It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Miyazaki, copyright protection and the 'insult to life itself' of AI images

Opinion Many people are having fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with OpenAI's ChatGPT. I see it as copy-and-paste intellectual property stealing on an industrial level.

It was sort of cute for, oh, say, five minutes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced you could use his business's GPT-4o model to generate images when everyone started using it to mimic Studio Ghibli, founded by renowned animator Hayao Miyazaki, iconic style. But then everyone, I mean everyone, was transforming photos into pictures that resemble – read ripoff – Miyazaki's distinctive hand-drawn aesthetic, as seen in such loved movies as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro.

Note, I said "generate," not create. There's no creation here. What OpenAI is enabling us all to do is industrial-style copy and paste. It's so cute it makes me want to puke – especially after I saw dozens of these images daily.

And that was before I saw the ChatGPT's Ghibli-style JFK assassination and Hitler being cheered on by Nazi troops. In a word, "barf."

Hayao Miyazaki, the artist and animator who co-founded Studio Ghibli and who still serves as its chairman, hasn't addressed this issue yet. But, in 2016, he called an automated animation tool "an insult to life itself," so I think we know where the elder statesman of fantasy animation stands.

Mind you, there's nothing new about this kind of theft. Even back in 2022, the famous Dungeons and Dragons fantasy artist Greg Rutkowski reported that tens of thousands of AI-created takes on his art had appeared online. Things have only gotten much worse since then for artists.

It also doesn't help that even digital rights and freedoms defenders are wrong. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) states:

Generative AI has the power to democratize speech and content creation, much like the internet has. Before the internet, a small number of large publishers controlled the channels of speech distribution, controlling which material reached audiences’ ears. The internet changed that by allowing anyone with a laptop and Wi-Fi connection to reach billions of people around the world.

Sorry, EFF, I was there when the ARPANet was transiting into the internet you know. The internet you describe did indeed liberate people and ideas. But that Internet has been dead for decades. Just ask Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, who recently said, "In the past decade, instead of embodying these values, the web has instead played a part in eroding them." That's because of the "dysfunction caused by the web being dominated by the self-interest of several corporations."

Unlike the internet of the late '80s and early '90s, however, there's been no golden age where individuals were free to create and profit from their works. AI is completely and totally dominated by billion-dollar companies, with only self-serving lip service for individuals or small creators.

What does OpenAI think? CEO Sam Altman claims AI has made it easier for people to create art. Thanks to OpenAI, anyone can create and publish meaningful work. "If they have something interesting to say, they get it out there, and the world benefits from that."

He sees art; I see enshittification.

I have no problem with people building works on the foundation of others. But, what I see with AI art isn't people creating their own work or even a take on someone else's images. I see near-exact duplication over and over again of an existing artist's work.

This is all of a part of Altman's attack on creators. He has been claiming that his AI engine's copyright ripoffs are all "fair use" under US copyright law since almost day one. He denies OpenAI is stealing anything, but the evidence is clear that that's precisely what he's doing.

Specifically, OpenAI claims its models are trained not to replicate works for public use. Instead, "they learn from the works and extract patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights." Yeah, right. At the same time, OpenAI claims if "American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over." It sounds to me like they want to have it both ways."

Of course, Altman could pay creators, but that's just crazy talk. The cash should not go to the people who do the work but to the company that copies it in the first place.

Needless to say, I find it more than a little ironic that Altman sings an entirely different tune when an AI rival, like, say, DeepSeek, is perhaps using some of OpenAI's work. Then it's "DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more. We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology.”

You see, it's stealing when someone else uses Big AI's work, but it's all fine and dandy when OpenAI et al uses your work.

Like many other billionaires, Altman hopes President Donald Trump will help him with any possible legal trouble. Will his million-dollar donation to Trump's inaugural fund give him carte blanche to ignore those troublesome writers, artists, musicians, and publishing companies? Stay tuned to see what happens with the forthcoming US AI Action Plan.

Regardless of how that works out, unless someone stands up for creators, much of the "art" we'll see in the future will be endless rehashes. Think, if you will, of how today, instead of genuinely new movies and TV shows, all we get is endless reboots and remakes. If the AI companies get their way, that will be true of art, novels, music, and – yes – movies and TV shows as well.

You could perhaps have looked forward to watching Die Hard XXI, long after Bruce Willis dies, starring his digital twin. That's if the rumors were true that he sold an AI version of himself; he has denied this. But when that kind of digital creation dominates the screen, it spells not a revival of creativity but art for big business, by big business forever without end. ®