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.
Oh there’s definitely no going back. This will continue to erode the art scene and continue to steal artwork from humans that spent hours making it. No government or entity can or should go into homes and take these things away, but it’s not really about that. Companies are vacuuming up artwork, books, etc and paying nobody for them, while telling us some nonsense like it’s a positive for society. No compensation for the thing they are now going to make money off of, but they’d sue you into oblivion in a second if you stole something from them. That simple fact is why this is all shit.
I love the idea of AI and I’ve built things using ChatGPT’s API (miserable), but these capitalists have gone about it all wrong per usual. It could’ve been a public resource that people willingly contribute to, but the capitalists took it upon themselves to break the rules again, while hiding behind a shield of excuses for why they should pay nobody.
Bingo.
You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, but you can bust skulls over the rank hypocracy of the tech CEOs.
Machines in the hands of the working class can thrive in a way that benefits everyone equally, and is available to everyone. But as soon as capitalists get it, the whole idea becomes corrupted because the sole purpose is profit at all costs. AI is not profitable yet, which is why these companies will pull out all the stops (including downloading content from illegal sources that they otherwise scold everyone else for using).
AI companies should be fined percentages of their total worth by the government whose artists they are taking advantage of. For example: Japanese government penalises OpenAI 50% of their net worth for every image which is even marginally similar to any publishing house in Japan. And they should be very lenient about taking on these cases.
I want OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and IBM to get fucked so bad they won’t even dream of coming back and doing this. I don’t know why the EU penalises these companies in monetary amounts. They should be putting rules like a certain percentage of your company for a certain type of wrongdoing.
TBH if Japan or other asian countries bleed these companies dry they will be sitting on an immense sum of money which will propel them to superpowers in their own right. It’s a win-win for everyone