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
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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.
The moralistic outrage is that people still have an outdated concept of intellectual property, and a blanket fear of corporations owning technological progress.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.
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So glad people finally waking up to these things being power plays.
Republicans, Evangelical Christians, and now Techbros are run 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 stop 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 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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Least pretentious American liberal
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An insult to life itself.
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So glad people finally waking up to these things being power plays.
Republicans, Evangelical Christians, and now Techbros are run 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 stop 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
The interesting thing would be an algorithm that is as close to a duplicate as possible without breaking copyright.
It forces laws to be made mathematically I'd assume, or something like that?
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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!Please make the word fascism more meaningless.
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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!Please make the word fascism more meaningless.
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?
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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?
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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!Please make the word fascism more meaningless.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Sucks because ghibli has always been really protective of its ip and in the future it maybe made harder and harder to see it.
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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.
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.
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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.
