It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.”
In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing Studio Ghibli versions of Elon Musk, “The Lord of the Rings“, and President Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even seems to have made his new profile picture a Studio Ghibli-style image, presumably made with GPT-4o’s native image generator. Users seem to be uploading existing images and pictures into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot to re-create it in new styles.
Ok, now I’ve finally come to a conclusion about this debate. When a human learns to draw or write in a particular style, there are no copyright issues. However, when a machine does the same, you need to compensate the people who made the training data. Here’s why.
The training data is an essential component of of the model. It’s like building a house with bricks you didn’t pay for. If you’re building something like a house, ship, software or a machine learning model, you need to pay for the materials that are required to build it.