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.
Style cannot be copyrighted.
And if somehow copyright laws were changed so that it could be copyrighted it would be a creative apocalypse.
Yes, but I would have to buy the blu-rays as an artist, if I wanted to study them, meanwhile these corporations can get away with paying nothing.
Not style. But they had to train that AI on ghibli stuff. So… Did they have the right to do that?
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.)
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.