Latest news with #Ghiblified
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
ChatGPT Turned Into a Studio Ghibli Machine. How Is That Legal?
A few weeks ago, OpenAI pulled off one of the greatest corporate promotions in recent memory. Whereas the initial launch of ChatGPT, back in 2022, was 'one of the craziest viral moments i'd ever seen,' CEO Sam Altman wrote on social media, the response to a new upgrade was, in his words, 'biblical': 1 million users supposedly signed up to use the chatbot in just one hour, Altman reported, thanks to a new, more permissive image-generating capability that could imitate the styles of various art and design studios. Altman called it 'a new high-water mark for us in allowing creative freedom.' Almost immediately, images began to flood the internet. The most popular style, by a long shot, was that of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki and widely beloved for films such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. Ghibli's style was applied to family portraits, historical events including 9/11, and whatever else people desired. Altman even changed his X avatar to what appears to be a Ghiblified version of himself, and posted a joke about the style's sudden popularity overtaking his previous, supposedly more important work. The Ghibli AI phenomenon is often portrayed as organic, driven by the inspiration of ChatGPT users. On X, the person credited with jump-starting the trend noted that OpenAI had been 'incredibly fortunate' that 'the positive vibes of ghibli was the first viral use of their model and not some awful deepfake nonsense.' But Altman did not appear to think it was luck. He responded, 'Believe it or not we put a lot of thought into the initial examples we show when we introduce new technology.' He has personally reposted numerous Ghiblified images in addition to the profile picture that appears atop every one of his posts, which he added less than 24 hours after the Ghibli-esque visuals became popular; OpenAI President Greg Brockman has also recirculated and celebrated these images. [Read: Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old law] This is different from other image-sharing trends involving memes or GIFs. The technology has given ChatGPT users control over the visual languages that artists have honed over the course of their careers, potentially devaluing those artists' styles and destroying their ability to charge money for their work. Existing laws do not explicitly address generative AI, but there are plausible arguments that OpenAI is in the wrong and could be liable for millions of dollars in damages—some of those arguments are now being tested in a case against another image-generating AI company, Midjourney. It's worth noting that OpenAI and Studio Ghibli could conceivably have a deal for the promotion, similar to the ones the tech company has struck with many media publishers, including The Atlantic. But based on Miyazaki's clear preference for hand-drawn work and distaste for at least certain types of computer-generated imagery, this seems unlikely. Neither company answered my questions about whether such a deal had been made, and neither Miyazaki nor Studio Ghibli have made any public remarks on the situation. Individual works of art are protected by copyright, but visual styles, such as Studio Ghibli's, are not. The legal logic here is that styles should be allowed to evolve through influence and reinterpretation by other artists. That creative and social process is how van Gogh led to Picasso, and Spenser to Shakespeare. But a deluge of people applying Ghibli's style like an Instagram filter, without adding any genuine creative value, isn't a collective effort to advance our visual culture. The images are also the direct result of a private company promoting a tech product, in part through its executives' social media, with the ability to manufacture images in a specific style. In response to a broader request for comment, a spokesperson for OpenAI told me, 'We continue to prevent generations in the style of individual living artists, but we do permit broader studio styles.' Still, this has the flavor of an endorsement deal, such as the ones Nike has made with LeBron James, and Pepsi with Beyoncé: Use ChatGPT; make Studio Ghibli art! These kinds of endorsements typically cost millions of dollars. Consider what happened in 1985, when Ford Motor Company wanted to promote one of its cars with an ad campaign featuring popular singers. Ford's advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, asked Bette Midler to record her hit song 'Do You Want to Dance?' but she declined. Undeterred, they approached one of Midler's backup singers and asked her to perform the song in Midler's style. She accepted, and imitated Midler as well as she could. The ad aired. Midler sued. In court, the judge described the central issue as 'an appropriation of the attributes of one's identity,' quoting from a previous case that had set precedent. Young & Rubicam had chosen Midler not because they wanted just any good singer but because they wanted to associate their brand with the feelings evoked by Midler's particular, recognizable voice. 'When a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product,' wrote the court, 'the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs.' Young & Rubicam had violated Midler's 'right of publicity,' in the language of the law. Midler received a $400,000 judgment (the equivalent of approximately $1 million today). [Read: The unbelievable scale of AI's pirated-books problem] OpenAI risked ending up in a similar lawsuit last year when it used a voice many people thought sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson's to promote its voice-assistant product. Like Midler, Johansson had been asked to participate, and declined. Experts believed she had a viable right-of-publicity case against OpenAI. Johansson's lawyers sent letters to OpenAI but did not file a formal legal complaint. (OpenAI denied that the voice was modeled on Johansson's, but removed it and apologized to the actor.) The average person seeing a torrent of images in the Studio Ghibli style, with captions praising ChatGPT, might reasonably infer that Miyazaki himself endorses or is associated with OpenAI, given that he is the most famous artist at the studio and has directed more of its films than any other. That people tend to call the aesthetic Ghibli's doesn't change the fact that the style is most recognizably Miyazaki's, present even in his early work, such as the 1979 film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, which was created six years before Ghibli was founded. Surely many people recognize Spirited Away as Miyazaki's and have never heard of Studio Ghibli. Besides a right-of-publicity complaint, another legal option might be to file a complaint for false endorsement or trade-dress infringement, as other artists have recently done against AI companies. False endorsement aims to prevent consumer confusion about whether a person or company endorses a product or service. Trade-dress law protects the unique visual cues that indicate the source of a product and distinguish it from others. The classic Coca-Cola bottle shape is protected by trade dress. Apple has also acquired trade-dress protection on the iPhone's general rectangular-with-rounded-corners shape—a design arguably less distinctive (and therefore less protectable) than Ghibli's style. In August, a judge agreed that false-endorsement and trade-dress claims against Midjourney were viable enough to litigate, and found it plausible that, as the plaintiffs allege, Midjourney and similar AI tools use a component that functions as 'a trade dress database.' [Read: There's no longer any doubt that Hollywood writing is powering AI] Regardless of what the courts decide or any action that Studio Ghibli takes, the potential downsides are clear. As Greg Rutkowski, one of the artists involved in the case against Midjourney, has observed, AI-generated images in his style, captioned with his name, may soon overwhelm his actual art online, causing 'confusion for people who are discovering my works.' And as a former general counsel for Adobe, Dana Rao, commented to The Verge last year, 'People are going to lose some of their economic livelihood because of style appropriation.' Current laws may not be up to the task of handling generative AI, Rao suggested: 'We're probably going to need a new right here to protect people.' That's not just because artists need to make a living, but because we need our visual aesthetics to evolve. Artists such as Miyazaki move the culture forward by spending their careers paying attention to the world and honing a style that resonates. Generative AI can only imitate past styles, thus minimizing the incentives for humans to create new ones. Even if Ghibli has a deal with OpenAI, ChatGPT allows users to mimic any number of distinct studio styles: DreamWorks Animation, Pixar, Madhouse, Sunrise, and so on. As one designer recently posted, 'Nobody is ever crafting an aesthetic over decades again, and no market will exist to support those who try it.' Years from now, looking back on this AI boom, OpenAI could turn out to be less important for its technology than for playing the role of provocateur. With its clever products, the company has rapidly encouraged new use cases for image and text generation, testing what society will accept legally, ethically, and socially. Complaints have been filed recently by many publishers whose brands are being attached to articles invented or modified by chatbots (which is another kind of misleading endorsement). These publishers, one of which is The Atlantic, are suing various AI companies for trademark dilution and trademark infringement, among other things. Meanwhile, as of today, Altman is still posting under his smiling, synthetic avatar. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
What Does OpenAI Owe Studio Ghibli?
A few weeks ago, OpenAI pulled off one of the greatest corporate promotions in recent memory. Whereas the initial launch of ChatGPT, back in 2022, was 'one of the craziest viral moments i'd ever seen,' CEO Sam Altman wrote on social media, the response to a new upgrade was, in his words, 'biblical': 1 million users supposedly signed up to use the chatbot in just one hour, Altman reported, thanks to a new, more permissive image-generating capability that could imitate the styles of various art and design studios. Altman called it 'a new high-water mark for us in allowing creative freedom.' Almost immediately, images began to flood the internet. The most popular style, by a long shot, was that of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki and widely beloved for films such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. Ghibli's style was applied to family portraits, historical events including 9/11, and whatever else people desired. Altman even changed his X avatar to what appears to be a Ghiblified version of himself, and posted a joke about the style's sudden popularity overtaking his previous, supposedly more important work. The Ghibli AI phenomenon is often portrayed as organic, driven by the inspiration of ChatGPT users. On X, the person credited with jump-starting the trend noted that OpenAI had been 'incredibly fortunate' that 'the positive vibes of ghibli was the first viral use of their model and not some awful deepfake nonsense.' But Altman did not appear to think it was luck. He responded, 'Believe it or not we put a lot of thought into the initial examples we show when we introduce new technology.' He has personally reposted numerous Ghiblified images in addition to the profile picture that appears atop every one of his posts, which he added less than 24 hours after the Ghibli-esque visuals became popular; OpenAI President Greg Brockman has also recirculated and celebrated these images. This is different from other image-sharing trends involving memes or GIFs. The technology has given ChatGPT users control over the visual languages that artists have honed over the course of their careers, potentially devaluing those artists' styles and destroying their ability to charge money for their work. Existing laws do not explicitly address generative AI, but there are plausible arguments that OpenAI is in the wrong and could be liable for millions of dollars in damages—some of those arguments are now being tested in a case against another image-generating AI company, Midjourney. It's worth noting that OpenAI and Studio Ghibli could conceivably have a deal for the promotion, similar to the ones the tech company has struck with many media publishers, including The Atlantic. But based on Miyazaki's clear preference for hand-drawn work and distaste for at least certain types of computer-generated imagery, this seems unlikely. Neither company answered my questions about whether such a deal had been made, and neither Miyazaki nor Studio Ghibli have made any public remarks on the works of art are protected by copyright, but visual styles, such as Studio Ghibli's, are not. The legal logic here is that styles should be allowed to evolve through influence and reinterpretation by other artists. That creative and social process is how van Gogh led to Picasso, and Spenser to Shakespeare. But a deluge of people applying Ghibli's style like an Instagram filter, without adding any genuine creative value, isn't a collective effort to advance our visual culture. The images are also the direct result of a private company promoting a tech product, in part through its executives' social media, with the ability to manufacture images in a specific style. In response to a broader request for comment, a spokesperson for OpenAI told me, 'We continue to prevent generations in the style of individual living artists, but we do permit broader studio styles.' Still, this has the flavor of an endorsement deal, such as the ones Nike has made with LeBron James, and Pepsi with Beyoncé: Use ChatGPT; make Studio Ghibli art! These kinds of endorsements typically cost millions of dollars. Consider what happened in 1985, when Ford Motor Company wanted to promote one of its cars with an ad campaign featuring popular singers. Ford's advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, asked Bette Midler to record her hit song 'Do You Want to Dance?' but she declined. Undeterred, they approached one of Midler's backup singers and asked her to perform the song in Midler's style. She accepted, and imitated Midler as well as she could. The ad aired. Midler sued. In court, the judge described the central issue as 'an appropriation of the attributes of one's identity,' quoting from a previous case that had set precedent. Young & Rubicam had chosen Midler not because they wanted just any good singer but because they wanted to associate their brand with the feelings evoked by Midler's particular, recognizable voice. 'When a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product,' wrote the court, 'the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs.' Young & Rubicam had violated Midler's 'right of publicity,' in the language of the law. Midler received a $400,000 judgment (the equivalent of approximately $1 million today). OpenAI risked ending up in a similar lawsuit last year when it used a voice many people thought sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson's to promote its voice-assistant product. Like Midler, Johansson had been asked to participate, and declined. Experts believed she had a viable right-of-publicity case against OpenAI. Johansson's lawyers sent letters to OpenAI but did not file a formal legal complaint. (OpenAI denied that the voice was modeled on Johansson's, but removed it and apologized to the actor.) The average person seeing a torrent of images in the Studio Ghibli style, with captions praising ChatGPT, might reasonably infer that Miyazaki himself endorses or is associated with OpenAI, given that he is the most famous artist at the studio and has directed more of its films than any other. That people tend to call the aesthetic Ghibli's doesn't change the fact that the style is most recognizably Miyazaki's, present even in his early work, such as the 1979 film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, which was created six years before Ghibli was founded. Surely many people recognize Spirited Away as Miyazaki's and have never heard of Studio Ghibli. Besides a right-of-publicity complaint, another legal option might be to file a complaint for false endorsement or trade-dress infringement, as other artists have recently done against AI companies. False endorsement aims to prevent consumer confusion about whether a person or company endorses a product or service. Trade-dress law protects the unique visual cues that indicate the source of a product and distinguish it from others. The classic Coca-Cola bottle shape is protected by trade dress. Apple has also acquired trade-dress protection on the iPhone's general rectangular-with-rounded-corners shape—a design arguably less distinctive (and therefore less protectable) than Ghibli's style. In August, a judge agreed that false-endorsement and trade-dress claims against Midjourney were viable enough to litigate, and found it plausible that, as the plaintiffs allege, Midjourney and similar AI tools use a component that functions as 'a trade dress database.' Regardless of what the courts decide or any action that Studio Ghibli takes, the potential downsides are clear. As Greg Rutkowski, one of the artists involved in the case against Midjourney, has observed, AI-generated images in his style, captioned with his name, may soon overwhelm his actual art online, causing 'confusion for people who are discovering my works.' And as a former general counsel for Adobe, Dana Rao, commented to The Verge last year, 'People are going to lose some of their economic livelihood because of style appropriation.' Current laws may not be up to the task of handling generative AI, Rao suggested: 'We're probably going to need a new right here to protect people.' That's not just because artists need to make a living, but because we need our visual aesthetics to evolve. Artists such as Miyazaki move the culture forward by spending their careers paying attention to the world and honing a style that resonates. Generative AI can only imitate past styles, thus minimizing the incentives for humans to create new ones. Even if Ghibli has a deal with OpenAI, ChatGPT allows users to mimic any number of distinct studio styles: DreamWorks Animation, Pixar, Madhouse, Sunrise, and so on. As one designer recently posted, 'Nobody is ever crafting an aesthetic over decades again, and no market will exist to support those who try it.' Years from now, looking back on this AI boom, OpenAI could turn out to be less important for its technology than for playing the role of provocateur. With its clever products, the company has rapidly encouraged new use cases for image and text generation, testing what society will accept legally, ethically, and socially. Complaints have been filed recently by many publishers whose brands are being attached to articles invented or modified by chatbots (which is another kind of misleading endorsement). These publishers, one of which is The Atlantic, are suing various AI companies for trademark dilution and trademark infringement, among other things. Meanwhile, as of today, Altman is still posting under his smiling, synthetic avatar.
Express Tribune
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Through a filter, darkly
Miyazaki rose to global fame with the 12th film produced by Studio Ghibli, the animation studio he co-founded with Isao Takahata. The film Spirited Away gained cult classic status among anime films for the emotional depth and resonance its stunning visuals evoke. If you want to watch what running away with your imagination looks like for two hours, that's probably apt proof. Recently, Ghibli art was trending again. Not because of a new film release but a photo filter which was on the lips and fingertips of every enthusiastic selfie taker. OpenAI released a Ghibli filter on ChatGPT 4.0, which had anime lovers abuzz with glee. They could capture moments of their lives with loved ones and transform them into fantastical and lush images like those that swept their childhood imagination. I even saw an AI generated Ghiblified video by a fan of Princess Kate's royal wedding. Such was the craze for the AI tool. At the heels of its popularity, the Ghibli trend sparked controversy, much like fire in the hands of gods and mortals. The Israel Defence Forces posted four illustrations of its military branches in the Ghibli style because it just wanted to 'hop on the trend'. In response the IDF was condemned for its utter insensitivity for using the art style of a studio and man that has made anti-war animation films. The White House posted on its official X account, an AI-generated image of a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent detaining a Hispanic woman on drug dealing charges. It was a Ghiblified photo and social media was appalled at the disparaging image. Others used the filter to recreate images of tragedies such as 9/11 and the police murder of George Floyd, a black American. It was just a trend for most users, like the IDF, they weren't going to do a background research to use a photo filter when they literally have bombs to drop on Palestinians. Meanwhile, Miyazaki himself was disgusted. I might as well die, said the 84-year-old auteur, affronted at the millions of cheap likeness AI rendered of his hand-drawn art. AI is an insult to life itself, he had said last year when there was heated debate across the world on AI-generated art. So even when Miyazaki fans popped their vacation and wedding photos on the photo editor apps to create their own Ghibli moments, while it was exciting for them, it must've been much to his horror and mortification. His fans inadvertently did him the disservice. Not every Ghibli fan may know that it took Miyazaki six long years, in the twilight of his life, to complete his latest film The Boy and the Heron. Not everyone may know the man behind the animation classics they love, honours the integrity of making art above all else. They may assume but not fully understand that for the animation legend bringing his handmade drawings to life is the very purpose of his existence. Internet users just want a piece of the latest trend. What else is there to do? We are not all born artists. We may not be able to paint a rainbow or draw a straight line, yet here is artificial intelligence for us to employ and manipulate for desired results. Whether it is to render a selfie as a Miyazaki portrait or use ChatGPT to write an article like the one you are reading. AI helps to fill a vacuum between fact and fantasy, what is and what could be. You wish you could paint like an artist or that you were part of a film. There are AI tools to help you seem like you were. True creativity resists untruths. Artists are loath to accept computer-generated images as works of fine art. AI can whip up a Van Gogh-esque impressionist landscape or a dreamy scene a la Monet. But there is only one original Starry Night, only one The Garden at Vetheuil. Celebrated Chinese artist and dissenter Ai Weiwei proclaimed that art that can be replicated by AI is 'meaningless'. Even if you have not seen a Van Gogh up close, with a keen eye, you can tell it apart from its computer generated likeness. The human hand is the distinction. It translates the emotions and thoughts produced in the human consciousness. In the documentary on Miyazaki, there is a scene where the artist is agonising over his drawings of the boy in the semi-autobiographical film. His movement is just not quite lifelike in one second of the film. Miyazaki cannot explain it in words, why he is dissatisfied. It is a feeling, and an infuriating equation he can't solve. AI does not grapple with this artistic anguish. It follows a bunch of sophisticated codes and numbers to create a visual, whether it is close to being lifelike or not, it doesn't have the cognition. With airbrushing and photoshopping tools the result of a person's picture can be deformed, if done badly. Similarly, even when you use a filter like the Ghibli one, your anime version might have eight fingers, or your girlfriend next to you might be turned into your boyfriend. Your eyes might be gazing to the left when in fact they are looking straight at the camera in the original photo. When I used it on my pictures, the result was not at all what I expected. The Ghibli version of me could have been any other woman. It had no distinct feature or look that I could call mine. That is perhaps the most incontrovertible trait of AI generated art. The reason that the maestro Miyazaki took to it with indignation. The likenesses of his drawing style have no soul. When his entire career pivots on the very capability of imbuing his drawings with the spirit of life. Granted I used the free trail versions and did not have the means to give specific prompts to recreate my images to enhance the filter effect, yet that is what creeped me out about my selfies. I wondered at the joy people got by seeing this version of their faces. When consuming or using AI, we are not so concerned about meaning, just fascinated by the results. It's become another sensory pleasure accessible at our fingertips. AI companies are only expanding their abilities to astound the average human intelligence. In the race to be as creative and responsive as the next Tom, Dick or real life Harry, AI technology is closing the gap at lightning speed. While we are intrigued and fascinated with how it can elevate our daily life tasks within seconds, we are not concerned by the ethics of its usage. Technology has so overwhelmed us that we don't have time to pause and think about our choice to use it. The documentary HM and the Heron follows the daily work routine of the Studio Ghibli cofounder, where he struggles to find the perfect, the most satisfactory drawing for what he sees in his mind's eye. All the while people around him, closest to him, are dying of old age. After the third death, another colleague, he says, 'I know he died and it's horrible but I don't know what to do.' So he takes to his work desk again and dives into his fantasy world. Film producer friend and former president of Studio Ghibli Toshio Suzuki says then, 'He even converts the energy of death into work.' Where art and life are coexisting with death, only the ken of ephemeral beings can fathom it. Being human is a step beyond Artificial Intelligence.
Vox
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
The real argument artists should be making against AI
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Many artists are upset at companies like OpenAI and Meta for using their work to train AI systems. Getty Images/Westend61 Every artist I know is furious. The illustrators, the novelists, the poets — all furious. These are people who have painstakingly poured their deepest yearnings onto the page, only to see AI companies pirate their work without consent or compensation. The latest surge of anger is a response to OpenAI integrating new image-generation capabilities into ChatGPT and showing how they can be used to imitate the animation style of Studio Ghibli. That triggered an online flood of Ghiblified images, with countless users (including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman) getting the AI to remake their selfies in the style of Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro. Couple that with the recent revelation that Meta has been pirating millions of published books to train its AI, and you can see how we got a flashpoint in the culture war between artists and AI companies. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. When artists try to express their outrage at companies, they say things like, 'They should at least ask my permission or offer to pay me!' Sometimes they go a level deeper: 'This is eroding the essence of human creativity!' These are legitimate points, but they're also easy targets for the supporters of omnivorous AI. These defenders typically make two arguments. First, using online copyrighted materials to train AI is fair use — meaning, it's legal to copy them for that purpose without artists' permission. (OpenAI makes this claim about its AI training in general and notes that it allows users to copy a studio's house style — Studio Ghibli being one example — but not an individual living artist. Lawyers say the company is operating in a legal gray area.) Second, defenders argue that even if it's not fair use, intellectual property rights shouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of innovation that will greatly benefit humanity. The strongest argument artists can make, then, is that the unfettered advance of AI technologies that experts can neither understand nor control won't greatly benefit humanity on balance — it'll harm us. And for that reason, forcing artists to be complicit in the creation of those technologies is inflicting something terrible on them: moral injury. Moral injury is what happens when you feel you've been forced to violate your own values. Psychiatrists coined the term in the 1990s after observing Vietnam-era veterans who'd had to carry out orders — like dropping bombs and killing civilians — that completely contradicted the urgings of their conscience. Moral injury can also apply to doctors who have to ration care, teachers who have to implement punitive behavior-management programs, and anyone else who's been forced to act contrary to their principles. In recent years, a swell of research has shown that people who've experienced moral injury often carry a sense of shame that can lead to severe anxiety and depression. Maybe you're thinking that this psychological condition sounds a world away from AI-generated art — that having your images or words turned into fodder for AI couldn't possibly trigger moral injury. I would argue, though, that this is exactly what's happening for many artists who are seeing their work sucked up to enable a project they fundamentally oppose, even if they don't yet know the term to describe it. Framing their objection in terms of moral injury would be more effective. Unlike other arguments, it challenges the AI boosters' core narrative that everyone should support AI innovation because it's essential to progress. Why AI art is more than just fair use or remixing By now, you've probably heard people argue that trying to rein in AI development means you're anti-progress, like the Luddites who fought against power looms at the dawn of the industrial revolution or the people who said photographers should be barred from taking your likeness in public without your consent when the camera was first invented. Some folks point out that as recently as the 1990s, many people saw remixing music or sharing files on Napster as progressive and actually considered it illiberal to insist on intellectual property rights. In their view, music should be a public good — so why not art and books? To unpack this, let's start with the Luddites, so often invoked in discussions about AI these days. Despite the popular narrative we've been fed, the Luddites were not anti-progress or even anti-technology. What they opposed was the way factory owners used the new machines: not as tools that could make it easier for skilled workers to do their jobs but as a means to fire and replace them with low-skilled, low-paid child laborers who'd produce cheap, low-quality cloth. The owners were using the tech to immiserate the working class while growing their own profit margins. That is what the Luddites opposed. And they were right to oppose it because it matters whether tech is used to make all classes of people better off or to empower an already-powerful minority at others' expense. Narrowly tailored AI — tools built for specific purposes, such as enabling scientists to discover new drugs — stands to be a huge net benefit to humanity as a whole, and we should cheer it on. But we have no compelling reason to believe the same is true of the race to build AGI — artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical system that can match or exceed human problem-solving abilities across many domains. In fact, those racing to build it, like Altman, will be the first to tell you that it might break the world's economic system or even lead to human extinction. They cannot argue in good faith, then, that intellectual property should be swept aside because the race to AGI will be a huge net benefit to humanity. They might hope it will benefit us, but they themselves say it could easily doom us instead. But what about the argument that shoveling the whole internet into AI is fair use? That ignores the fact that when you take something from someone else, it really matters exactly what you do with it. Under the fair use principle, the purpose and character of the use is key. Is it for commercial use? Or not-for-profit? Will it harm the original owner? Think about the people who sought to limit photographers' rights in the 1800s, arguing that they can't just take your photo without permission. Now, it's true that the courts ruled that I can take a photo with you in it even if you didn't explicitly consent. But that doesn't mean the courts allowed any and all uses of your likeness. I cannot, for example, legally take that photo of you and non-consensually turn it into pornography. Pornography — not music remixing or file sharing — is the right analogy here. Because AI art isn't just about taking something from artists; it's about transforming it into something many of them detest since they believe it contributes to the 'enshittification' of the world, even if it won't literally end the world. That brings us back to the idea of moral injury.
New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why the White House Started Making Deportation Cartoons
Our story opens on March 25 — mere weeks ago, yet somehow already fading into the fog of our eternal present — with OpenAI releasing a new version of ChatGPT. Compared with previous versions, this one was surprisingly good at generating novel digital images: Users could tell it what they wanted to see, and voilà, an image would appear. And what lots of people wanted to see, it transpired, was real photographs transformed to look like stills from the animated films of the Japanese company Studio Ghibli. These beloved movies — especially those directed by Hayao Miyazaki — evoke the wonder and innocence of childhood but also the forces that erode that innocence: mortality, history, greed, hubris. They are products of a labor-intensive and largely by-hand animation process; nothing else looks quite like them. It's not surprising that people were tickled by the prospect of near-instantly making anything look like a Ghibli movie, complete with that trademark aura of cozy but sophisticated wholesomeness. But ChatGPT's Ghiblification set what was surely a new speed record for the emergence of a meme format: Within 24 hours of the new release, generating Ghibli images had become the way for people to demonstrate their fluency in the internet's shifting codes. On the afternoon of the 25th, an engineer named Grant Slatton racked up tens of thousands of likes on X after posting a Ghiblified photograph of himself, his wife and their corgi on a beach. Soon people were posting not just family photos but images from the news and from history: a Ghiblified Donald Trump; a Ghiblified Jeffrey Epstein; Ghiblified jets smashing into Ghiblified twin towers; a Ghiblified murder of George Floyd. They started Ghiblifying old memes: Ghiblified 'distracted boyfriend,' Ghiblified 'Bernie Sanders at Trump's inauguration,' Ghiblified 'Ben Affleck mournfully smoking a cigarette.' Refreshing social media, you could watch in real time as internet culture rummaged around its cobwebbed pantry, tossing everything into its new game. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, claimed that a million new ChatGPT users signed up in a single hour on March 31 and that the Ghibli-related demands were 'melting' the company's graphic processors. Haters like me felt obligated to point out that this Ghiblification seemed likely to rely on ChatGPT's having been fed Ghibli movies as training, with no permission sought or compensation offered. (All OpenAI has said on the subject is that the new model was trained on 'images reflecting a vast variety of image styles.') These movies are painstakingly constructed stories about the irreducibility of the human spirit and the fragile beauty of nature. The Ghiblified images are something else, something that wouldn't be out of place in a Miyazaki movie: a swarm of cheap knockoffs feeding parasitically off the essence of the originals, cranked out by a technology so plunderously energy-intensive that coal plants slated for closure have been kept open just to keep it running. But pointing this out risked sounding like a killjoy: They were just memes, right? By March 27, the meme had reached the White House, or at least its official X account, where a news release about the planned deportation of a Dominican woman — a convicted fentanyl dealer — was paired with a Ghiblified image of this woman weeping in shackles. Historically, a meme's presence in the feeds of politicians or large companies has been a reliable sign that it's going stale. President Trump, however, has ushered in a new relationship between politics and internet culture. For at least a decade, his feeds, and those of people in his orbit, have often felt like portals connected straight to the online sewers where toxic new memes evolve. (The very sewers where, after March 25, people quickly started sharing Ghiblified Hitlers and Ghiblified antisemitic caricatures.) Trump and his social media people, like any content creators seeking on-ramps to maximum virality, have been willing to post or repost just about anything: anti-Clinton memes from white-nationalist message boards, a reworked wrestling clip of Trump body-slamming 'CNN,' assorted QAnon dog whistles. The subjects are varied, but the memes all share a single message: Look what we're unafraid to do! In recent months, this piece of the Trump presidency — its content strategy, as it were — has taken an especially dark turn. Trump was re-elected thanks in part to his promise to lead a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. But the promised wave of mass deportations hasn't yet materialized; indeed, while arrests and detentions have increased this year over Joe Biden's last year in office, deportations have lagged behind last year's and are far below Barack Obama's numbers. In the absence of an increase in actual deportations, the administration seems to have pursued an increase in deportation spectacles: images celebrating people's expulsion from the country with a visceral glee expressed in the native idioms of internet culture. There was the video, posted to the White House X account, of deportees' being shackled and loaded onto planes — and jokingly labeled deportation 'ASMR.' There was the deportation clip soundtracked by Semisonic's 'Closing Time.' There was the image of Trump waving from a McDonald's takeout window, placed memeishly above a Homeland Security announcement in such a way that the president seemed to be giving a cheery goodbye to the deported Brown University professor Rasha Alawieh. Perhaps most striking, there was the video of Kristie Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, speaking in front of an El Salvadoran prison cell crammed full of shaved inmates, warning immigrants that they, too, could be sent there. In thumbnail form, this video resembled nothing so much as the elaborate viral contests posted by the likes of Mr. Beast (see 'I Survived 50 Hours in a Maximum-Security Prison' or '100 Identical Twins Fight for $250,000'). Not long ago, the United States government would, by default, seek to distance itself from images like this; often, as with images of post-9/11 torture, the government actively suppressed or destroyed them. The Trump administration releases them on purpose, implicitly arguing that their content is a source of pride and amusement. (If the Abu Ghraib photos leaked today, it's possible to imagine that the White House would repost them approvingly.) It drops any sugarcoating or performance of restraint and gives us crass gloating, assigning Trump the role of the merciless, enthusiastic deporter in chief — no matter what the actual numbers look like. On April 6, the White House posted another Ghiblified meme, this one pairing a cartoon JD Vance with a quotation from him about refusing to let the 'far left' influence deportation policy. This administration isn't the only one trying to play the latest meme game. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a leading figure of the global far right (and a big A.I. fan), posted a Ghiblified self-portrait; Sam Altman reposted it. The Israeli Army, which has used A.I. to plan its strikes on Gaza, posted Ghiblified images of its personnel; the Israeli Embassy in India posted Ghiblified images of Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu together. Just as A.I.-powered Ghiblification is an easy way to give any image you want a sought-after vibe, political memes are a way to cultivate a defiantly jubilant online mood with no fixed relationship to reality. Or at least they're a way to try. Would Trump be able to meme his way through tumbling markets, spiking costs or goods shortages? We may find out. As the White House's deputy communications director, Kaelan Dorr, said on X, responding to criticisms of the Ghiblified deportation image: 'The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.'
