In 2020 at the dawn of the pandemic, with all the crazyness and change it brought, I thought to myself that it’s the right time for me to step back a bit and focus on a personal project that I’ve been endlessly putting off because I never had the time to put it in practice, so I started a project that would end up being a pursuit that would take more than a year of 8-10 hours a day, of trials and errors, to learn how to paint realistically. So needless to say, that learning a new skill can be a considerable commitment of both time and resources, for getting to the desired results (see some of the works here www.garageandgentry.ro).
Seeing the Studio Ghibli versus Ai madness going on these days, and having a rough idea of the kind of effort and commitment it takes to develop the type of skills and workmanship to create art at the level of creativity of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, I think this issue opens up a whole, not so new, can of worms, and it should seriously raise questions as to what should and should not be acceptable for Ai companies to do, or to use in feeding their model training monsters.
Copyright is a big part of art and design and as a designer at Supersymmetric, it is a big part of the design work i’m producing, from doing background research so that the work does not infringe on anyone’s copyrights, to managing third-party copyrights if the work includes such elements. In short, there’s a lot of work of balancing creativity and copyright in any creative pursuit be it art or design. So seeing the ease with which certain Silicon Valley Ai producing companies are overriding basic principles and with a somewhat questionable approach to data privacy, ethics or copyright, it’s disappointing and it sends the message (at least as far as I am concerned) the rules exist ‘only for the poor’ so that they don’t ‘steal from the ultrawealthy’ and that the Silicon Valley tech bro gang pretty much does what it always does while not giving a hoot, following the good old Silicon Valley ethos of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ or whatever similar version of it is fashionable now.
Yes, some might argue that it’s a wonderful thing and that ‘it brings art to those who didn’t have access to it’ or that ‘it makes art more accessible to the ones that are not talented’, or ‘that now everyone can be an artist’ and many other similar examples, and while I can see some positives in such arguments, the reality of it is that this doesn’t make you and artist nor a designer, as much as ordering some fancy food from restaurant doesn’t make you a cook.
What many people might also miss is that there’s something even more accessible to everyone than a very expensive software blurting out image comps made out of many people’s ‘borrowed’ hard work and creativity, a paper and a pen. And some could also argue that a pen and a paper is still more accessible to significantly more individuals than Ai so they could potentially spend some time developing the actual skill.
My question is then, is it really the case in the end that ‘it makes art more accessible’ or is it just that it makes things more profitable for private companies by commoditizing the stolen hard work, grind, perseverance, talent, creativity of other people?
In this particular situation of Studio Ghibli and Ai, I think that it’s a pure example of blatant theft even though there are some saying that ‘artistic style is not copyrightable’ so it’s ok. While I do think that AI can be a good thing, there are still many data privacy, ethical and legal issues to be considered and one can hope that such issues will be ironed out eventually in such a way that it’s not detrimental to original creators, and is only benefiting the tech burgeoisie.
In the meantime it’s not just Studio Ghibli vs Ai, it’s any original creator vs Ai and even though anyone can now easily type in a prompt to create an illustration ‘Ghibli style’ and have a bit of joy by getting something quickly and with minimum effort, this only strengthens the fact that Myiazaki’s and Studio Ghibli’s hard work, process, passion, joy, creativity, experience and quality, are and will remain invaluable and it’s something that can not be comoditized nor replicated by Ai, so that someone else can experience it. In the end you, the one typing in the prompt, you only get a pretty image devoid of an entire universe of experience and creativity.
Artwork: Napoleon crossing the Alps (Versailles) • Jacques-Louis David