personal attack against him in particular because of it, but unless OpenAI specifically made Ghibli style available without lifting restrictions on others I don't see a reason to assume that.
Also, an article that calls X "The Nazi Network" is not exactly the most reliable source. This isn't even about X.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/chatgpt-wont-copy-artist-styles-including-jim-lee-frank-frazetta/
This suggests that all they've ever actually been doing is blocking keywords of artists names, and that it has always been trivial to get around such restrictions if you know how to prompt correctly.
I can't find anything about Ghibli or Miyazaki's names being on that restricted list.
Also if keyword blocking is the best they could muster, they were never serious about blocking certain styles.
From the article listed, a quote from ChatGPT:
Right, but the point I'm trying to ask about is whether they're treating Ghibli specially here. People are reacting as if OpenAI is thumbing its nose specifically at Miyazaki here, whereas the impression I've got is that they simply opened the floodgates and dropped restrictions on styling in general.
Style has never been covered by copyright to begin with, so any concerns they might have had about being sued over style would have always been erring on the side of caution. They may simply think that the legal environment has calmed down enough that they won't be inundated with frivolous lawsuits any more.
They loosened moderation on style-based prompts. That's the 'real' story. The End. But...
...some users on Reddit/X (hard to pin down exactly where, as these things go) made it a meme to 'Ghibli-fy' images because it is easy now (despite being trivially easy to do in ComfyUI for over a year) and then, in an attempt to monetize the meme/outrage, """news websites""" started producing articles like this one were written using old quotes to imply that there is some sort of ongoing drama between OpenAI and Studio Ghibli.
It's just manufactured drama built on Internet memes and outrage farming media sites.
I understand what you're getting at, and this article was the best I could come up with. I think the real problem is that OpenAI is tight lipped about what they allow and don't allow. As I said, I don't personally use them, so I'm unfamiliar with if all restrictions are gone or if this is people doing the classic work-around-a-keyword filter. I have a friend who is exceptional about getting past their keyword filters in which he has done things he is definitely not supposed to be able to do.
I'll see if I can get a hold of him later tonight, because he was generating some stuff in a Ghibli style in the last few days. I'll ask if the keyword filter is still there and whether this is people just working around it, he would know better than I with first hand experience. Because I am having a hell of a time finding articles that actually detail what changed here.
I think we both want an answer to the same questions but the available writing on such questions is very limited, it seems.
That didn't exactly look like animation. Looks like they trained an AI to control a humanoid figure in a virtual environment. It learned completely new and inhuman means of locomotion. Not very impressive from the technical angle, but the pitch about using it as a model for Zombie movement was clever.
You can use that for CG animation, of course. But those bi- and quadrupedal robots are also trained that way.
I feel the filmmakers manufactured some drama there. Knowing the real context of the quote makes it much more sensible.
If Disney can't sue for this, then what exactly would be too far? We're a few steps from being able to animate our own movies in Disney style.
Too far would be anything outside of fair use. If a user generates an image of a specific copyrighted character, then attempts to make money off of that image, they could be sued.
You can't copyright a style, but there's still a lot of legal grey area here.
It's also worth noting that OpenAI has an indemnification clause in their Terms of Use. This means that if someone else goes after OpenAI for something that went viral and was created by a specific user, OpenAI can then turn around and bill that user for all legal fees incurred by them (whether they win or lose the case).
If anyone is into using AI for anything, I would strongly suggest that they avoid using (or at least publishing/posting about) any of OpenAI's tools especially while all of these legal issues are still being sorted out.
The interesting thing would be an algorithm that is as close to a duplicate as possible without breaking copyright.
Then there's the fact company like Disney will want to use AI to lower labor costs, while at the same time preventing others from doing the same to them. Given their lobbying what weird laws will that result in?
You can eat at McDonald's and call it food, but that doesn't make it true.
Worse, it's cruel indifference.
Oh no, they didn't protect a rich corporations profits! How cruel!!!
I feel like they're reading too much into this.
What is this article even talking about? It’s making no sense.
They're trying to make some type of argument that a private studio should have exclusive rights to a specific style of art and that by openai allowing users to generate art in that style, we are slipping into anti-democratic authoritarianism.
My opinion is that you can't own "styles" of art and that there's nothing wrong here. Legally speaking I can copy any art style I want.
Yeah they want corporations to own styles so the rich can be more powerful, the rich push this sort of propaganda out endlessly
first let's get something out of the way
the actual way that copyright works is that a few giant megacorps buy up everything and they end up owning copyrights to the vast majority of recognizable content.
so for example in 2019 over half of the movies released in theaters was owned by Disney. The same company that unilaterally has the ability to change US federal law when convenient for them.
studio ghibli is no different- they're a subsidiary of Nippon Television which has a $2B+ annual revenue
so keep in mind when you advocate here for stronger copyright protections, you are essentially saying that the biggest companies in the world deserve more money.
2nd- the "style" is not copyrightable. anybody can mimic the style. and guess what? if I make a cartoon and I make it look like studio ghibli style.. people are still gonna recognize it as "studio ghibli" style. they are basically getting free marketing. they are not losing out here.
Anyone who doubles down this hard to defend AI art theft machines fucking hates human artists, who are a branch of intellectuals. Nazis are known to openly hate, abuse the rights of and mistreat intellectuals. Fuck kava.
You may or may not be correct in hating me but do not let my comments bring down the good name of kava
As for "doubling down so hard" I'd flip the message and ask you why you are simping for mega corps? simping for mega corps is about as fascist as you can get- a populist ideology idolizing elites
An AI is not doing anything a human wouldn't do. You look at a bunch of content. You learn from it and incorporate it in new synthesis.
It's not fundamentally different. So unless you can make a meaningful statement (beyond mild personal attacks) that illustrates the difference between the two, you will convince no-one
I’m not entirely sure what this style even is - wouldn’t this same argument apply to Apple’s “Memoji” that has been out a few years?
Thanks for that explainer. I thought the verbiage in the article was a little over the top.
However there is a point at which the "style" of the art is the thing that is copyrightable, sort of by implication.
The standard for proving a copyright violation where a defendant claims a transformative use or a derivative work is "substantial similar."
For as long as I can remember that includes the overall presentation of the work, and it's hard to describe that as anything other than a "style."
The article draws a comparison that allowing copyright protection for styles would be like allowing copyrights for entire genres. I don't think that's right. Nobody could copyright all "landscape paintings" as a genre, but look at landscape works by Katsushika Hokusai, and that style, to me, is creative enough to warrant protection, if it were made originally in America today and not already in the public domain. And he didn't invent woodblock prints or even woodblock prints of landscapes, but the way he did it is so unique as to be insperable from the copyrighted work itself and arguably deserving of protection simply for its advancement of the art.
If you made a woodblock print in the same style but used it to portray a scene typical in anime, rather than a landscape, that's clearly transformative and derivative, but not substantially similar. If you use the style to make prints of waves breaking around Mt. Fuji, that's substantially similar. So like, as to dude's anime style, if you use the same style to make landscapes, certainly that's not infringing, as it's not substantially similar.
I also don't see the threatening outcome the author suggests as worrisome. There are still exceptions for blatant copying that apply, mainly parody and fair use.
As you have described the situation my question is if it would be similar to copyright Donald duck, despite not having drawn all possible poses and situations?
That's already the case. There would be two copyrights for a cartoon for Donald duck, and possibly, in fact likely, many others.
A copyright is essentially a right of enforcement. You don't have to register anything or file anything in order to gain that right. It's a right to sue someone to enjoin further use and potentially to recoup money damages if you can prove loss.
The standard for whether something is copyrightable at the outset is whether it is the product of a modicum of creativity, and reduced to a tangible medium of expression.
So far one cartoon of Donald duck, each drawn frame of the show would have its own copyright. Also, the character would have a copyright. The dialogue of the script would have another copyright. And the test for whether a particular character is something that can be copyrighted is to ask whether the character is separable from the overall work and whether the character is "well delineated."
Donald duck is certainly the product of creativity, it is reduced to a tangible medium of expression when it is drawn on paper, and it is the main character of the show and has its own personality and behavior. So it is pretty clearly of deserving protection. Although at this point in time, I believe some of Disney's earliest characters are now in the public domain, Even Mickey mouse, which people like my IP professor in law school said was never going to happen. This is because I believe in 1984 there was a law called the copyright act of 1984 but was colloquial referred to as the Mickey mouse copyright act. It was championed by Sonny Bono, who I believe was friends with Walt Disney personally, and which many said had the sole purpose of extending Mickey mouse's copyright for another 25 years or whatever it was. My memory is a little fuzzy on this. My professor figured that Disney was such a powerful institution that anytime Mickey mouse was about to fall into the public domain, Congress would stop it.
A doctrine sort of related to your question is called scen a faire. It is a French phrase which I have no doubt spelled wrong because I am on mobile. It means that elements essential to a scene of the kind which would be common to all scenes of that type, are not copyrightable. So this would include some background characters such as those that, despite being drawn in a creative way, are more so the product of the scene itself rather than any creativity. For example, if there is a scene in a cartoon where the character gets onto a train and hands the ticket to a ticket taker, the ticker taker character is probably not copyrightable.
Title made by the least pretentious American liberal
Nah information should be free. Ghibli doesn't own its style. Fuck this copyright propaganda machine.
Is it really a 'move to allow' style prompts? They're just no longer preventing people from doing that.
It's weird that people who profess to be staunch defenders of art don't understand that stealing styles is fundamental to art. If enough people steal a specific style then art history just labels it a 'movement'. Look on this page: https://magazine.artland.com/art-movements-and-styles/ and you can see that the thing they're describing is a lot of people copying the same style.
Drum and Bass, a music genre, was essentially built on a """""stolen"""" clip from The Winstons in a song called Amen, Brother. The Amen break (you've certainly heard it even if you don't know the name) is copied over and over and over.
This is just the latest social media trend trying to shoehorn issues into the 'AI-bad' meme. Stealing styles is not unusual or even immoral. It is literally the foundation of art.
This is just outrage farming, because 1. People are familiar with this style and 2. The primary artist who made the style popular is against AI.
Is this fashion comeback ? Style transfer was popular 10 years ago.
I think it is also a kind of "you did a nice thing there, so I'll act as if I can do the same" display.
I see it as enabling people to make images in a style they admire and would like to draw but don't personally have the skill. To me the concept of copyright is the only difference between AI art generators and say, springy leg braces that let you slam dunk like Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I understand there are business ramifications some people might object to, but I don't get the moralistic part of the outrage. Maybe somebody can help me understand by explaining it rationally without screaming or calling me names, but spitting rage at me is pointless.
edit: from the abundance of downvotes and lack of explanation I take it people know they're supposed to be outraged but don't know why. The telltale mark of meme culture, wear it proudly!
The moralistic outrage is that people still have an outdated concept of intellectual property, and a blanket fear of corporations owning technological progress.
The truth is, no one can actually own an idea or style. But we have laws that try to make it a real thing. Because of regulatory capture, copyright truly only benefits corporations with lots of money, not all the little indie artists that actually would need it.
Hell, most these indie artists make their money drawing and selling fanart, which is the most literal definition of copying. Yet no one worries about that.
Does OpenAI offer the same service in Disney "'Mickey Mousify"
And how has that played out.
It's a sincere question (I don't know) though i admit to not trying to learn, as I've never played with any of the AI tools
I googled it for you. Yes, they advertise "From Studio Ghibli, Pixar, and Disney Classics to The Simpsons, South Park, and more." Not sure why everybody is focusing on Studio Ghibli.
AI does not know or create anything. Without stolen training data what would your fancy LLM actually be able to do?
It's not my LLM, but like most software developers I admit I "stole" the same training data to learn programming.
There's a word for it that describes the perpetrators well: BARBARIC. (and still, might will never equal right !)
Cool, another preachy argument that jumps to irrational conclusions. Because Ghibli?
Uh…we always could & did. Imitators have been doing that since always, long before LLMs. No one owns an art style.
That's the argument? Plagiarism & imitating art styles is fascism? Wow! The rest of the article is worse.
Please make the word fascism more meaningless.
Exactly this is so frustrating that people fall in for copyright propaganda just because "big tech is bad".
Ghibli doesn't own a style. It has sbeen made by thousands of animators and millions of illustrations and influences before them.
This is not the way to get back at big tech.
Fill me in a bit. Are you under the impression that artists are particularly okay with/enjoy people imitating their art style?
As an artist, when people imitate me, I take it as flattery.
When a machine imitates me, I take it as an insult to life itself.
This is an absolutely rational take.
Individual, noncommercial imitation is flattery.
LLM ripoff is exactly that.
I might be flattered that someone bothered to make a machine do that. Massaging software to do that also takes skill?
When GitHub Copilot lifts my opensource code, I'm not offended. I only cringe a bit when it's bad code I regret committing.
I respect your position, and I appreciate people who are willing to share their creativity in an inspiring way like that.
However, others don't see it as flattery. Particularly in eastern cultures, it is seen as mockery or plagiarism. You can choose to disagree about why they don't want you to imitate their style, but you should always respect the request.
If eastern cultures don't like imitation, why are there a million identical isekai light novels with an average joe who dies, reincarnates in a slightly altered Dungeons and Dragons world, and gets a harem of women with huge breasts whose personalities are taken straight from TVtropes?
Because humans suck?
Fair.
Are we pretending this is new & their opinion matters in some new way it hasn't before?
There might be an argument to demand licensing royalties on intellectual property. Is that too capitalist? Maybe it's fine if we work that into the word fascism somehow, wear it out a bit more to hit that sweet spot. Ooh.
No. We're acting as if their opinion always mattered just as much as it does now.
While your style is not, can not, and should not be your intellectual property, you should have the right to say "I don't want you to imitate my exact style" and people should respect that.
So not at all: got it.
You do.
"That's just like your opinion, man." meme goes here.
The argument seems to amount to "stop using/imitating my work to express yourself in ways I don't like", which is futile & senseless.
So, to recap, your position is this:
Artists do not deserve the respect that would allow them to be creative unfettered. Gotcha.
How does "respect" "allow" an artist "unfettered creativity"? How exactly is instructing others how to treat/imitate their work & expecting their wishes to be fulfilled promoting "unfettered creativity"? Seems like the opposite. Can you break that down into logic?
Are you suggesting artists are fragile beings whose creativity only exists at the mercy of our "respect" and the slightest disrespect breaks them? That seems rather self-important.
I submit that artists don't need our respect to be creative: the suggestion is belittling to artists.
The real point is the article fails to argue well.
I didn't say they needed respect to be creative. I said they needed respect to be creative unfettered.
I'm suggesting that disrespecting an artists wishes causes them unnecessary struggles which in turn unnecessarily makes it more difficult for them to do their work.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't, either. It is a fallacy of modal logic to claim an action that is not one that should be done is an action that should not be done.
If we limited ourselves to doing what we should, then entertainment like Ghibli wouldn't exist, and you wouldn't write comments here. There's no reason you should write comments here, yet you did. Does that mean you're "devoid of any morals" & "lack the integrity expected of a contributing adult"?
Imitation & derivative works hardly rise to anything worth fussing or losing total perspective over. If we pay attention, all human creativity is derivative, nothing is truly original. Works build on & reference each other. Techniques get refined. It's why we have genres. From the Epic of Gilgamesh & ancient mythology to modern storytelling, or the development of perspective in graphical works across time, there's a clear process of imitation & development across all of it.
Oddly enough, Princess Mononoke is inspired by the Cedar Forest guardian Humbaba from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Should we also condemn Ghibli's "lack of integrity" for their "intellectual property theft" from the ancient Mesopotamians?
If Ghibli were somehow deprived of economic gain & welfare due to others passing off derived work as their own, then you might have a point. However, I doubt when they sincerely want to watch Ghibli, people decide instead to watch LLM generated stills on social media that no one would pay for. They're no substitute for real, creative output. If anything, the increased exposure stirs interest in the real work of Ghibli. Even the objection is speculation: the article doesn't state Miyazaki objected, it merely argued he would. So, no, you don't have a real point here, either.
This is as much "theft" as any other imitative, derivative expression. I'll take free speech over decrying fake "theft".
Well, you're wrong.
And you're ableist for that. Good job.
So just to be clear
Much can be understood about someone's sense of morality in their actions (eligible for moral consideration) toward the disadvantaged. Does that person treat others as that person would want to be treated by them? Do they prioritize a cause that doesn't address a credible harm over their easily addressable actions that do cause credible harm?
Your moral code & moral claims seem confused & mistaken.
We already have AI yet people are still illiterate and misspell words in the title. Really makes you think
Potentially unpopular opinion, but I don't think art or artstyles should be copyrighted.
They aren't, thankfully
How dare they not respect intellectual property 😢😢😭😭😭😭
Seriously? With everything going on this is what people want to rage about? How disconnected do you have to be?
These critiques are getting insufferable. They're cute dumb filters.