There has been a flood of photos turned into Studio Ghibli-style images posted to social media in the last 24 hours and it’s all because of ChatGPT’s new AI image generator.
Iconic photos and scenes have been given the Studio Ghibli treatment, a Japanese animation style behind films such as My Neighbor Totoro.
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has got in on the act turning his X profile picture into an animated version of himself.
However, the flood of memes have raised copyright concerns. While a specific style is not explicity eliglbe for copyright protection, a lawyer tells Tech Crunch that OpenAI may still have broken the law since it is highly likely that to be able to output image in Studio Ghibli style, ChatGPT’s new model was trained on million of frames taken from Ghibli’s films.
“I think this raises the same question that we’ve been asking ourselves for a couple years now,” Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Neal & McDevitt, tells Tech Crunch. “What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?”
To make matters worse, one of Studio Ghibli’s founders, Hayao Miyazaki, reacted in horror when first shown AI technology a few years ago.
“I am utterly disgusted,” Myazaki said when shown an AI presentation. “If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it, but I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
OpenAI launched its new AI image generator this week, calling it a technological step forward.
“Images in ChatGPT” differs from DALL-E — OpenAI’s previous image generator which seems like it’s being retired — because the images come from within ChatGPT-4o.
It is described as a “step change” and “omnimodal”, meaning the model can generate any kind of data including text, image, audio, and video.
Of note, Hayao Miyazaki famously strongly stated his distaste for AI-generated works of art.
“I am utterly disgusted,” he said when shown an AI-based tool. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology in my work at all. I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.”
Image credits: AI-generated
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