Everything is Ghibli

https://carly.substack.com/p/everything-is-ghibli

by ghuntley • 1 year ago

213 338 1 year ago

carly.substack.com

Massive, industrial scale copyright infringement

anigbrowl3• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Apparently current Japanese law allows models to be trained on copyrighted content.

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/japan-ai-data-laws-exp...

hiccuphippo• 1 year 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.

falcor842• 1 year 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.

iszomer2• 1 year ago

Yeah but humans aren't exactly fast at replicating any particular art style.

conartist64• 1 year 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.

user432678• 1 year ago

A friend of mine tried to create stock illustrations in Disney style on Etsy, got banned almost immediately for copyright infringement. I guess it depends.

jmount• 1 year ago

It is complicated. Tom Waits won a case where a commercial imitated his style.

pera• 1 year ago

It's not about the style and it's a mistake to perceive generative AI models as analogues of human artists:

- When does generative AI qualify for fair use?:

https://suchir.net/fair_use.html

- AI is currently just glorified compression:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399753

trealira• 1 year ago

Not a lawyer, but I don't think art styles are copyrightable, though maybe they could be in Japan.

epolanski2• 1 year ago

Unlikely since there's a studio led by a former ghibli lead that does visuals in the very same style.

conartist64• 1 year 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.

doright3• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

IMO, massive industrial scale indignation of humanity.

jMyles2• 1 year 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.

krapp7• 1 year 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.

aredox11• 1 year 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.

karel-3d2• 1 year 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.

tgv6• 1 year 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_7• 1 year 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-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• 1 year 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.

BeFlatXIII5• 1 year ago

Good. Down with intellectual "property." Ideas are gifts from the divine, meant for self-propagation.

shmerl2• 1 year ago

Hayao Miyazaki is frying this kind of idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc

I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself

facile3232• 1 year 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.

falcor842• 1 year 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.

pixelpoet2• 1 year 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.

bl4ckneon• 1 year ago

I thought the same thing, it wasn't a quote about all AI, it was in direct response to what he saw which was a "person" like limbing on the floor in a creepy way.

gilbetron2• 1 year ago

"I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."

The "insult to life" is specifically about the tech, from my reading. Granted, if he had been shown something less grotesque, maybe he would've responded differently? I doubt it, the guy doesn't like CGI either.

sva_• 1 year ago

Crucially, this was before the transformer paper, "Attention is all you need", or any of the diffusion models had been released.

This just looks like some painful RL or evolutionary algorithms, at best.

GuB-422• 1 year ago

In all fairness, Hayao Miyazaki is famously grumpy about everything, especially when related to modern society. I wouldn't have expected anything less.

A common meme is to put him side to side with Junji Ito. Hayao Miyazaki as the grumpy old man whose work is cute and happy, and Junji Ito as the nice and cheerful guy whose work is the thing of nightmares.

Junji Ito's take on AI, is that he worries for his profession, but he thinks he still has something AIs can't replicate, at least for now. As expected, while both of them oppose AI, they do it in a way that couldn't be more different.

zombiwoof2• 1 year ago

Someone’s attitude shouldn’t prejudice you against their opinion

paxys2• 1 year ago

This video is shared a lot to represent Miyazaki's feelings on AI, but all I see is him reacting to one specific video on the screen - grotesque/bloody figures crawling on the floor in totally unnatural motions. He specifically says he doesn't like it because it seems to make light of the suffering of disabled people. There zero feedback on the AI whatsoever. Who knows what he would have said if the engineers had built something closer to the company's artistic vision.

Ekaros• 1 year ago

What he is criticising here is not AI or AI art. But instead of rather old machine learning trying to achieve some type of ambulation or human like gait. Which I think is some level cool. But also artistically is clearly grotesque and not something that should be widely presented.

Just think of using this type of movement or actions in media specially a film. That would be entirely unworkable and doomed idea. Disgust from most viewers would be similar.

Havoc• 1 year 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

ketzo3• 1 year ago

Right — which is to say, the vast, vast majority of people heard about Ghibli and not Gemini.

paxys2• 1 year 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.

bla3• 1 year ago

Exactly. New image models are always exciting for two weeks or so. New LLM models are useful until the next,. better model comes out.

Which probably is just a small integer multiple of two weeks, but hey!

zombiwoof2• 1 year ago

Silicon Valley doesn’t care

They are like the Mafia.

“I don’t care, pay me”

tehjoker5• 1 year 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."

krapp7• 1 year 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.

tehjoker5• 1 year 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.

SamPatt2• 1 year 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?

owebmaster2• 1 year ago

people are telling a machine to make an inferior copy of something resembling art

So art ended when someone created a photo camera?

BeFlatXIII5• 1 year ago

Why do variations of this rant get spammed every time AI art is discussed? No one cares for an argument that boils down to "git gud"

zen928• 1 year ago

When you realize that your imagined disappointment is a proxy for jealousy, some of the subtle seething whimpers delicately packed into your every reply on the topic might start to subside. You're upset that people wasted their time developing a specific skillset that is a useless unfruitful timesink for the vast majority was ultimately replaced by a simple to use tool at an extraordinarily faster rate. We never needed the 'ghibli artstyle' to tell ghibli stories, we needed the direction and tone and messaging his works created to be in a consumable format that captures people. Languishing on the experience being cheapened because the landscape of art presentation has changed is a regressive stance that has no basis in reality and many counterpoints.

Here's the oft repeated analogies that never have a proper response to hopefully help guide you out of your self created mental labyrinth, but trigger warning! (for people like you): photographers, printing press, classical music.

luqtas• 1 year ago

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.

i think they shouldn't be able to sell anything at all. violation of copyright isn't a excuse to sell stuff at-cost, let alone feed Nvidia with trillions of USD by releasing open-source (if they ever release) technology

tehjoker5• 1 year ago

tbh i not a huge fan of copyright, but it is crazy that OpenAI is allowed to privatize the results of training on a significant fraction of media produced by humans let alone a technology that was produced over a long duration in great part through public funding

tgv6• 1 year ago

when people can make art in a style they love

It's not making, creating. It's consuming.

Wrt. the Communist Manifesto: it's precisely the bourgeoisie and the church who are responsible for the greatest art, and its development. As you say, the workers love kitsch.

tehjoker5• 1 year ago

Lol, the bourgeoisie and the church pay for art because they have surplus cash and it is almost always workers that produce it.

keyle• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Selling on benchmarks is like selling users a blender by telling them the efficiency % of the motor. No regular person cares.

epolanski2• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Not long ago cheap chinese phone included their benchmark score in advertisement

Miraltar• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Here is a montage of many of the recent ghibli creations: https://0x0.st/82oM.webm

It's chocked full of memes, historical and political photos, and general pop culture.

gradientsrneat• 1 year ago

The real movie was humanity all along.

knowknow2• 1 year 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.

lowq4• 1 year ago

"An insult to life itself" [1]

[1] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/hayao-miyazaki-ar...

wlesieutre• 1 year 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

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

ThrowawayR2• 1 year ago

The article you link to directly quotes him:

"After seeing a brief demo of a grotesque zombie-esque creature, Miyazaki pauses and says that it reminds him of a friend of his with a disability so severe he can’t even high five. “Thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

He's disgusted by the creature, not the computer based technique. While he's on record as disapproving of CGI, Earwig and the Witch, directed by his son, used CGI so his disapproval isn't absolute.

michaelt2• 1 year ago

Let's look at the context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc

Presenters: "This is a presentation of an artificial intelligence model which learned certain movements [...] It's moving by using its head. It doesn't feel any pain, and has no concept of protecting its head. It uses its head like a leg. This movement is so creepy, and could be applied to zombie video games. An artificial intelligence could present us grotesque movements which we humans can't imagine."

The screen shows some Silent Hill looking vaguely humanoid, crawling blob. As the presenters say, it's pretty creepy looking.

Miyazaki: "I am utterly disgusted [...] I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all"

IMHO saying Miyazaki outright hates AI is putting words into his mouth. All the clip shows is that a dude that doesn't make zombie horror films doesn't need a zombie horror generator thank you very much.

So yeah, he clearly rejects the product pitch. But judging from Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro I don't see why you'd pitch him that product.

ted_bunny• 1 year ago

What's with the narrator's voice in that clip? Unwatchable

footlose_3815• 1 year ago

I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this

It's in the article

knowknow2• 1 year ago

It’s not, the quote in question was from a completely different AI demo which the author mischaracterizes.

the quote in context - https://youtu.be/ngZ0K3lWKRc?si=gw-_z17n_XWfqzcQ

seizethecheese• 1 year 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.)

baggy_trough3• 1 year ago

Hopefully he's wise enough to realize that it's the ultimate compliment.

michaelt2• 1 year ago

Truly, every artist hopes their distinctive style will be taken by a multi-billion-dollar corporation and used by the White House to make a jeering depiction of crying deportees. It's the ultimate compliment.

jaredklewis• 1 year ago

Hideo? You mean Hayao right?

JohnBooty3• 1 year ago

    and that the model surely used his films as data.

While I don't doubt it's true, this could be challenging to prove, because Studio Ponoc (ex-Ghibli) has produced work that uh, hews rather closely to Miyazaki's style. Were the models trained on Ghibli, Ponoc, both, something else, etc?

I mean, I have no doubts. But proving it seems tough!

leoh• 1 year ago

Well they then stole from Ponoc, too, right?

aredox11• 1 year ago

Ponoc is made of former Ghibli employees who founded a new home when Ghibli's future was uncertain. I am sure they are on friendly terms, if not family, with Ghibli: they worked together for years. People like them can have a gentleman's agreement.

What is OpenAI in all this, if not a greedy, sloppy, soulless outsider stealing their Art and effort for financial gain without ever asking for permission?

Cthulhu_7• 1 year ago

I gathered the Japanese government legalized using copyrighted works to train AI last year: https://www.privacyworld.blog/2024/03/japans-new-draft-guide...

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

Also hope he goes against all the artists who demanded payment for copying his style before

ogurechny2• 1 year ago

Supposedly, you have a working internet connection. In no time, you can check the name of Hayao Miyazaki. You can see how he draws his manga, in a style which would be really hard to animate. You can see how he designs his characters. Well, maybe the colour palette can be attributed to “his style” in some works. Still, you can learn that Ghibli had famous background artists and art directors like Nizo Yamamoto and Kazuo Oga. You can compare characters drawn by Yoshifumi Kondou and Katsuya Kondou with Miyazaki's, and guess who was responsible for what in different works. You can learn how in the era when everyone waited for computers to make economical marvel of “three dee” real, Isao Takahata used computers to transfer pen and brush strokes to animation in “The Yamadas” and “Princess Mononoke”.

But you don't want any of that. You want to have a familiar pop cultural label (“Miyazaki”) that produces a familiar reaction (“Oooh!”). Purely decorative, symbolic objects. Stories, ideas, hard work? Eh, don't bother me with that nonsense.

There is nothing new or “cutting edge” in ignorance. And AI companies know perfectly well that they work for exactly that audience. Despite all the talk, they don't create the next genius artist, they want to be a next “enhancement filter” in TVs, something that no one uses, but everyone has to add to impress the public. That's just parasitism on lack of ability to discern.

alickz6• 1 year 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.

How much of it is _his_ style and _his_ art?

How many people work on the frames and animation?

m3kw9• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

That's why it's called AI slop.

PostOnce• 1 year 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 in fact they have a whole studio dedicated to copying ghibli: 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.)

rchaud2• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

I doubt anyone is enriching themselves with AI memes, at best it slightly devalues their brand by reducing scarcity.

TimPC4• 1 year ago

I personally think the line should be mostly output based. You should be able to train on any copyrighted work by having a single reader license (e.x. purchasing a book or e-book) for that work and no other special licenses. You shouldn't be able to download pirated works for training but you shouldn't need special licenses to train instead of read.

But if your model produces outputs that too closely match their inputs and a company can show it that is a copyright violation and you can be sued for it.

ljlolel• 1 year ago

I’ve never seen these ghibli movies and I think they’re beautiful.

aredox11• 1 year ago

This, however, is not the first time ghibli has had competition 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

It is not "competition" and "copying", it is the fact that Ghibli almost closed for good several times, so some employees created their own studio.

On August 3, 2014, Toshio Suzuki announced that Studio Ghibli would take a "brief pause" to re-evaluate and restructure in the wake of Miyazaki's retirement. He stated some concerns about where the company would go in the future. This led to speculation that Studio Ghibli will never produce another feature film again. On November 7, 2014, Miyazaki stated, "That was not my intention, though. All I did was announce that I would be retiring and not making any more features."[40] Lead producer Yoshiaki Nishimura among several other staffers from Ghibli, such as director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, left to found Studio Ponoc in April 2015, working on the film Mary and the Witch's Flower.

FinnLobsien2• 1 year ago

There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom. The same will be true of AI art copycats.

True, but this was also during a time when it was incredibly hard to make a video game. It wasn't like anyone could spin up a Doom clone in 2 minutes. Competition vs. commoditization at massive scale are different things.

Cthulhu_7• 1 year ago

Yeah, the concept of a commercial / off the shelf game engine wasn't that much of a thing until Doom, but with Doom and especially its successors Quake and Unreal from Epic it did. Quake's engine spawned Half-Life's, Unreal became one of the biggest game engines anywhere.

TimPC4• 1 year ago

I'd argue many of the clones were better but not enough better. Doom was the first to do X and once you already played a game that did X the next game needed to do 2X not 1.2X.

t0bia_s• 1 year ago

Imagine what classical realists artist though about early photography and how it shaped in history. Painters abandon achievement for replicate reality (all kind of *ism come later) or use new technology (photography) to improve creative process (Mucha).

AI is just another tool for artist. AI by itself never generate "art". It cannot by definition.

Adverblessly2• 1 year ago

There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom.

Sorry to take this on a tangent, but the problem with Doom clones isn't that they aren't as good as Doom, it is that Doom already exists and is known to the audience. If you've had your mind blown by Doom, playing a 10% better version of Doom isn't going to blow your mind again, it is going to merely be a fun experience. Many people won't even bother to try that 10% better Doom clone, since all they'll see is a clone of something they already tried.

Cthulhu_7• 1 year ago

To add, cloning is one thing, but a lot of games - including id's own games - iterated on the formula, leading to the genre of first-person shooters like Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Halo, Bioshock, etc.

That is, clones rarely work, but evolutions do. Stardew Valley on the surface can be considered a Harvest Moon clone, but it iterated on the formula, leading to a lot of attempts at casual farm games from many different competitors. Minecraft was an Infiniminer clone (or inspired by?) and iterated on the idea. Fortnite was a PUBG clone which was a DayZ clone.

Kye2• 1 year ago

Minecraft is the most successful Doom clone because you don't even realize it's a Doom clone.

crabbone2• 1 year ago

This is looking for silver lining: so, someone copied Ghibli style, which is plagiarism, which is bad, but it turns out that by plagiarizing the offender also made the original work more famous and more valuable in some ways... OK. But plagiarizing is still bad. Even if it had some positive effects.

blargey2• 1 year ago

Gee, whatever would Ghibli have done without this publicity boost.

It’s always the already-popular artist’s identity giving clout to the model, not the other way around.

And if the artist’s style is not well known, their identity is obfuscated because the model/LORA/“finetune”-peddler can get away with it. And they’re all peddlers, if it’s not OpenAI it’s grifters with Patreons to fund their “hard work” of tagging people’s work and throwing it at rental GPU compute.

z3phyr2• 1 year ago

There were a million Doom clones, none of which were as good as Doom

Sure, but there were some "Doomlikes" I would still rate as better than doom; like Build Engine games Duke Nukem and Blood/Blood 2 and other IdTech based games like Hexen.

Tycho• 1 year ago

Also Marathon and its sequels by Bungie.

jasonjayr• 1 year ago

Don Bluth worked at Disney, and poached some of the animators to make his own independent studio, and produced quite a few Disney-like feature films that stood pretty well on their own.

Yizahi3• 1 year ago

Your argument is an example of survivor bias. Just because one very wealthy corporation wasn't affected (too much) when their intellectual property was stolen, doesn't mean that smaller and less wealthy or less important companies/people aren't affected by IP theft by LLM porch pirates.

And even in Ghibly studio case it's not quite clear, if they won't be affected long term.

blueflow• 1 year ago

... that most people have no taste or sense or introspection, they don't know why good things are good

Is this an exaggeration? Or do some people literally have no introspection?

Gothmog692• 1 year ago

Like when Don Bluth left disney. He did have a good run though.

abhgh• 1 year ago

The people who founded Ponoc seemed to have creative differences with Miyazaki. They wanted to make a movie [1] that they felt Ghibli won't greenlight [2] - but there seems to have been no deep seated animosity or desire to rip-off. Incidentally I just borrowed this movie from the local library a few hour ago because the cover art reminded me of Ghibli but I noticed it wasn't a Ghibli production. Some searching online led me to the cited article.

[1] Mary and the Witch’s Flower https://imdb.com/title/tt6336356/

[2] https://otakuusamagazine.com/hayao-miyazaki-says-he-wont-see...

margorczynski• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

thefz6• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

I'm afraid that in time people will forget that it's all about learning to climb.

bspammer• 1 year ago

The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though. People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.

It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.

aredox11• 1 year ago

People want to take a selfie at the top. No one is "enjoying the view" anymore - certainly not the shallow masses.

It is enshittification.

creata4• 1 year ago

It cheapens the experience a lot, but oh well, at least the experience is still there for the people who want it.

overfeed3• 1 year ago

What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose prestige was forged by countless professionals working very hard.

j-bos2• 1 year ago

Hasn't that been true since the dawn of mass media? A book does not demand you share your own stories, the radio does not require you carry a tune

aredox11• 1 year ago

Didn't know that before books and radios you had to share your own stories and carry your own tunes

numpad05• 1 year ago

I've been suspecting the subtext of that was "take back anime from Japanese", except what they made was a death trap welded stuck in reverse. Now they must climb with what they have, for that they are closer to the top from there than to where they came from.

Adverblessly2• 1 year ago

I can't really speak for other people, but I think the "democratizing creativity" part comes in in places where the specific creative part that the AI replaces is not a core part of the creative experience.

Take a look at Super Auto Pets, a pretty successful and fun auto-battler game. It literally uses a free emoji pack for its core art. It doesn't really matter that they didn't hire an artist for those (though I think they did hire an artist after finding success) since a free emoji pack was enough for the creative product they wanted to create. If they had AI generated emoji instead, it wouldn't have really mattered much for the final result (creatively at least, I assume audiences would respond poorly due to GenAI's reputation). At the same time, the ability to create their product without paying a lot of money for artists was critical to make it in the first place.

This is what it means to me to "democratize creativity", to allow creatives to realize their creative ambitions in an area they are proficient at (e.g. video games) without requiring a lot of creative skill in adjacent areas that aren't critical to the experience they are trying to make.

creata4• 1 year ago

I think there's a reason people would respond more poorly to generated art than to emojis: the contentlessness of emojis is broadly understood. We look at an emoji and we know what it is intended to signify. With "AI" art, there is an ambiguity: which aspects of the artwork are intentional, and which aspects are the creator accepting whatever the "AI" churned out?

If the art isn't critical to the game, then use simple art. It doesn't matter if the simple art is or isn't AI generated, what matters (in my opinion) is that it doesn't lead us into looking for meaning that isn't there.

baq2• 1 year ago

People want to be dropped on the top of the mountain and be called an alpinist.

No, people want to see their ideas come to life, previously this required effort in mastering a skill, now... it takes less and/or different amount of work.

thefz6• 1 year ago

So everything is cheap, nothing has value.

numpad05• 1 year ago

We all say "they have no _idea_ what they're doing" in English. Creativity basically equals skill. Those with less skills has less to express.

I mean, everyone knows it takes a programmer to spec an app. The "different" skill needed for vibe coding is regular old coding skillset. Only difference with image AI is that it doesn't do "vibe drawing" well.

AI art experiment is over. It's been long over, like camera based self driving was by the time some large orgs started embracing the technology. And it's taking longer for some to understand that it's over, just like that time.

crabbone2• 1 year ago

There was a very similar discussion when photography was made easily accessible. Baudelaire thought that photography was the killer of art by allowing non-artists to crate something that was very much like art, mechanistically, without having a good insight into what they were doing.

And, in some ways he was right... but also not. What eventually happened is that art education that would be required for any aristocrat or an aspiring aristocrat became optional. Most intellectual elite today would be unable to draw much beyond a stick figure diagram. Art, at least where it concerns drawing or painting became a narrowly specialized field. And so, most people today don't understand and don't appreciate art.

But, art didn't die. Instead, artists started asking themselves more questions about the nature and philosophy of art, figuring out which aspects are essential, experimenting more. In retrospect, it's sad that fewer people today have decent access or understanding of art, but while more common before, the understanding was often very superficial anyways.

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

Or get a book without having to wait for a Monk to copy one

glimshe2• 1 year ago

I don't know where you hang out on Reddit but on my subs people are almost invariably hostile to AI. AI art, even stuff that looks great, gets down voted to oblivion.

thefz6• 1 year ago

The comment was in /r/chatgpt.

leokennis• 1 year ago

People want to write Java code and have a compiler translate it into machine code and be called a programmer.

People want to run marathons on shoes with padded soles and be called an athlete.

z3phyr2• 1 year ago

A slope has two ends, even when it's slippery. People want to claim submarines swim, but they do not.

thefz6• 1 year ago

This equates more to being carried to the finish line by car, doing the last three steps and call it a marathon.

Anyway plenty of people can't even finish 1K, so 42.2K in padded shoes is still impressive.

chthonicdaemon2• 1 year ago

Do you also object to people paying money to have other people's art in their homes? Is the moral damage from getting an artwork in your home that you didn't create inversely proportional to your monetary investment?

thefz6• 1 year ago

If something else created it for you, is that your art?

vhantz• 1 year ago

What exactly is creative about buying art? Nonsensical comparison, unsurprising for HN though.

Cthulhu_7• 1 year ago

I heard a good one. AI isn't art, AI is content. People don't want to create art per se, they want to generate images for e.g. memes or filler / illustrative images on their blog, replacing or being an addition to stock images.

No shade on stock photographers / illustrators, but that's where I see image generation end up at. And you could already get custom illustrations made for cheap on sites like fiverr. The real long term question will be whether an AI generated image can compete with services like that. (my guess: probably, AI images are higher resolution/quality and generated faster, but I don't know the real total cost of them nor that of cheap illustrators or stock images)

jcalx• 1 year ago

we’re exiting the scarcity economy of visuals & entering something weirder—where aesthetics become ambient infrastructure, like wifi.

AI is democratizing _execution_, not creativity. The advent of the smartphone camera era allowed for the average person to take vastly more photos than ever before, and yet the photos I personally find noteworthy are either remarkable in their context or aesthetic quality (e.g. [0]) or personally meaningful.

Alternatively put, "culture" values a proof-of-work that is creativity + execution. Taking a photo of a lunar eclipse setting over a crater has global value, because of the effort in planning and taking the shot (read [0], it's great). Me shitposting a meme for my game night groupchat neatly summarizing what happened in our last session of Pandemic: Legacy has local value, because of the creativity in adapting a meme format to our particular context and the execution of the edit, but nobody besides us would find it as funny.

(Interesting aside — I personally think that the photo in [0] is more impressive than someone going all that way to _paint_ the same scene en plein air, because of the split-second precision of the execution. Even though photography may have devalued a lot of the technical execution of capturing a scene, it has opened up new ways in which said execution can be valuable.)

So AI decouples creativity and execution in a way that is, like every innovation before, unlike every innovation before. The Ghibli aesthetic is the soft pastels of the color palette [1] and the comfortable, nostalgic character design [2] but also the restful rhythm of "ma" [3] and the detail lovingly lavished to background characters [4]. GPT-4o devalues some of those things, but it another sense it just re-weights our cultural proof-of-work valuations back towards human effort.

[0] https://lrtimelapse.com/news/total-lunar-eclipse-over-teide-...

[1] https://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/graphic-design/the-ri...

[2] https://stylecircle.org/2020/09/the-studio-ghibli-closet/

[3] https://screencraft.org/blog/hayao-miyazaki-says-ma-is-an-es...

[4] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-spirited-away...

salomonk_mur• 1 year ago

I wonder if when commercial airplanes were invented, someone like you thought that the magic of traveling had been lost to technology.

TimPC4• 1 year ago

I think it's less about wanting to be called an artist and more about wanting to be able to get the results of making things more easily. And there is a good case that we can have a successful boom from this sort of thing.

eric_cc8• 1 year ago

People want to express their creativity stuck in their head without having the skill or training (privilege of the training) to be a legit artist. I think it’s awesome that this removes the barrier and empowers people to be creative in ways that they previously could not.

mostlysimilar2• 1 year ago

Your definition of creativity is flawed. Imagining something is a small part of the process. Developing the skill and technique to express that imagination is the most important part.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

There are elevators up mountains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailong_Elevator

blargey2• 1 year ago

The real problem is not the effort (or lack thereof), it’s the perception that modern AI is dropping them off at the peak of Everest, when in reality they’re being stood on a plastic-molded crag at a sea-level tourist trap.

Creative vision is not being realized, it’s being stunted.

joegibbs• 1 year ago

Artists' main objection to AI seems to be that they think that people who use it are posers who are trying to claim that they're just as good as Rembrandt because they can type "beautiful painting, style of Rembrandt" into Midjourney.

I don't think this is very true, I don't often see anyone bragging about their skills and demanding their outputs get put in a gallery and judged on equal merits as the old masters.

I'm not much of an artist and whenever I use an image generator to generate something, I don't do it to show off my artistic talent or whatever - if I was to do it before AI I would've commissioned an artist for it (which I probably wouldn't have done because it was too expensive, so I would forgo it) - the work the artist does would actually have even less of my own input than the AI's, since I'm giving them less description to go off - it's all the artist's, based on their own experiences.

scotty792• 1 year ago

People don't click buttons on Guitar Hero controller to be called musicians. They do it to briefly feel how they imagine a musician might feel sometimes.

There's nothing wrong with that.

hbarka• 1 year ago

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

orthoxerox• 1 year ago

/ɡɪblai/

svara• 1 year ago

It's spelled ジブリ - "Djiburi" roughly - making this one pretty easy to settle.

layer8• 1 year 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.

internet_points• 1 year ago

It's pronounced /fish/

GaggiX• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Oh, well, here even the state communication director posted a ghibli-selfie...

Cthulhu_7• 1 year ago

Where's this Ghiblification?

The White House twitter account: https://x.com/whitehouse/status/1905332049021415862

icu• 1 year 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-3d2• 1 year ago

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

bfrog• 1 year ago

AI stealing yet again.

keepamovin• 1 year 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

greenhearth• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

osti• 1 year ago

Pretentious.

ambarp2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the work that Corridor Digital has done with similar tech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y

Everything is Ghibli

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