12 ms·

Everything is Ghibli

213 points by ghuntley 2y ago

ungreased0675 2y ago
Massive, industrial scale copyright infringement
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Japanese firms take copyright pretty seriously, and Miyazaki is famously not a fan of CG or automation or indeed the US. I suspect lawsuits will not be long in coming.
  - pnw 2y ago
    Apparently current Japanese law allows models to be trained on copyrighted content. https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-explained/ https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-exp...
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Such a law doesn't automatically imply that everything a model outputs is automatically copyright free though, does it? Otherwise: Meet my new and surprisingly performant new model, IdentityFunctionGPT! Oh, the weights? Sorry, trade secret.
      - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
        I don't know, I'm no lawyer. However, if I make a drawing in the style of Ghibli, I own the copyright because I made it. I don't know if in Japan, art style is copyrightable. I don't know if copyright applies to generated content (of any sort) though. It probably does.
        lxgr 2y ago
        The important question here isn't who owns the copyright in the output, but rather whether the output also infringes on somebody else's, and if so, who's liable for that: The company that trained the AI, the one that hosts it as a service, or the user that prompted it.
  - hiccuphippo 2y ago
    On the other hand, Japan pretty much ignores the amateur comics community using copyrighted works for their fan fiction. Even when they have big, well known, events where they sell the comics.
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      There's an industry consensus to leave it alone in most* cases, since it is considered to expand the total manga market and generate new talent. Micro-publishers are very different from megacorporations, though. * Unsurprisingly a famous exception involves Nintendo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_inciden...
    - numpad0 2y ago
      There's a unwritten framework regulating it, unwritten but enforced by selective C&D. I think that's how a lot of industries work anyway, see Oracle v. Google drama on use of Java in Android.
- falcor84 2y ago
  IANAL but artistic style is not copyrightable. Many many human artists have created images and animated films in the style of Ghibli or Disney or Pixar and there's no direct copyright issue there.
  - iszomer 2y ago
    Yeah but humans aren't exactly fast at replicating any particular art style.
    - catach 2y ago
      Speed of replication isn't a part of copyright law, is it?
      - iszomer 2y ago
        Nope. But I do feel bad for partaking in part for Louis CK's Twitter-Jesus rant. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSSDeesUUsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSSDeesUUsU
      - SirMaster 2y ago
        No, but I have to wonder if the reason it isn't is because up until now it was so slow and time consuming etc to create a replication.
    - throwuxiytayq 2y ago
      Should I be concerned about my drawing speed lest it qualifies as copyright informant?
  - conartist6 2y ago
    Maaybe, but you'd also have to pass the three-prong test of fair use, and one of the prongs of the test is that your fair use of the material can't eliminate the market for the original material. I fail to see how taking a distinctive artistic style that was incredibly difficult to produce and shitting out massive amounts of it everywhere as a super low quality commodity would pass the test of fair use.
- trealira 2y ago
  Not a lawyer, but I don't think art styles are copyrightable, though maybe they could be in Japan.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    Unlikely since there's a studio led by a former ghibli lead that does visuals in the very same style.
  - conartist6 2y ago
    That feels like an omission in the law. Previously it was simply impossible to "take" a style wholesale. You would at least have to become an artist versed in that style, and it in investing your life into that style you would also make it yours. AI can take a whole style wholesale with no effort and no contribution. It is greivous theft in the moral sense if not the legal sense.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - doright 2y ago
    There were some AI training exceptions passed in Japan if I recall correctly, but with the copyright culture in Japan lacking anything resembling fair use, there was pretty much zero chance something like Stable Diffusion could have been built and proliferated in such a culture. Those AI laws seem pretty reactionary to the West's innovations to stay relevant in my view.
- TheRealQueequeg 2y ago
  IMO, massive industrial scale indignation of humanity.
- jMyles 2y ago
  ...perhaps this is what it takes to finally end the farcical narrative of "intellectual property" and usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge.
  - krapp 2y ago
    The copyright infringement is on the part of the models being trained on Studio Ghibli's work without permission. There's no law against you "accessing the entire corpus of evolved knowledge" and doing the work yourself.
  - aredox 2y ago
    Yeah, and culture will stagnate forever at the 2020 mark, as nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return. >usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge We have had that for decades and everything is going to shit. People now just reject facts.
    - anhner 2y ago
      > culture will stagnate forever at the 2020 mark, as nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return. right, because before copyright laws nobody ever created anything...
      - aredox 2y ago
        Then why were copyright laws created immediately after the advent of the printing press? One wonders...
        danielbln 2y ago
        Yes, immediately, just a short three hundred years later (printing press 1440, first copyright law 1710). And if you look into that law (Statute of Anne) then you will find that poor hardworking authors where not exactly on the receiving end of that protection.
- karel-3d 2y ago
  Style is not copyrightable. Marvin Gaye estate tried to argue that style is copyrightable, and sued some artists as their songs use similar chord progressions as Marvin Gaye songs; they won one case (which I won't google) but they lost with Sheeran.
  - tgv 2y ago
    In music, copyright is (relatively) clearly defined: it's the melody. You can't touch that. There are also reproduction rights, which protect the (recorded) performance, even if the music's copyright belongs to someone else.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  It's not copyright infringement / not illegal if it's legal and / or there's an exception for "information analysis": https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-guidelines-on-ai-and-copyright-is-it-really-ok-to-train-ai-using-pirated-materials/ https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-guide... This is the tricky part; is it immoral? I think so, but that's a personal opinion. Is it illegal? Not by Japanese copyright laws.
- frankzander 2y ago
  Infact it isn't the style which has been copyright infringed but the original works which had been fed into the Neuronal networks in order to learn how to produce such works. There is no consent from the authors. I'm not a fighter copyright but if someone makes money from someone others work than the author should be compensated. The AI industry is standing on the shoulders of giants and make a lot of money. If the authors had been asked beforehand if their works could be use to train NN than I'm sure this whole AI blubble is has burst long time ago.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  Good. Down with intellectual "property." Ideas are gifts from the divine, meant for self-propagation.
shmerl 2y ago
Hayao Miyazaki is frying this kind of idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc > I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself
- facile3232 2y ago
  "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself" I emphatically appreciate Miyazaki. Even if you take him as hyperbolic, or perhaps biased due to differences in intention between the engineer team and artistry he represents, it's very positive to have strongly opinionated voices in the room that can clearly articulate why. The anecdote about pain and stiffness is succinct but exactly what is necessary to communicate specifically what is missing from the animations at hand. However, I'm curious what he would have thought about someone playing QWOP. I wonder if he would be more fully bought into such a concept (well outside his own work of course) if such technology might emphasize appreciation for life rather than trying to mimic/bastardize/reproduce it.
- falcor84 2y ago
  I can't help but feel that at least a significant part of his reaction is due to the subject matter of AI zombies crawling in what we imagine would be painful poses without feeling pain, rather than just the technology itself.
  - pixelpoet 2y ago
    Likewise, I feel like the article presents a somewhat manufactured "quote" and misinterpretation of what was being referred to in the linked video. Unfortunately I'm sure this sensationalised fake-quote will spread much more quickly than any context / checking.
    - shmerl 2y ago
      I don't see how. This kind of AI has no mind and can't feel anything, so it has no component that's needed for expressing feelings in art. That's his main point. That was true then, it's true today.
Havoc 2y ago
> Google dropped their biggest upgrade ever & ghibli core completely hijacked the zeitgeist. On twitter maybe but on places like localllama google Gemini got way more airtime than this drama
- ketzo 2y ago
  Right — which is to say, the vast, vast majority of people heard about Ghibli and not Gemini.
  - paxys 2y ago
    The vast majority of people are consumers, not AI developers. Of course viral moments will be more consumer-oriented. It's easier to digest and reshare a Ghiblified-caricature than a research paper. But the content of that research paper will lead to the next viral moment years down the line.
    - ketzo 2y ago
      I feel like you underestimate the degree to which AI developers are influenced in just the same ways as everybody else. Capturing mindshare matters no matter how you do it. I would bet my life savings that more people will join OpenAI to work on their models as a result of the Ghibli moment than will join Google as a result of this particular (incredibly impressive!) Gemini iteration. Because we’re humans! And we’re all pretty easily impressed, even those of us who actually build these dang things.
      - Barrin92 2y ago
        the people who are qualified to work on the frontier of AI research are people with PhDs from leading universities who spend 80% of their day on arxiv reading CS papers, they don't learn about AI from Ghibli art on twitter. That's bread and circus for the masses. There's no correlation between who consumes that stuff and who builds the technology, if anything, the opposite. Leading edge chip designers at TSMC didn't end up there because they ended up playing graphic intensive video games
zombiwoof 2y ago
Silicon Valley doesn’t care They are like the Mafia. “I don’t care, pay me”
tehjoker 2y ago
tbh i think it's a good thing when people can make art in a style they love. most people make kitsch, that's ok. people who study will make stuff that reaches the emotional and intellectual heights of the best. it does make me uneasy if OpenAI charges more than at-cost to help people do so though. it's the profiteering off others' work that is gross. a quote from "The Communist Manifesto" about the nature of capitalism: "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
- krapp 2y ago
  >tbh i think it's a good thing when people can make art in a style they love I agree. But people aren't making art in a style they love, people are telling a machine to make an inferior copy of something resembling art in a style they claim to love. I say "claim to" because I find it hard to believe someone could be a fan of Ghibli and treat the studio's work in a way that Miyazaki would despise. This isn't love so much as exploitation. If people value the Ghibli style so much, they could learn the art of drawing and animation, and actually make art instead of insulting the studio's talent and legacy by avoiding the craft and seeking an endorphine high from AI slop. It doesn't have to be perfect or even good to be satisfying, but it will be yours.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    That's true, but you're basically just describing kitch. That's what most people make, and often they are happy with it. I agree that more effort and thought will produce a piece they will be happier with and feel a sense of ownership of.
  - SamPatt 2y ago
    You can love an art style and want to create images in that style without wanting to be an artist. My family and I absolutely love Ghibli films. I ran some family photos through 4o and my wife was thrilled. It made her day. You can call it slop, you can say I'm not truly a fan, but I made my wife happy, and I can't see the harm. How is it "insulting their legacy"? You think people writing Harry Potter fan fiction are insulting J.K. Rowling?
keyle 2y ago
Great read. I particularly noted The takeaway? If you’re launching a consumer product, technical superiority doesn’t automatically translate to cultural impact. In the battle for attention, a memorable vibe often beats a better benchmark.
- harrall 2y ago
  Selling on benchmarks is like selling users a blender by telling them the efficiency % of the motor. No regular person cares.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    I don't know, eventually while this was cool and got lots of attention from internet at scale, it is largely irrelevant in $ terms.
  - mrheosuper 2y ago
    Not long ago cheap chinese phone included their benchmark score in advertisement
  - Miraltar 2y ago
    Exactly, I feel like AI was initially meant for "nerds" or at least tech enthusiasts so big numbers were great but when the market widens it becomes less relevant
ranger_danger 2y ago
Here is a montage of many of the recent ghibli creations: https://0x0.st/82oM.webm https://0x0.st/82oM.webm It's chocked full of memes, historical and political photos, and general pop culture.
- gradientsrneat 2y ago
  The real movie was humanity all along.
knowknow 2y ago
I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this, the fact that machines are able to recreate his style seems to go against the whimsy he creates in his art. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a possible lawsuit considering how strongly that style is tied to him, and that the model surely used his films as data. If it was me I would feel horrible that what I gave to the public and dedicated my life to was contorted in this manner.
- seizethecheese 2y ago
  If it was me, I would feel great that my work has been extended to give joy at such a large scale. (Not that it’s invalid if he has a different opinion.)
- lowq 2y ago
  "An insult to life itself" [1] [1] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hayao-miyazaki-artificial-intelligence-animation-insult-to-life-studio-ghibli-1201757617/ https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hayao-miyazaki-ar...
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    > After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque creature Reacting to an animation where a gross critter "learned to walk using AI" instead of being animated by a person 8+ years ago, and ended up using its head as a leg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc It has nothing to do with the current image generation topic beyond the "AI" label being stuck on both of them Which is not to say I expect he's thrilled about ChatGPT cloning the art style on a mass scale, but that quote that everyone keeps reposting doesn't have anything to do with it
    - lowq 2y ago
      Guilty as charged. I don't think the leap was far but there was certainly a logical leap. Thanks for pointing that out.
    - 2y ago
m3kw9 2y ago
Seems like a fad where everyone looks basically the same after the conversion. You are gonna get a reaction for first 5 photos but I’ve grown past it and I just skip looking most of it on social media
- imp0cat 2y ago
  That's why it's called AI slop.
PostOnce 2y ago
Ghibli art is famous because ghibli art means ghibli movies. It is more beautiful in motion than still, the beauty is in part due to the emotion evoked by the story. There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats. This, however, is not the first time ghibli has had competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower in fact they have a whole studio dedicated to copying ghibli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc Yes they used to work at ghibli, but so too did john romero work at id, and yet daikatana was not a quake-killer. This doesn't devalue ghibli at all, I think (In fact, I think AI will always have the fundamental problem that most people have no taste or sense or introspection, they don't know why good things are good, and can't see that crap things are crap, so they are predestined to only be able to produce garbage. Nod to Ted Sturgeon.)
- rchaud 2y ago
  The wrongdoing here isn't in devaluing somebody's work, it is about enriching oneself by openly repurposing their IP without compensation and dodging any kind of repercussions whatsoever. It was bad when Chinese companies did it, OpenAI using legal sleight of hand to indemnify their actions isn't any less galling.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    I doubt anyone is enriching themselves with AI memes, at best it slightly devalues their brand by reducing scarcity.
    - freetinker 2y ago
      Utter bullshit. Or more politely - wrong take. OpenAI embeds itself further in public consciousness, arguably attracting more users therefore profiting. Enabling mass-production of Ghibli style without permission or monetary compensation is theft.
      - 2y ago
rufus_foreman 2y ago
[flagged]
- krapp 2y ago
  [dead]
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - rufus_foreman 2y ago
    I read the article. I didn't find anything out.
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      I don't believe you. The third paragraph stated 'Soon everyone ... was stylizing themselves, their kids, 9/11, and memes into the soft, pastel aesthetic of Japan’s beloved animation house,' with a link to the Wikipedia page about Studio Ghibli, along with pictorial examples.
margorczynski 2y ago
The Ghibli stuff is really amusing but for me the best are the infographics - you can make amazing stuff with basically 0 2D CG know-how for e.g. a presentation, web page, documentation, blog, etc. The biggest difference to what was previously available is the accuracy - especially the text. This opens up a plethora of possibilities.
- smjburton 2y ago
  This is what I'm most excited about as well. Prior to 4o image generation, most GPTs I came across really struggled with this type of image generation. The only one that seemed to come close was Ideogram.
thefz 2y ago
Read on Reddit that people love AI because it's "democratizing creativity". Let that sink in. People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called an alpinist.
- emblaegh 2y ago
  I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.
  - dxuh 2y ago
    I'm afraid that in time people will forget that it's all about learning to climb.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      That thinking is time honoured and never found much traction. For example, pretty much nobody knows how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, carve their own furniture or even drive a manual car. Hordes of tourists circle the globe bringing disrepute to all sorts of time honoured monuments of history's greatest. Skills and challenges which aren't needed get forgotten and are generally not missed.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - globular-toast 2y ago
        None of those things you mention have been forgotten. Many people do all of those things not because they have to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness. People will actively seek out challenges even when they seemingly have none. The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.
hbarka 2y ago
The pronunciation of Ghibli is the next /ɡɪf/ versus /dʒɪf/
- orthoxerox 2y ago
  /ɡɪblai/
- svara 2y ago
  It's spelled ジブリ - "Djiburi" roughly - making this one pretty easy to settle.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Just as easily for GIF, whose inventor stated that it’s /dʒɪf/, but people still disagree (myself included). With Ghibli there is the fact that the original Italian word is pronounced with a hard G. In fact, that’s why it has an “h”. We can treat this similar to Roma vs. Rome.
    - fenomas 2y ago
      ジブリ isn't the JP translation of an Italian word, it's a Japanese proper noun with an unambiguous pronunciation in the language it was coined in. The fact that it's derived from a word pronounced differently is neither here nor there - arguing that would be like arguing that English "origin" is ambiguous because the Latin derivation had a hard G.
- internet_points 2y ago
  It's pronounced /fish/
GaggiX 2y ago
The native image support of GPT-4o is really impressive, no model before was able to work so well in the joint space, just compare it to the Gemini 2.0 Flash model with native image support, the difference is massive, so I'm not too surprise that people focused more on the native image support of GPT-4o than the new SOTA by Google.
nottorp 2y ago
Where's this Ghiblification? I'm still getting real cat photos in my FB feed. At least I hope they're real. Could it be that all the "AI" evangelists are in their own bubble and desperately trying to make money off each other? Like when mobile free to play gambling apps ("games" they said) had ads, but only for other mobile free to play gambling apps.
- yazantapuz 2y ago
  Oh, well, here even the state communication director posted a ghibli-selfie...
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  > Where's this Ghiblification? The White House twitter account: https://x.com/whitehouse/status/1905332049021415862 https://x.com/whitehouse/status/1905332049021415862
icu 2y ago
I think AI is just leverage for whatever you want to do. How you use that leverage, and what you apply it to is what matters. It's just another tool for humanity.
karel-3d 2y ago
I like to create Corporate Memphis versions of pictures instead. It just seems way more dystopian.
bfrog 2y ago
AI stealing yet again.
keepamovin 2y ago
What if the transcendence of a unique style into a commodity is inevitable for all greatly influential styles, and a mark of greatness not of debasement or dilution. What if instead of the "impurity" of the commons polluting the "purity" of the pure form, the pure form has evolved into a memetic virus that has infected everything and reproduced itself in many forms, beyond even the power of its creator? The creator's grief at, in part, loss of control is understandable but perhaps is a tribute to how what they created transcended them into a thing with a life of its own, one of the truest tributes to creative genius, no? What if a distinct style is not owned by one artist, even if they are most associated with it, but in reality, in art historical reality, is most commonly explored by a group of more and less famous creators, all as part of a movement, at a time? What influences did Ghibli draw on? Buddhism says all things are essentially empty of their own existence but are merely conditions resulting from other causes, and so on, in a chain unending. Like this. The pointillism[0] of Impressionism that ended up spread to the masses by countless including Bob Ross is one example of the memetic evolution and transcendent influence of "high art". Greatness can filter down but it doesn't mean it's not great. An iPhone is still a masterpiece even if you hold it in the ghetto. Does the ghetto pollute it or does it lift the ghetto? Maybe there's cross pollination, but I think it's infected with its greatness. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
greenhearth 2y ago
The obtuseness and the soullessness of the user excited by this trick is what is most sad about this situation. "Look at me, I'm a cartoon!" speaks of the arrested development and some kind of a consciousness stunted by some autistic juvenescence prevalent in modern people. This pupa is really excited about living, I suppose.
incrudible 2y ago
The Miyazaki quote is always taken out of context, the disgust he utters has nothing to do with automation of grunt work and everything to do with the horror content he just witnessed. Miyazaki is not one who insists on everything Ghibli being hand drawn, his son even uses cartoonish CGI, which I think looks awful. This type of quality is close to enabling a storyboarder like Miyazaki do an entire animation on their own. I have yet to hear him say he would not use such technology, despite him being rather opinionated.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
osti 2y ago
Pretentious.
ambarp2 2y ago
I understand the criticisms presented here. But seeing a beautiful, whimsical image of my baby daughter in the Ghibli style was pure joy and brought tears to my eyes. I have no idea how I could have done this otherwise, and I hope it brings happiness to Miyazaki to know that it brought joy to someone.
- genocidicbunny 2y ago
  To offer a counter view, for me, I might enjoy having the photos rendered in the Ghibli style for a short period of time, but they will never be either timeless moments of my kids, or stills from a timeless animated film. I'm always going to find myself associating the images with a fairly low-effort attempt to do something 'cute' because I am hard pressed to feel that prompting an AI and feeding it an existing image is the appropriate effort on my part to create something memorable. This is highly personal though, and if it works for you, then you have one of the best reasons for using this sort of image generation -- to create memories and experiences with your family.
tracker1 2y ago
Reminds me of the work that Corridor Digital has done with similar tech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y

213 points by ghuntley 2y ago

ungreased0675 2y ago

Massive, industrial scale copyright infringement

anigbrowl 2y ago
Japanese firms take copyright pretty seriously, and Miyazaki is famously not a fan of CG or automation or indeed the US. I suspect lawsuits will not be long in coming.
- pnw 2y ago
  Apparently current Japanese law allows models to be trained on copyrighted content. https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-explained/ https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-exp...
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Such a law doesn't automatically imply that everything a model outputs is automatically copyright free though, does it? Otherwise: Meet my new and surprisingly performant new model, IdentityFunctionGPT! Oh, the weights? Sorry, trade secret.
    - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
      I don't know, I'm no lawyer. However, if I make a drawing in the style of Ghibli, I own the copyright because I made it. I don't know if in Japan, art style is copyrightable. I don't know if copyright applies to generated content (of any sort) though. It probably does.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        The important question here isn't who owns the copyright in the output, but rather whether the output also infringes on somebody else's, and if so, who's liable for that: The company that trained the AI, the one that hosts it as a service, or the user that prompted it.
- hiccuphippo 2y ago
  On the other hand, Japan pretty much ignores the amateur comics community using copyrighted works for their fan fiction. Even when they have big, well known, events where they sell the comics.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    There's an industry consensus to leave it alone in most* cases, since it is considered to expand the total manga market and generate new talent. Micro-publishers are very different from megacorporations, though. * Unsurprisingly a famous exception involves Nintendo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_doujinshi_inciden...
  - numpad0 2y ago
    There's a unwritten framework regulating it, unwritten but enforced by selective C&D. I think that's how a lot of industries work anyway, see Oracle v. Google drama on use of Java in Android.
falcor84 2y ago
IANAL but artistic style is not copyrightable. Many many human artists have created images and animated films in the style of Ghibli or Disney or Pixar and there's no direct copyright issue there.
- iszomer 2y ago
  Yeah but humans aren't exactly fast at replicating any particular art style.
  - catach 2y ago
    Speed of replication isn't a part of copyright law, is it?
    - iszomer 2y ago
      Nope. But I do feel bad for partaking in part for Louis CK's Twitter-Jesus rant. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSSDeesUUsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSSDeesUUsU
    - SirMaster 2y ago
      No, but I have to wonder if the reason it isn't is because up until now it was so slow and time consuming etc to create a replication.
  - throwuxiytayq 2y ago
    Should I be concerned about my drawing speed lest it qualifies as copyright informant?
- conartist6 2y ago
  Maaybe, but you'd also have to pass the three-prong test of fair use, and one of the prongs of the test is that your fair use of the material can't eliminate the market for the original material. I fail to see how taking a distinctive artistic style that was incredibly difficult to produce and shitting out massive amounts of it everywhere as a super low quality commodity would pass the test of fair use.
trealira 2y ago
Not a lawyer, but I don't think art styles are copyrightable, though maybe they could be in Japan.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Unlikely since there's a studio led by a former ghibli lead that does visuals in the very same style.
- conartist6 2y ago
  That feels like an omission in the law. Previously it was simply impossible to "take" a style wholesale. You would at least have to become an artist versed in that style, and it in investing your life into that style you would also make it yours. AI can take a whole style wholesale with no effort and no contribution. It is greivous theft in the moral sense if not the legal sense.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- doright 2y ago
  There were some AI training exceptions passed in Japan if I recall correctly, but with the copyright culture in Japan lacking anything resembling fair use, there was pretty much zero chance something like Stable Diffusion could have been built and proliferated in such a culture. Those AI laws seem pretty reactionary to the West's innovations to stay relevant in my view.
TheRealQueequeg 2y ago
IMO, massive industrial scale indignation of humanity.
jMyles 2y ago
...perhaps this is what it takes to finally end the farcical narrative of "intellectual property" and usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge.
- krapp 2y ago
  The copyright infringement is on the part of the models being trained on Studio Ghibli's work without permission. There's no law against you "accessing the entire corpus of evolved knowledge" and doing the work yourself.
- aredox 2y ago
  Yeah, and culture will stagnate forever at the 2020 mark, as nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return. >usher in an internet age where everybody can access the entire corpus of evolved knowledge We have had that for decades and everything is going to shit. People now just reject facts.
  - anhner 2y ago
    > culture will stagnate forever at the 2020 mark, as nobody in his right mind will create anything new only to be immediatly copied without anything in return. right, because before copyright laws nobody ever created anything...
    - aredox 2y ago
      Then why were copyright laws created immediately after the advent of the printing press? One wonders...
      - danielbln 2y ago
        Yes, immediately, just a short three hundred years later (printing press 1440, first copyright law 1710). And if you look into that law (Statute of Anne) then you will find that poor hardworking authors where not exactly on the receiving end of that protection.
karel-3d 2y ago
Style is not copyrightable. Marvin Gaye estate tried to argue that style is copyrightable, and sued some artists as their songs use similar chord progressions as Marvin Gaye songs; they won one case (which I won't google) but they lost with Sheeran.
- tgv 2y ago
  In music, copyright is (relatively) clearly defined: it's the melody. You can't touch that. There are also reproduction rights, which protect the (recorded) performance, even if the music's copyright belongs to someone else.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
It's not copyright infringement / not illegal if it's legal and / or there's an exception for "information analysis": https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-guidelines-on-ai-and-copyright-is-it-really-ok-to-train-ai-using-pirated-materials/ https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-guide... This is the tricky part; is it immoral? I think so, but that's a personal opinion. Is it illegal? Not by Japanese copyright laws.
frankzander 2y ago
Infact it isn't the style which has been copyright infringed but the original works which had been fed into the Neuronal networks in order to learn how to produce such works. There is no consent from the authors. I'm not a fighter copyright but if someone makes money from someone others work than the author should be compensated. The AI industry is standing on the shoulders of giants and make a lot of money. If the authors had been asked beforehand if their works could be use to train NN than I'm sure this whole AI blubble is has burst long time ago.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
Good. Down with intellectual "property." Ideas are gifts from the divine, meant for self-propagation.

shmerl 2y ago

Hayao Miyazaki is frying this kind of idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc > I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself

facile3232 2y ago
"I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself" I emphatically appreciate Miyazaki. Even if you take him as hyperbolic, or perhaps biased due to differences in intention between the engineer team and artistry he represents, it's very positive to have strongly opinionated voices in the room that can clearly articulate why. The anecdote about pain and stiffness is succinct but exactly what is necessary to communicate specifically what is missing from the animations at hand. However, I'm curious what he would have thought about someone playing QWOP. I wonder if he would be more fully bought into such a concept (well outside his own work of course) if such technology might emphasize appreciation for life rather than trying to mimic/bastardize/reproduce it.
falcor84 2y ago
I can't help but feel that at least a significant part of his reaction is due to the subject matter of AI zombies crawling in what we imagine would be painful poses without feeling pain, rather than just the technology itself.
- pixelpoet 2y ago
  Likewise, I feel like the article presents a somewhat manufactured "quote" and misinterpretation of what was being referred to in the linked video. Unfortunately I'm sure this sensationalised fake-quote will spread much more quickly than any context / checking.
  - shmerl 2y ago
    I don't see how. This kind of AI has no mind and can't feel anything, so it has no component that's needed for expressing feelings in art. That's his main point. That was true then, it's true today.

Havoc 2y ago

> Google dropped their biggest upgrade ever & ghibli core completely hijacked the zeitgeist. On twitter maybe but on places like localllama google Gemini got way more airtime than this drama

ketzo 2y ago
Right — which is to say, the vast, vast majority of people heard about Ghibli and not Gemini.
- paxys 2y ago
  The vast majority of people are consumers, not AI developers. Of course viral moments will be more consumer-oriented. It's easier to digest and reshare a Ghiblified-caricature than a research paper. But the content of that research paper will lead to the next viral moment years down the line.
  - ketzo 2y ago
    I feel like you underestimate the degree to which AI developers are influenced in just the same ways as everybody else. Capturing mindshare matters no matter how you do it. I would bet my life savings that more people will join OpenAI to work on their models as a result of the Ghibli moment than will join Google as a result of this particular (incredibly impressive!) Gemini iteration. Because we’re humans! And we’re all pretty easily impressed, even those of us who actually build these dang things.
    - Barrin92 2y ago
      the people who are qualified to work on the frontier of AI research are people with PhDs from leading universities who spend 80% of their day on arxiv reading CS papers, they don't learn about AI from Ghibli art on twitter. That's bread and circus for the masses. There's no correlation between who consumes that stuff and who builds the technology, if anything, the opposite. Leading edge chip designers at TSMC didn't end up there because they ended up playing graphic intensive video games

zombiwoof 2y ago

Silicon Valley doesn’t care They are like the Mafia. “I don’t care, pay me”

tehjoker 2y ago

tbh i think it's a good thing when people can make art in a style they love. most people make kitsch, that's ok. people who study will make stuff that reaches the emotional and intellectual heights of the best. it does make me uneasy if OpenAI charges more than at-cost to help people do so though. it's the profiteering off others' work that is gross. a quote from "The Communist Manifesto" about the nature of capitalism: "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

krapp 2y ago
>tbh i think it's a good thing when people can make art in a style they love I agree. But people aren't making art in a style they love, people are telling a machine to make an inferior copy of something resembling art in a style they claim to love. I say "claim to" because I find it hard to believe someone could be a fan of Ghibli and treat the studio's work in a way that Miyazaki would despise. This isn't love so much as exploitation. If people value the Ghibli style so much, they could learn the art of drawing and animation, and actually make art instead of insulting the studio's talent and legacy by avoiding the craft and seeking an endorphine high from AI slop. It doesn't have to be perfect or even good to be satisfying, but it will be yours.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  That's true, but you're basically just describing kitch. That's what most people make, and often they are happy with it. I agree that more effort and thought will produce a piece they will be happier with and feel a sense of ownership of.
- SamPatt 2y ago
  You can love an art style and want to create images in that style without wanting to be an artist. My family and I absolutely love Ghibli films. I ran some family photos through 4o and my wife was thrilled. It made her day. You can call it slop, you can say I'm not truly a fan, but I made my wife happy, and I can't see the harm. How is it "insulting their legacy"? You think people writing Harry Potter fan fiction are insulting J.K. Rowling?

keyle 2y ago

Great read. I particularly noted The takeaway? If you’re launching a consumer product, technical superiority doesn’t automatically translate to cultural impact. In the battle for attention, a memorable vibe often beats a better benchmark.

harrall 2y ago
Selling on benchmarks is like selling users a blender by telling them the efficiency % of the motor. No regular person cares.
- epolanski 2y ago
  I don't know, eventually while this was cool and got lots of attention from internet at scale, it is largely irrelevant in $ terms.
- mrheosuper 2y ago
  Not long ago cheap chinese phone included their benchmark score in advertisement
- Miraltar 2y ago
  Exactly, I feel like AI was initially meant for "nerds" or at least tech enthusiasts so big numbers were great but when the market widens it becomes less relevant

ranger_danger 2y ago

Here is a montage of many of the recent ghibli creations: https://0x0.st/82oM.webm https://0x0.st/82oM.webm It's chocked full of memes, historical and political photos, and general pop culture.

gradientsrneat 2y ago
The real movie was humanity all along.

knowknow 2y ago

I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this, the fact that machines are able to recreate his style seems to go against the whimsy he creates in his art. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a possible lawsuit considering how strongly that style is tied to him, and that the model surely used his films as data. If it was me I would feel horrible that what I gave to the public and dedicated my life to was contorted in this manner.

seizethecheese 2y ago
If it was me, I would feel great that my work has been extended to give joy at such a large scale. (Not that it’s invalid if he has a different opinion.)
lowq 2y ago
"An insult to life itself" [1] [1] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hayao-miyazaki-artificial-intelligence-animation-insult-to-life-studio-ghibli-1201757617/ https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hayao-miyazaki-ar...
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  > After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque creature Reacting to an animation where a gross critter "learned to walk using AI" instead of being animated by a person 8+ years ago, and ended up using its head as a leg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc It has nothing to do with the current image generation topic beyond the "AI" label being stuck on both of them Which is not to say I expect he's thrilled about ChatGPT cloning the art style on a mass scale, but that quote that everyone keeps reposting doesn't have anything to do with it
  - lowq 2y ago
    Guilty as charged. I don't think the leap was far but there was certainly a logical leap. Thanks for pointing that out.
  - 2y ago

m3kw9 2y ago

Seems like a fad where everyone looks basically the same after the conversion. You are gonna get a reaction for first 5 photos but I’ve grown past it and I just skip looking most of it on social media

imp0cat 2y ago
That's why it's called AI slop.

PostOnce 2y ago

Ghibli art is famous because ghibli art means ghibli movies. It is more beautiful in motion than still, the beauty is in part due to the emotion evoked by the story. There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats. This, however, is not the first time ghibli has had competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_and_the_Witch's_Flower in fact they have a whole studio dedicated to copying ghibli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ponoc Yes they used to work at ghibli, but so too did john romero work at id, and yet daikatana was not a quake-killer. This doesn't devalue ghibli at all, I think (In fact, I think AI will always have the fundamental problem that most people have no taste or sense or introspection, they don't know why good things are good, and can't see that crap things are crap, so they are predestined to only be able to produce garbage. Nod to Ted Sturgeon.)

rchaud 2y ago
The wrongdoing here isn't in devaluing somebody's work, it is about enriching oneself by openly repurposing their IP without compensation and dodging any kind of repercussions whatsoever. It was bad when Chinese companies did it, OpenAI using legal sleight of hand to indemnify their actions isn't any less galling.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  I doubt anyone is enriching themselves with AI memes, at best it slightly devalues their brand by reducing scarcity.
  - freetinker 2y ago
    Utter bullshit. Or more politely - wrong take. OpenAI embeds itself further in public consciousness, arguably attracting more users therefore profiting. Enabling mass-production of Ghibli style without permission or monetary compensation is theft.
    - 2y ago

rufus_foreman 2y ago

[flagged]

krapp 2y ago
[dead]
anigbrowl 2y ago
[flagged]
- rufus_foreman 2y ago
  I read the article. I didn't find anything out.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    I don't believe you. The third paragraph stated 'Soon everyone ... was stylizing themselves, their kids, 9/11, and memes into the soft, pastel aesthetic of Japan’s beloved animation house,' with a link to the Wikipedia page about Studio Ghibli, along with pictorial examples.

margorczynski 2y ago

The Ghibli stuff is really amusing but for me the best are the infographics - you can make amazing stuff with basically 0 2D CG know-how for e.g. a presentation, web page, documentation, blog, etc. The biggest difference to what was previously available is the accuracy - especially the text. This opens up a plethora of possibilities.

smjburton 2y ago
This is what I'm most excited about as well. Prior to 4o image generation, most GPTs I came across really struggled with this type of image generation. The only one that seemed to come close was Ideogram.

thefz 2y ago

Read on Reddit that people love AI because it's "democratizing creativity". Let that sink in. People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called an alpinist.

emblaegh 2y ago
I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.
- dxuh 2y ago
  I'm afraid that in time people will forget that it's all about learning to climb.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    That thinking is time honoured and never found much traction. For example, pretty much nobody knows how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, carve their own furniture or even drive a manual car. Hordes of tourists circle the globe bringing disrepute to all sorts of time honoured monuments of history's greatest. Skills and challenges which aren't needed get forgotten and are generally not missed.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - globular-toast 2y ago
      None of those things you mention have been forgotten. Many people do all of those things not because they have to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness. People will actively seek out challenges even when they seemingly have none. The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.

hbarka 2y ago

The pronunciation of Ghibli is the next /ɡɪf/ versus /dʒɪf/

orthoxerox 2y ago
/ɡɪblai/
svara 2y ago
It's spelled ジブリ - "Djiburi" roughly - making this one pretty easy to settle.
- layer8 2y ago
  Just as easily for GIF, whose inventor stated that it’s /dʒɪf/, but people still disagree (myself included). With Ghibli there is the fact that the original Italian word is pronounced with a hard G. In fact, that’s why it has an “h”. We can treat this similar to Roma vs. Rome.
  - fenomas 2y ago
    ジブリ isn't the JP translation of an Italian word, it's a Japanese proper noun with an unambiguous pronunciation in the language it was coined in. The fact that it's derived from a word pronounced differently is neither here nor there - arguing that would be like arguing that English "origin" is ambiguous because the Latin derivation had a hard G.
internet_points 2y ago
It's pronounced /fish/

GaggiX 2y ago

The native image support of GPT-4o is really impressive, no model before was able to work so well in the joint space, just compare it to the Gemini 2.0 Flash model with native image support, the difference is massive, so I'm not too surprise that people focused more on the native image support of GPT-4o than the new SOTA by Google.

nottorp 2y ago

Where's this Ghiblification? I'm still getting real cat photos in my FB feed. At least I hope they're real. Could it be that all the "AI" evangelists are in their own bubble and desperately trying to make money off each other? Like when mobile free to play gambling apps ("games" they said) had ads, but only for other mobile free to play gambling apps.

yazantapuz 2y ago
Oh, well, here even the state communication director posted a ghibli-selfie...
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
> Where's this Ghiblification? The White House twitter account: https://x.com/whitehouse/status/1905332049021415862 https://x.com/whitehouse/status/1905332049021415862

icu 2y ago

I think AI is just leverage for whatever you want to do. How you use that leverage, and what you apply it to is what matters. It's just another tool for humanity.

karel-3d 2y ago

I like to create Corporate Memphis versions of pictures instead. It just seems way more dystopian.

bfrog 2y ago

AI stealing yet again.

keepamovin 2y ago

What if the transcendence of a unique style into a commodity is inevitable for all greatly influential styles, and a mark of greatness not of debasement or dilution. What if instead of the "impurity" of the commons polluting the "purity" of the pure form, the pure form has evolved into a memetic virus that has infected everything and reproduced itself in many forms, beyond even the power of its creator? The creator's grief at, in part, loss of control is understandable but perhaps is a tribute to how what they created transcended them into a thing with a life of its own, one of the truest tributes to creative genius, no? What if a distinct style is not owned by one artist, even if they are most associated with it, but in reality, in art historical reality, is most commonly explored by a group of more and less famous creators, all as part of a movement, at a time? What influences did Ghibli draw on? Buddhism says all things are essentially empty of their own existence but are merely conditions resulting from other causes, and so on, in a chain unending. Like this. The pointillism[0] of Impressionism that ended up spread to the masses by countless including Bob Ross is one example of the memetic evolution and transcendent influence of "high art". Greatness can filter down but it doesn't mean it's not great. An iPhone is still a masterpiece even if you hold it in the ghetto. Does the ghetto pollute it or does it lift the ghetto? Maybe there's cross pollination, but I think it's infected with its greatness. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

greenhearth 2y ago

The obtuseness and the soullessness of the user excited by this trick is what is most sad about this situation. "Look at me, I'm a cartoon!" speaks of the arrested development and some kind of a consciousness stunted by some autistic juvenescence prevalent in modern people. This pupa is really excited about living, I suppose.

incrudible 2y ago

The Miyazaki quote is always taken out of context, the disgust he utters has nothing to do with automation of grunt work and everything to do with the horror content he just witnessed. Miyazaki is not one who insists on everything Ghibli being hand drawn, his son even uses cartoonish CGI, which I think looks awful. This type of quality is close to enabling a storyboarder like Miyazaki do an entire animation on their own. I have yet to hear him say he would not use such technology, despite him being rather opinionated.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

osti 2y ago

Pretentious.

ambarp2 2y ago

I understand the criticisms presented here. But seeing a beautiful, whimsical image of my baby daughter in the Ghibli style was pure joy and brought tears to my eyes. I have no idea how I could have done this otherwise, and I hope it brings happiness to Miyazaki to know that it brought joy to someone.

genocidicbunny 2y ago
To offer a counter view, for me, I might enjoy having the photos rendered in the Ghibli style for a short period of time, but they will never be either timeless moments of my kids, or stills from a timeless animated film. I'm always going to find myself associating the images with a fairly low-effort attempt to do something 'cute' because I am hard pressed to feel that prompting an AI and feeding it an existing image is the appropriate effort on my part to create something memorable. This is highly personal though, and if it works for you, then you have one of the best reasons for using this sort of image generation -- to create memories and experiences with your family.

tracker1 2y ago

Reminds me of the work that Corridor Digital has done with similar tech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y