Pay thy muse: Yes, AI does owe royalties for stolen inspiration
Summary
- In cases of alleged intellectual property theft, such as OpenAI’s Ghibli-style output, artists should have recourse to the law. The rationale of outlawing attempts to deceive consumers, as applied in crackdowns on counterfeits, must apply to AI too.
Cities don’t get any cooler than Manhattan, New York City. My favourite is the midtown area, purely for the spectrum of human life it displays. Within just a couple of miles, you will find both Billionaire’s Row and homeless people, Morton’s Steakhouse and street-side food carts, Radio City Music Hall and buskers making music off buckets. But the sharpest contrast is seen between shoppers exiting Bergdorf Goodman with shopping bags slung on shoulders while nearby, cops chase away peddlers of counterfeit designer-label bags.
Recently, when Sam Altman of OpenAI changed his profile picture to an AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style rendering of himself, millions of similar images mushroomed all over social media. The latest update to OpenAI’s GPT-4o model had turned the Japanese studio’s artistic genius and incredible skill into a cheap digital toy. Since then, Ghibli-style imagery has gone viral. Proponents of AI imitation art have argued that Ghibli’s creativity is being democratized and fans can thus engage with it in novel ways.
Also Read: ChatGPT plays Ghibli well: Will genuine originality suffer?
Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli’s 84-year-old co-founder, is widely recognized for his role in greatly elevating the art of animation. His signature style—marked by lush, hand-drawn landscapes, vibrant colours and expressive characters—turns animation into a medium of unparalleled beauty and aesthetic brilliance. His films have won every major award, including another Oscar last year. In a 2016 interview, Miyazaki had famously reacted to an AI animation demo with visceral disgust, emphasizing why art had to have soul and labour.
Back then, AI generated animation looked horribly unnatural. Current AI technology is different. With good prompting, it is indistinguishable from original artworks. In other words, it deserves more than cursory attention.
The police action in New York against forged luxury goods is directed at what is clearly an illegal trade. The logos and names on those counterfeit bags are trademarked brand identifiers. When someone sells a fake bag with such a label, it’s not just copying a style, it’s passing off a product as originating from the brand, diluting its value—an action that is explicitly illegal under the US Lanham Act.
In this context, some have argued that an AI Ghibli art generator causes neither a trademark nor copyright violation. The latter protects specific works of art, such as individual films or clips, but not broad styles. Landmark cases like Feist Publications vs Rural Telephone Service (1991) were settled on the premise that abstract ideas or styles (such as impressionism or anime) cannot be copyrighted, only their concrete expressions can.
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On close scrutiny, you will notice that many counterfeit goods do not actually say ‘Louis Vuitton’ or sport this luxury brand’s iconic ‘LV’ logo. They just look similar. An ‘LM,’ for example, can look the same without technically infringing LVMH’s trademark. It turns out that is illegal too. Under US and EU laws, infringement stems from any likelihood of a reasonable consumer mistaking a fake for the real deal. The police crackdown on peddlers therefore is justified by their intent to deceive.
Just like those LM bags, an AI-generated Miyazaki-style image too could deceive an unfamiliar consumer. Online counter-arguments cite differences between physical goods and expressions of art, apart from a lack of legal precedence. Both of these arguments are weak. The frank truth is that respect for foreign intellectual property rights in the US is spotty at best.
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The goods-versus-expressions argument gets shattered at any dinner in America where Wagyu steak from Kansas is served along with Korbel California champagne. That the originals are meant to come from Japan and France doesn’t seem to strike anyone.
In the 2023 Hollywood strike, AI was a central point of contention. The Writer’s Guild of America demanded that writers’ works shouldn’t be used as source material to train AI models. The screen actors’ guild took issue over the digital likenesses of performers being created from their past screen appearances.
While the final settlement left many issues for future legal battles, Hollywood studios did agree to demote AI to a worker-controlled tool. This outcome sets a precedent for recognizing the threat that technology poses with algorithms impersonating artists.
Also Read: AI belongs to everybody, says Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI
Evolution put humans on top of the biological order because of our cognition and ability to create rules-based societies. With AI here for good, we must also create guidelines that will keep us on top. A future 3D printer that could recreate lookalikes of designer goods at will, in a manner that doesn’t openly break laws, would surely face a storm of litigation, lobbying pressure and law-enforcement crackdowns. That’s only fair to those who design and create these products. In the same vein, it is now time for us to protect the legacy of creators who toil to create works that are worth re-creating.
I should confess that I’m personally a big fan of AI. My company is evaluating many interesting AI initiatives we hope to work with. But if AI does not set off in its early days with fair trade as a guiding principle, it will soon find itself at odds with society at large. We’ve never had trouble working out royalty regimes. To start with, we should at least figure out what licence fees OpenAI should pay Studio Ghibli for using its artworks to train its AI models. We can talk about royalties for generated images later.
The author is founder and CEO, August Media Group.
