If you're on pretty much any social media platform right now, you'll no doubt have noticed a massive uptick in the volume of Studio Ghibli-style artwork appearing in your timeline.
This is all thanks to OpenAI's recent update to ChatGPT, which introduces a bunch of tools which can "transform" any image into a different style—one of which is based on the work of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio founded by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Toshio Suzuki, Yasuyoshi Tokuma in 1985.
Responsible for classic movies such as My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo and The Boy and the Heron, Studio Ghibli's style is famous all over the world—and now AI is effectively stealing that style and allowing ChatGPT users to recreate it, all without paying Studio Ghibli a single penny. Heck, OpenAI didn't even get permission.
Given that Hayao Miyazaki, the studio's leading light and director of many of its films, is famously outspoken on the topic of AI (he once called an AI animation demo "an insult to life itself"), this turn of events seems especially distasteful, and many artists have voiced their disgust on social media.
Samuel Deats, director of Netflix's Castlevania: Nocturne series, has given perhaps the most eloquent statement on this sorry mess:
Millions of artists are being violated before everyone's eyes, robbed of their life's work in the biggest art heist in history, just to enrich companies at the expense of wiping out human creativity from this point forward for the rest of time--unless we stop them here and now.
AI's rate of evolution has clearly caught the legal world napping; these AI models are trained on vast amounts of data—images, videos and text—often without the permission of the people who own that data. For example, it was recently revealed that Facebook parent company Meta had secretly trained its own AI model on pirated database. Blatant copyright theft is apparently OK if you're big enough, it seems.
Clearly, copyright laws need to adapt to this changing landscape, but has the damage been done already?