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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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>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.

> 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.

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.

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

huh.

this is your brain on boomer nostalgia

This makes no sense whatsoever to me.

probably https://minecraft.wiki/w/Legend_of_the_Chambered

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.

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

Utter bullshit. Or more politely - wrong take. OpenAI embeds itself further in public consciousness, arguably attracting more users therefore profiting.

Enabling mass-production of Ghibli style without permission or monetary compensation is theft.

Theft of what? There was no market for "memes in ghibli style commissioned by the original studio" which would probably cost hundreds if not thousands if hand-drawn. Nobody was going to pay for that. When it became freely available and instantly reproducible, that's the new market.

It's not truly free though, it's a loss leader for the near-trillion dollar AI industry. If we're asking where the stolen value ends up, I think you can answer "in the NVIDIA share price".

Theft of copyrighted data (movies/art), which OAI used for developing their LLM.

Oh, you mean copyright infringement, not theft

Unless you live in some anarcho-capitalist society, it is theft, in very simple terms. And I wonder, just where are all those highly successful libertarian societies? The ones who don't need to enforce copyright and where every member of society is creating his own creative art content, movies, songs, games etc. Oh, they have all failed miserably to scammers? Poor people, how I pity them (not).

I see the neo-Silicon Valley spirit of "regulatory arbitrage as a service" is unwavering.

It's promotion for OpenAI's product, without any of the appropriate licensing. 3D printing companies don't provide Lego schematics to sell their products. There's also the small matter of their ex-employee turned copyright whistleblower, who ended up dead:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0el3r2nlko

>Nobody was going to pay for that.

Japanese artists exist.

Excellent points both. I need to ponder this…

It doesn't seem hard to imagine 2-5 years from now when "memes in Ghibli style" turns into "pay us 25 cents and we'll send you a 30 minute cartoon in Ghibli style".

Styles are notoriously hard to copy. It's not like Ghibli style being copied is anything new. For example, Studio Ponoc where former Ghibli employees did the copying. As long as they aren't literally generating copyrighted works styles can't be owned.

Would the world be better off if Picasso's heirs owned Cubism and any artist wanting to produce works in that style had to buy a license?

Studio Ponoc had Miyazaki's blessing. I doubt the same can be said for OpenAI. OpenAI doing this without even asking might not be illegal, but it comes across like an act of incredible disrespect for the very creators that these memes are masquerading as an homage to.

“When we opened the new studio, Studio Ponoc, I went to report this to Mr. Miyazaki,” he went on, “and he gave his blessing and said, ‘You really need to have the conviction to go create a new film studio and the conviction to show children worthwhile films. And every film you make, you’ll have to realize that has to be a film that is worthy to show to children’.[1]

[1]: https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/

OpenAI definitely is, as apparently image generation is, for the time being, not available in the free tier, so the only way to keep up with the fad is to upgrade.

It's there on my free account with the new generator.

People pay to get more images generated, you can make money even if you have a free version.

OpenAI had a publicity cycle around how tuned their image generator is for this particular style in the same week that google released a major rev for Gemini. That kind of social media dominance against a major competitor is incredibly valuable.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

Also Marathon and its sequels by Bungie.

> ... 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?

> 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.

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.

The question is how much that first-mover advantage still means. I guess with video games and movies (Doom and Ghibli), there's a massive difference between telling ChatGPT to make your selfie look like Ghibli.

But for illustrators and graphic artists? What's now keeping me from downloading an illustrator's portfolio and telling ChatGPT to make me something in that style, but for my company?

Is there still value in that illustrator pioneering her unique style? It used to be a client magnet, now a good portfolio might take your potential clients away.

I guess the other side of this is that the more a style/idea/media spreads, the more comesw back to the original creator, but I'm doubtful this is true in AI.

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.

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.

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

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

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