It is accepted, within limits, for humans do transformative work, but it's not been yet established which the limits for AIs are, primarily (IMO): 1. whether the work is transformative or not 2. whether the scale of transformation/distribution changes the nature of the work.

Also counts as "downloading someone's content" - at least partially

We will eventually need that policeman's helmet as a retaliation means /s

We've have always known we should harvest the internet for absolutely everything. If we don't, it's fine, we can squabble about our IP and China will just ingest the entire Internet, make a model out of it, then release the Ghiblifier and we'll all download it or run it on Openrouter. You can already download Hunyuan Image 3.0 and it's just as good as OpenAI's image create, if not better. What's Japan going to do about that?

Also, for the record, I would absolutely download a handbag, or a television, or a DVD, or a car, if I could. I'd be pumping out Louis Vuittons and iPhones for my kids all day long, and driving a Lambo because why not?

  You wouldn't download a car.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/you-wouldnt-steal-a-...

The difference is: You're making copies of something:

  Scenario 1: I take your baguette. Your hand is empty. You starve.
  Scenario 2: I take your baguette recipe. You still have a baguette recipe. You continue to live.
  Scenario 3: I take your baguette recipe and publish it. Your customers leave you. You starve.

Should we enforce the protection of people's right to have monopoly of distribution of intellectual property?

Or should we accept that in reality, copies are free and distribution monopolies only exist in inefficient markets?

It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property.

But information wants to be free.

It's a dilemma. Do we side what feels right, or what's real?

None of the training data was originally drawn by OpenAI. OpenAI also actively monetizes that work.

Fair use is a defense to infringement, like self defense is a defense to homicide. If you infringe but are noncommercial, it is more likely to be ruled fair use. If Disney did a Ghibli style ripoff for their next movie, that is clearly not fair use.

OpenAI is clearly gaining significant material benefits from their models being able to infringe Ghibli style.

If I was the first person to invent a car, for example, and I named its method of locomotion "walking", would you treat it the same as a human and let it "walk" in all the same places humans walk? After all, it's simply using kinetic energy and friction to propel itself along the ground, as we do.

Because a car is so obviously different to a human, we intuitively understand it requires an alteration to our rules in order for us to coexist peacefully. Since LLMs are so abstract, we don't intuitively understand this distinction, and so continue to treat them as if they should be bound by the same rules and laws as us.

that's why piracy Robin Hood Style is fine, but corporate piracy is not. I downloaded a Ghibli movie because I could't afford the DVD. I didn't copy it on VHS then to sell it via e-commerce to 1000 people.

AI companies grabbed IP and pull hundreds of thousands of customers with it, then collect their interactions either way and profit exponentially while Ghibli, Square Enix et al. don't profit from users using more and more AI ...

and most people are not "training" ML models ... people are using copy machines that already learned to compensate for their lack of will to put effort into stuff.

a lot of us been there and enough decided to move beyond and get/become better at being human aka evolve vs get cozy in some sub-singularity. some didn't and won't, and they are easiest to profit from.

That's the problem here, there's no creative input apart from the prompt, so obviously the source is blatant (and often in the prompt).

1. Ask ChatGPT to generate some Ghibli-likes for you.

2. Find a local photo printing store prepared to print and blockmount them for you (this is actually the hardest part - most will politely tell you to piss off).

3. List them on Mercari or Rakuma.

4. Regularly relist them as they're periodically removed for violating local counterfeiting laws.

5. Eventually explain yourself to a judge and maybe go to prison for a year.

Technically you only need to do 1 and some of 2 to be committing a crime in Japan.

1) Download Ghibli film material from an arrrr site. Extract frames using ffmpeg. Pay someone $1 per week in Nigeria to add metadata for each (or some) frame(s).

2) ???

3) Profit

It's also possible that models' entire understanding of the aesthetic comes from screenshots of the movie. Even if OpenAI didn't feed in each frame of the movie, they definitely fed in lots of images from the web, some of which were almost certainly movie screenshots.

In the tattoo case, tattooing pikachu on a person does not harm Nintendo’s business, but copying another tattoo artist’s work or style directly takes their business. Tattoo art is an industry where your art style largely defines your career.

I can see the argument LLMs are transformative, but when you set up specific evaluation of copying a company/artist and then advertise that you clone that specific studio’s work, that’s harming them and in my opinion crossing a line.

This isn’t an individual vs corporation thing, (though people are very selfish).

There’s so much more here than just corporate vs individual. There’s the sheer scale of it, the enforcement double standards, questions of consent, and taking advantage of the commons (artists public work) etc. To characterize it as people not liking business is plain wrong.

We’re deving a game AI can’t use. We’ve invented several firewalls.

This is the future.