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If you’ve been questioning why your social media feeds have been awash with Studio Ghibli-style photographs this week, OpenAI’s new picture generator is the reply. On Tuesday, the corporate embedded the multimodal instrument into GPT-4o, and customers have been reworking their pictures into vibrant, whimsical scenes harking back to the Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro.”
OpenAI’s new picture generator means that you can add an current picture to ChatGPT and easily ask it to vary the artwork model within the accompanying textual content immediate. Even OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman Ghibli-fied his X profile image and playfully lamented about how his decade of labor in AI has boiled right down to folks modifying their pictures into these photographs.
However, the enjoyable didn’t final lengthy. The system card for GPT-4o’s native picture generator now states that OpenAI “added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist.” OpenAI acknowledged that the very fact its instrument can emulate named artists’ types “has raised important questions and concerns within the creative community.”
The similar was written in DALL-E 3’s system card from 2023, so OpenAI just isn’t making a wild U-turn on its place in relation to AI artwork possession and copyright. Nevertheless, there may be an ongoing debate about whether or not AI firms violate copyright legislation by coaching their fashions on publicly out there content material.
Ironically, Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki is vocally anti-AI. While not particularly addressing the copyright debate, he referred to AI-generated art work as “creepy stuff” and that he “would never wish to incorporate this technology into (his) work at all” in 2016, as proven in NHK’s “Never-Ending Man” documentary.
The launch of GPT-4o’s native picture generator got here simply over per week after Google’s 2.0 Gemini Flash was given an identical characteristic. This additionally shortly bumped into copyright-related hassle when customers found it might take away watermarks from copyrighted photographs.
The ongoing AI artwork copyright debate
Tech firms are capitalising on the authorized gray space surrounding the usage of people’ work — whether or not written, illustrative, or audio — to coach giant language fashions. Examples like this, the place GPT-4o clearly is aware of the Ghibli aesthetic, show that firms are doing this with out copyright permission, however change into evasive when requested about it particularly. For instance, when accused of copyright infringement by Getty Images in 2023, Stability AI didn’t deal with the allegations in its response, as a substitute suggesting that the case needs to be taken up in a distinct jurisdiction.
Naturally, artists are advocating for stronger laws to forestall this, demanding that any copyright holder who consents to such use be pretty compensated. The New York Times has been embroiled in a authorized battle with OpenAI and Microsoft since 2023 over the usage of its content material for AI coaching, and Conde Nast and various different main publishers initiated comparable proceedings towards AI startup Cohere in February. OpenAI can even face a lawsuit from information publication The Intercept, alleging the tech large eliminated copyright administration info from articles to coach its AI fashions.
In March 2025, greater than 400 artists, together with Paul McCartney, Ben Stiller, and Cate Blanchett, despatched a letter urging motion in opposition to AI firms exploiting copyrighted works with out permission. This got here shortly after the discharge of The Silent Album, a…
