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
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
Hayao Miyasaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio known worldwide for their stunning, emotional, beautiful stories and movies. At the core of Studio Ghibli’s work is a deep engagement with questions of humanity. About what it means to be a human, about how to care for on...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I wonder how Nintendo will react when it's their turn 😆
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.
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.
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.
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
But they don't have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give "advice" to the cartel members about "optimal pricing."
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.
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.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
June 15, 2009
Using existing data on recordings and books we obtain a point estimate of around 15 years for optimal copyright term with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years
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.
OpenAI picked Studio Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach.
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”.
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.
no reason to believe it violates "democratic values"
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.
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.
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.
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.
OpenAI is so lagging behind in terms of image generation it is comical at this point.
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.
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
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.
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.
Its attacking on a cultural front and we will move on in a week. People still care more about insurance companies, trust me.
You can eat at McDonald's and call it food, but that doesn't make it true.
We already have AI yet people are still illiterate and misspell words in the title. Really makes you think
That linked X post from the White House at the end leaves me speechless.
Utterly inhumaneWe 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.
I feel like they're reading too much into this.
There's a word for it that describes the perpetrators well: BARBARIC. (and still, might will never equal right !)
Is this fashion comeback ? Style transfer was popular 10 years ago.
These critiques are getting insufferable. They're cute dumb filters.
Nah information should be free. Ghibli doesn't own its style. Fuck this copyright propaganda machine.
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?
For the longest time OpenAI’s systems would try to block people from generating images in the style of certain artists. This was obviously for copyright reasons, the didn’t want to get sued (even more than they already are). Which is something they just changed very explicitly. You can now easily generate stuff in the style of Studio Ghibli and Sam Altman made his avatar on X-The Nazi Network a ghiblified version of himself.
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.
Seriously? With everything going on this is what people want to rage about? How disconnected do you have to be?
An insult to life itself.
Ugh, why are they quoting that blowhard David Gerard
Edit: Lotta David Gerard fans here
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
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.
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.