Fans of Studio Ghibli, the famed Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and other beloved movies, were delighted this week when a new version of ChatGPT let them transform popular internet memes or personal photos into the distinct style of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.
This is already a copyright apocalypse though isn’t it? If there is nothing wrong with this then where is the line? Is it okay for Disney to make a movie using an AI trained on some poor sap on Deviant Art’s work? This feels like copyright laundering. I fail to see how we aren’t just handing the keys of human creativity to only those with the ability to afford a server farm and teams of lawyers.
I would agree the cats out of the bag, so there may not be anything that can be done. The keys aren't going to those who can afford a server farm, the door is wide open for anyone with a computer.
The interesting follow up to this is what Disney does to a model trained on their films. Sure lawyers, but how much will they actually be able to do?
I think you’re right about style. As a software developer myself, I keep thinking back to early commercial / business software terms that listed all of the exhaustive ways you could not add their work to any “information retrieval system.” And I think, ultimately, computers cannot process style. They can process something, and style feels like the closest thing our brains can come up with.
This feels trite at first, but computers process data. They don’t have a sense of style. They don’t have independent thought, even if you call it a “<think> tag”. Any work product created by a computer from copyrighted information is a derivative work, in the same way a machine-translated version of a popular fiction book is.
This act of mass corporate disobedience, putting distillate made from our collective human works behind a paywall needs to be punished.
. . .
But it won’t be. That bugs me to no end.
(I feel like my tone became a bit odd, so if it felt like the I was yelling at the poster I replied to, I apologize. The topic bugs me, but what you said is true and you’re also correct.)
I think it will be punished, but not how we hope. The laws will end up rewarding the big data holders (Getty, record labels, publishers) while locking out open source tools. The paywalls will stay and grow. It'll just formalize a monopoly.
I'm not sure pissing off Miyazaki is a great move. He's an old Japanese man who is famously so bitter that when he chain smokes he gives the cigarettes cancer, communicates largely in contemplative one-liners, and is known to own precisely one sword. And he has a beard. We've all seen this movie; we know how that kind of thing ends.
I bet the reason you feel that way cause you know it's not ghibli who made it. The other part is, it's a meme. Though seeing this art style everywhere makes it loose it's charm and novelty. Instead of thinking all those movies they made. You get to think about 2 girls and 1 cup ghibli movie poster. That's bad for business especially for ghibli. It's the same thing that happen with Pixar art style.