Artificial Intelligence tools evolve daily it seems, and ChatGPT remains near the top of the pile for its commitment to constant improvement. For some, though, last week's announcement of improved image-generation capabilities was a step too far.
GPT-4o's new native image generation is indeed impressive, but claims that it's powered by "publicly available data" are proving contentious.
With users able to essentially replicate famous, iconic art styles just by affixing a few words to their prompts, one of the most popular influences has been Studio Ghibli.
Please, not Ghibli
Studio Ghibli's animations are not only beloved, but genre defining.
Each of its movies, from "Spirited Away" to "My Neighbor Totoro", are painstakingly designed and drawn. Now, AI has been accused of cheapening the Studio Ghibli aesthetic by vocal fans around the internet.
Despite the outrage, the proliferation of Studio Ghibli-style images generated using the tool isn't against the law.
Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at Neal and McDevitt, told TechCrunch that a certain "style" isn't necessarily protected by copyright.
“I think this raises the same question that we’ve been asking ourselves for a couple years now,” Brown explained.
“What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?”
While other "styles" are being recreated by OpenAI's model, the "Ghiblified" ones are drawing the most ire because of comments made by animator, co-founder of Studio Ghibli and noted critic of AI, Hayao Miyazaki, in a recently resurfaced 2016 documentary service.
Responding to an example of animating "grotesque movements that we humans can't imagine" using a computer, Miyazaki said:
“Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability,” he said. “It’s so hard for him just to do a high five; his arm with stiff muscle can’t reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting.”
“Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted… I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
Some of the criticism seems to have broken through to ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI. In a white paper released last week, the firm said it would take a "conservative approach" to image generation while it learned how the "creative community" used the tool.
"We added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist," OpenAI said.
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