Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
If you hired someone to copy Ghibli’s style, then fed that into an AI as training data, it would completely negate your entire argument.
It is not illegal for an artist to copy someone else’s style. They can’t copy another artist’s work—that’s a derivative—but copying their style is perfectly legal. You can’t copyright a style.
All of that is irrelevant, however. The argument is that—somehow—training an AI with anything is somehow a violation of copyright. It is not. It is absolutely 100% not a violation of copyright to do that!
Copyright is all about distribution rights. Anyone can download whatever TF they want and they’re not violating anyone’s copyright. It’s the entity that sent the person the copyright that violated the law. Therefore, Meta, OpenAI, et al can host enormous libraries of copyrighted data in their data centers and use that to train their AI. It’s not illegal at all.
When some AI model produces a work that’s so similar to an original work that anyone would recognize it, “yeah, that’s from Spirited Away” then yes: They violated Ghibli’s copyright.
If the model produces an image of some random person in the style of Studio Ghibli that is not violating anyone’s copyright. It is not illegal nor is it immoral. No one is deprived of anything in such a transaction.