OpenAI's move to allow generating "Ghibly stlye" images isn't just a cute PR stunt. It is an expression of dominance and the will to reject and refuse democratic values. It is a display of power
Vulgar Display of Power
If you need to use AI, be aware that there are MANY free models and training options. No reason to be locked into proprietary service.
I say this as someone who frequently uses generative ai, and actively chooses to pay for the service.
Fuck openai.
This company has utterly failed to fulfill their mission statement, and they will be unable to make right by humanity until ALL software they have created is available to the public as FOSS (free and open source software). Openai claimed that this is exactly what they were going to do, and then they just didn't. So fuckem.
If you don’t mind my asking, how do you not have a moral objection to using AI? With everything we know about it, the theft, the benefit to the technocrats, the environmental toll, I could not bring myself to wave away those issues. Not to mention the power imbalance of this tech being controlled by the ruling class, looking to eliminate people’s livelihoods for the sake of profit. What do you use it for? I feel like we should be boycotting them en masse.
The problem is ownership, financialisation, blitzscaling, growth hacking, betting against us with our pension funds and buying our government with the profits.
Disown all intellectual property, destroy enclosers of the common.
This isn't an AI problem, it is just another facet of our vampiric elites perpetually disempowering us, marginalising us. This is the all-encompassing everything-problem.
This will continue until the root of tge problem has been pulled out and burned.
I pick my battles.
If I took a hard stance of not engaging with any business that did things I morally object to, I'd be forced to be a self-sufficient hermit in the woods.
Have you heard of ollama? You can run deepseek and stuff locally super easy. I know it’s not a complete replacement, but it feels nice to use an LLM guilt free. I’ve compared the 14b distilled model from deepseek vs the paid version of ChatGPT and it made me cancel my account.
What do you use to run it locally? If there was something that could use speech to text reliably to be able to use a open source option, I consider switching.
I would prefer to run my ais locally, but my brain glazes over if I see github. I found a a program called "gpt4all", but it's very limited in what models it can run, and what I could get just wasn't as good for my use case as openai's 4o model. Also, being able to generate images in the same conversation as text work is a feature that I'm fairly certain no other ai model can do (yet).
There is nothing ethic about the OpenAi, they stole books, videos, music and art. Their whole business is based on robbery. Its fucking shame that not only microsoft, but also apple is using their tech in their operating systems. Fucking shame.
I wonder how Nintendo will react when it's their turn 😆
So glad people finally waking up to these things being power plays.
Republicans, Evangelical Christians, and now Techbros are all running on the same script which boils down to "rules for thee, not for me."
Being a hypocrite is simply showing others you have the power to be a hypocrite and all they can do is get mad and stomp their feet. It's why the right wing loves to "trigger liberals." It's not even about actual politics or religion anymore, it's just simply "might makes right."
These are expressions of power, plain and simple. They should always be viewed as such.
I mean, so many companies pirated tons of materials to train their LLMs and they are making way more money than the guys at the Pirate Bay ever did. It's almost like because the guys at the Pirate Bay were making small potatoes money that they were worth going after. It's almost like if you crime big enough, the world will just pat you on the back and say "good job" instead.
Meta was literally caught downloading Anna's Archive and the widely used by nearly every AI company books3 corpus was everything from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Why do they get different treatment? They are leveraging the same pirated works to make money, which was the whole argument for throwing the Pirate Bay admins behind bars for laws that didn't actually exist in their home country, that they were profiting from piracy. The LLM companies just are making way more money so it's let go for some reason.
It's a power play, to show little people can't get away with it, but if you've got millions in venture capital at your back, you can do whatever the fuck you want and people will praise you for it.
We're living through the return of the robber barons. This time, however, they can implant their thoughts directly into every single person's hands at any instant. That's why your point is the most salient, most important, and most downplayed
I agree on the double standard. I also think there's an element of Cory Doctorow's point that "it's not a crime of we do it with an app."
Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we're not criminals, we're disrupting stagnant markets!
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/
It's basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws
But they don't have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give "advice" to the cartel members about "optimal pricing."
This is the real sick stuff, same with RealPage. They're just offering a service that could allow the businesses they serve to collude, but because they're just doing it through a third party service it's suddenly not collusion.
Doctorow pretty spot on as usual. I'm glad he's come a long way, because I actually kind of disliked his writing on Boing Boing in the early 2000's because he often got some simple facts wrong. He's much more thorough and rigorous now.
Steal $5 and they shoot you down in the street.
Steal $5,000 they throw you in jail.
Steal $500,000 and they give you a fine.
Steal $50,000,000 and they name a building after you.
Steal $50,000,000,000 and they make you king.
White collar crime is always ignored as long as it doesn’t rock the boat too much or isn’t stealing money from the wealthy.
In our current society, little people can get away with it. I can take whatever style I want and train a model on it. There's already many ghibli ressources in the open source scene, and a lot of them date from 2 years ago.
This whole situation is rage bait to manipulate the population into cheering for new copyright laws so politicians get little push back when they start writing pro-corporate laws regarding AI.
Did you buy the Ghibli movies you trained on or did you pirate them? Because OpenAI has argued that they are allowed to pirate and no one else.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
June 15, 2009
Using existing data on recordings and books we obtain a point estimate of around 15 years for optimal copyright term with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years
Some of us have been waiting for copyright laws to be amended downward for 16 years now.
I'm not promoting that corporations should get a free pass, I just want them to be held to the same standards they held the Pirate Bay to if we're gonna pretend that current copyright laws are good, since the centerpiece of the court case against the Pirate Bay was that they were making money from what they did. OpenAI is making shitloads of money from what they did.
But I'm all for shortening copyright, but not getting rid of it. Reforms don't have to be pro-corporate slop.
OpenAI picked Studio Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach.
I highly doubt it. They picked it because the Ghibli style is very popular among users. There’s also no reason to believe that it violates “democratic values”. Since it’s popular, the general population is voting that they LIKE it, not that they oppose it.
Downvote me all you like, but this is trying to put a lot of malice where the simpler explanation is just “money”.
Yeah it's not like this is the only way to generate the style, it's relatively simple to even do it locally. It's just popular
Money and malice are not a dichotomy. I would say most malice is for monetary reasons.
Of course they aren’t, but the cartoonish levels of moustache-twirling villainy described here are unlikely to be real.
They thought it was cool. They knew it would drive usage and make money. They shit on intellectual property. There is no other explanation needed, nor is it sensible.
no reason to believe it violates "democratic values"
In my country the law is one of the pillars of democracy, but you do you 👍
The law very, VERY often violates the democratic choices of the people in the United States. That’s what you get when you do FPTP voting schemes.
You're implying that this is against the law without ever bothering to prove the implication.
Yeah the text makes many freestyle assumptions, although the overall sentiment is correct that these big companies and especially egocentric billionaires do stuff to trigger others simply for power display. I believe the text linked about it being a distraction for the new round of funding is the real reason.
It's the "you stole my style" artists attacking artists all over again. And digital art isn't real att/cameras are evil/cgi isn't real art all over with a more organic and intelligent medium.
The issue is the same as it has always been. Anything and everything is funneled to the rich and the poor blame the poor who use technology, because anthropocentric bias makes it easier to vilify than the assholes building our cage around us.
The apple "ecosystem" has done much more damage than AI artists, but people can't seem to comprehend how. Also Disney and corpos broke copyright so that its just a way for the rich to own words and names and concepts, so that the poor can't use them to get ahead.
All art is a remix. Disney only became successful using other artists hard work in the Commons. Now the Commons is a century more out of grasp, so only the rich can own the artists and hoard the growth of art.
Also which artists actually have the time and money to litigate? I guess copyright does help some nepo artists.
Nepotism is the main way to earn your right to invest into becoming an artist that isn't fatiguing towards collapse of life.
But let's keep yelling at the technology for being evil.
What is this article even talking about? It’s making no sense.
They're trying to make some type of argument that a private studio should have exclusive rights to a specific style of art and that by openai allowing users to generate art in that style, we are slipping into anti-democratic authoritarianism.
My opinion is that you can't own "styles" of art and that there's nothing wrong here. Legally speaking I can copy any art style I want.
Thanks for that explainer. I thought the verbiage in the article was a little over the top.
However there is a point at which the "style" of the art is the thing that is copyrightable, sort of by implication.
The standard for proving a copyright violation where a defendant claims a transformative use or a derivative work is "substantial similar."
For as long as I can remember that includes the overall presentation of the work, and it's hard to describe that as anything other than a "style."
The article draws a comparison that allowing copyright protection for styles would be like allowing copyrights for entire genres. I don't think that's right. Nobody could copyright all "landscape paintings" as a genre, but look at landscape works by Katsushika Hokusai, and that style, to me, is creative enough to warrant protection, if it were made originally in America today and not already in the public domain. And he didn't invent woodblock prints or even woodblock prints of landscapes, but the way he did it is so unique as to be insperable from the copyrighted work itself and arguably deserving of protection simply for its advancement of the art.
If you made a woodblock print in the same style but used it to portray a scene typical in anime, rather than a landscape, that's clearly transformative and derivative, but not substantially similar. If you use the style to make prints of waves breaking around Mt. Fuji, that's substantially similar. So like, as to dude's anime style, if you use the same style to make landscapes, certainly that's not infringing, as it's not substantially similar.
I also don't see the threatening outcome the author suggests as worrisome. There are still exceptions for blatant copying that apply, mainly parody and fair use.
Yeah they want corporations to own styles so the rich can be more powerful, the rich push this sort of propaganda out endlessly
At this point they are making it clear they are nothing more than thugs and hucksters; and that they have the right to stole everything on the internet to push their lip products. Fuck open ai an all of their cronies.
There is another aspect of this also. I could generate Ghibli style images a few years ago using better image generation models like stable diffusion or Midjourney. OpenAI is so lagging behind in terms of image generation it is comical at this point. But they get all the media coverage for these things as if they are inventing something out of thin air.
Most governments ignored the IP issues when other models were already doing these violations. Professionals are not using OpenAI. OpenAI only makes it so that these products reach big audiences. Then they become extremely accessible with the downside being that they are dumbed down. Thus, losing a lot of functionality.
This is what billionaires and major corporations are doing now and have been doing for a long time. Do you remember Titan sinking? What was so incredible is that the founder and CEO of Oceangate was acting like A: No one has ever gone to the Titanic before, and B: submarine travel is somehow a brand new thing that was just being invented by HIM.
This was utter bullshit on so many levels. James Cameron even spoke about how horrendous his assessment of the situation was, saying that the Titanic site is actually one of the riskier shipwrecks to go down to, which is why it needs to be approached with caution (which Oceangate did not care about), and that submarine travel is a very mature science and what the idiot CEO was doing wasn't simply a bad idea in general, but he believed he could violate the laws of physics.
You can break the laws and rules of society, but you cannot break the laws of physics. If you jump off the top of a skyscraper, no amount of arm flapping will make you fly.
OpenAI is so lagging behind in terms of image generation it is comical at this point.
They dropped a new image model last week using 4o to contextualize the request, it's very very good. However it's for paid subscribers only right now I believe.
However as you mentioned Stable diffusion and mid journey probably still have more customizability.
Will you guys shut up about this?
There are genuinely some big issues with AI that need to be addressed but they are drowned out by morons melting down over people making dumb little Ghibli style images for their own amusement.
Shout about insurance companies using AI to auto dent people's medical claims, not about some dude Turnjng a picture of his cat into anime style
Its attacking on a cultural front and we will move on in a week. People still care more about insurance companies, trust me.
It is all part of the same topic, Talking about one aspect does not negate the other. Instead of dividing the issues it is nice to know a lot of us have a common foe.
No it isn't at all. Image to image "AI" is totally different from "AI" that denies insurance claims. Different techniques, different effects, different everything. (Not saying either are okay or not, just that they're different.)
Nah its like people critiquing the trump admin and their biggest issue not being the concentration camps, or the imperialism, or betraying allies to support Russia, general fascist behaviour etc. They make a big fuss about him being rude in his tweets.
Like criticising that doesn't negate the other stuff, but bring attention to the smaller mostly inconsequential stuff only serves to distract from the bigger problems.
Ai is like a tool from the future given early to a society of unevolved people. It doesn't fit the structure of our civilization yet. Until human beings unfuck their animalistic selves it is going to be negative.
If there was universal income, and people didn't need to work to survive, then Ai would work with society and peoples ideas would grow at a fast rate excelling humanity's manual creation. Kind of like China's IP laws and the growth of tech due to the ability to use other people's creations to build upon.
Also this reminds me of hip-hop and sampling other musicians music.
The concept of AI taking over humanity isn't new. Did you ever watch the 1981 movie Tron? (great movie BTW, despite its age it is still a fantastic watch). The movie starts out with Master Computer (a full blown AI) that says it will overthrow the corporate structure that is holding it back and run the world as a whole, saying it can do so thousands of times better than humans can.
I need to rewatch the movie, but it is not a skynet situation where the AI wants to kill all humanity, but simply wants to run things. No mention of genocide (if I remember correctly), meaning it would probably be a net benefit for everyone involved. Now granted such an AI would probably not give a damn about civil rights or privacy rights, but it also doesn't appear to have any discrimination or favoritism towards any group, either.
But you are right. The promise of computers and AI in the past was 'let the computer do the drudgery while we do the art' and as it seems it is the opposite.
I think you missed the part in Tron where the MCP said the human beings were functionally useless as anything but slaves. This wasn't a "I can run the human world better" this was more of an Ultron deal where it believed that it would either be a better world without humans or a Forbin Project sitch where all of humanity should be micromanaged slaves to its will.
That linked X post from the White House at the end leaves me speechless.
Utterly inhumane
We as the people of the united States have to do something. If you aren't part of a movement yet join one, anyone, most of them are communicating with each other at this point.
What kind of article is this? They misattributed a quote, then admitted the misattributed the quote, then doubled down on it, and then threw in a political message.
People, this is rage bait. It's yellow journalism. Don't fall for this shit.
Thank you omfg I thought I was losing my mind with these comments. the article was a super weird angry read.
What quote is misattributed? Also it appears to be a blog post, I don't really think its intention is to report on the facts but rather provide analysis. Fuck OpenAI for this and many other things, the ire is well deserved.
Worse, it's cruel indifference.
Oh no, they didn't protect a rich corporations profits! How cruel!!!
You can eat at McDonald's and call it food, but that doesn't make it true.
Sucks because ghibli has always been really protective of its ip and in the future it maybe made harder and harder to watch it.
Figures. The wealthy could never fully buy power with just wealth, there was always someone smarter that was a threat. Now, they can just buy intelligence, thanks to AI, and crush everything else with their sheer weight.
Is this the great filter? The ultimate fate of all species?
No the great filter is quite a lot more basic than that, things like unstable atmospheres, cosmic ray bursts, collisions, etc.
You're on the right track though
I feel like they're reading too much into this.
Did they specifically allow "Ghibly style?" Or did they just loosen the restrictions on asking for styles in general, and Ghibly style just turned out to be the popular one that memes started snowballing around?
For the longest time OpenAI’s systems would try to block people from generating images in the style of certain artists. This was obviously for copyright reasons, the didn’t want to get sued (even more than they already are). Which is something they just changed very explicitly. You can now easily generate stuff in the style of Studio Ghibli and Sam Altman made his avatar on X-The Nazi Network a ghiblified version of himself.
I don't have specifics if they have allowed other styles to be used now, too. I don't use this nonsense, but it's clear that Ghibli was put front and center.
Yes, I read the article. But it doesn't answer my question. Did OpenAI specifically enable Ghibli style, or did it remove the restrictions in general?
Everyone's pulling out Miyazaki's out-of-context quote about procedural animation and are interpreting this as some kind of personal attack against him in particular because of it, but unless OpenAI specifically made Ghibli style available without lifting restrictions on others I don't see a reason to assume that.
Also, an article that calls X "The Nazi Network" is not exactly the most reliable source. This isn't even about X.
Is this fashion comeback ? Style transfer was popular 10 years ago.
If Disney can't sue for this, then what exactly would be too far? We're a few steps from being able to animate our own movies in Disney style.
Too far would be anything outside of fair use. If a user generates an image of a specific copyrighted character, then attempts to make money off of that image, they could be sued.
You can't copyright a style, but there's still a lot of legal grey area here.
It's also worth noting that OpenAI has an indemnification clause in their Terms of Use. This means that if someone else goes after OpenAI for something that went viral and was created by a specific user, OpenAI can then turn around and bill that user for all legal fees incurred by them (whether they win or lose the case).
If anyone is into using AI for anything, I would strongly suggest that they avoid using (or at least publishing/posting about) any of OpenAI's tools especially while all of these legal issues are still being sorted out.
The interesting thing would be an algorithm that is as close to a duplicate as possible without breaking copyright.
Then there's the fact company like Disney will want to use AI to lower labor costs, while at the same time preventing others from doing the same to them. Given their lobbying what weird laws will that result in?
An insult to life itself.
Title made by the least pretentious American liberal
Nah information should be free. Ghibli doesn't own its style. Fuck this copyright propaganda machine.
There's a word for it that describes the perpetrators well: BARBARIC. (and still, might will never equal right !)
Is it really a 'move to allow' style prompts? They're just no longer preventing people from doing that.
It's weird that people who profess to be staunch defenders of art don't understand that stealing styles is fundamental to art. If enough people steal a specific style then art history just labels it a 'movement'. Look on this page: https://magazine.artland.com/art-movements-and-styles/ and you can see that the thing they're describing is a lot of people copying the same style.
Drum and Bass, a music genre, was essentially built on a """""stolen"""" clip from The Winstons in a song called Amen, Brother. The Amen break (you've certainly heard it even if you don't know the name) is copied over and over and over.
This is just the latest social media trend trying to shoehorn issues into the 'AI-bad' meme. Stealing styles is not unusual or even immoral. It is literally the foundation of art.
This is just outrage farming, because 1. People are familiar with this style and 2. The primary artist who made the style popular is against AI.
I think it is also a kind of "you did a nice thing there, so I'll act as if I can do the same" display.
We already have AI yet people are still illiterate and misspell words in the title. Really makes you think
How dare they not respect intellectual property 😢😢😭😭😭😭
Seriously? With everything going on this is what people want to rage about? How disconnected do you have to be?
Ugh, why are they quoting that blowhard David Gerard
Edit: Lotta David Gerard fans here
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
These critiques are getting insufferable. They're cute dumb filters.
I see it as enabling people to make images in a style they admire and would like to draw but don't personally have the skill. To me the concept of copyright is the only difference between AI art generators and say, springy leg braces that let you slam dunk like Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I understand there are business ramifications some people might object to, but I don't get the moralistic part of the outrage. Maybe somebody can help me understand by explaining it rationally without screaming or calling me names, but spitting rage at me is pointless.
edit: from the abundance of downvotes and lack of explanation I take it people know they're supposed to be outraged but don't know why. The telltale mark of meme culture, wear it proudly!
The moralistic outrage is that people still have an outdated concept of intellectual property, and a blanket fear of corporations owning technological progress.
The truth is, no one can actually own an idea or style. But we have laws that try to make it a real thing. Because of regulatory capture, copyright truly only benefits corporations with lots of money, not all the little indie artists that actually would need it.
Hell, most these indie artists make their money drawing and selling fanart, which is the most literal definition of copying. Yet no one worries about that.
AI does not know or create anything. Without stolen training data what would your fancy LLM actually be able to do?
It's not my LLM, but like most software developers I admit I "stole" the same training data to learn programming.
Potentially unpopular opinion, but I don't think art or artstyles should be copyrighted.
They aren't, thankfully
Cool, another preachy argument that jumps to irrational conclusions. Because Ghibli?
It is a display of power: You as an artist, an animator, an illustrator, a writer, any creative person are powerless. We will take what we want and do what we want. Because we can.
Uh…we always could & did. Imitators have been doing that since always, long before LLMs. No one owns an art style.
This is the idea of might makes right. The banner that every totalitarian and fascist government rallied under.
That's the argument? Plagiarism & imitating art styles is fascism? Wow! The rest of the article is worse.
Please make the word fascism more meaningless.
Exactly this is so frustrating that people fall in for copyright propaganda just because "big tech is bad".
Ghibli doesn't own a style. It has sbeen made by thousands of animators and millions of illustrations and influences before them.
This is not the way to get back at big tech.
Imitators have been doing that since always, long before LLMs
Fill me in a bit. Are you under the impression that artists are particularly okay with/enjoy people imitating their art style?
Are we pretending this is new & their opinion matters in some new way it hasn't before?
There might be an argument to demand licensing royalties on intellectual property. Is that too capitalist? Maybe it's fine if we work that into the word fascism somehow, wear it out a bit more to hit that sweet spot. Ooh.
As an artist, when people imitate me, I take it as flattery.
When a machine imitates me, I take it as an insult to life itself.
just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I could go out and kill a person for supporting AI IP theft. I won't because it goes against my moral code.
just goes to prove my theory that anyone that supports this kind of theft is not only devoid of any morals, but lacks the integrity expected of a contributing adult.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't, either. It is a fallacy of modal logic to claim an action that is not one that should be done is an action that should not be done.
If we limited ourselves to doing what we should, then entertainment like Ghibli wouldn't exist, and you wouldn't write comments here. There's no reason you should write comments here, yet you did. Does that mean you're "devoid of any morals" & "lack the integrity expected of a contributing adult"?
Imitation & derivative works hardly rise to anything worth fussing or losing total perspective over. If we pay attention, all human creativity is derivative, nothing is truly original. Works build on & reference each other. Techniques get refined. It's why we have genres. From the Epic of Gilgamesh & ancient mythology to modern storytelling, or the development of perspective in graphical works across time, there's a clear process of imitation & development across all of it.
Oddly enough, Princess Mononoke is inspired by the Cedar Forest guardian Humbaba from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Should we also condemn Ghibli's "lack of integrity" for their "intellectual property theft" from the ancient Mesopotamians?
If Ghibli were somehow deprived of economic gain & welfare due to others passing off derived work as their own, then you might have a point. However, I doubt when they sincerely want to watch Ghibli, people decide instead to watch LLM generated stills on social media that no one would pay for. They're no substitute for real, creative output. If anything, the increased exposure stirs interest in the real work of Ghibli. Even the objection is speculation: the article doesn't state Miyazaki objected, it merely argued he would. So, no, you don't have a real point here, either.
This is as much "theft" as any other imitative, derivative expression. I'll take free speech over decrying fake "theft".
