Using ChatGPT's Ghibli-style photos violates copyright laws? Experts explain

Studio Ghibli-style artwork is going viral on social media. Thousands of users are using ChatGPT's feature to transform or create fresh photos (based on prompts) resembling Japanese anime images. Several celebrities have also posted Ghibli-style photos of themselves.

What began as fun has become a top trend. However, ChatGPT's new feature has sparked copyright concerns and discussions over artificial intelligence (AI) re-creating specialized works of artists.

Read More: Apart from Ghibli-style images, what else can you do using ChatGPT's new feature?

While OpenAI allowed premium users to create Ghibli photos initially, users without subscriptions can make up to three images for free.

Do these AI-generated Ghibli-style images violate copyright laws?

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is known as the artist behind Studio Ghibli artwork. The 84-year-old, who made hand-drawn Ghibli sketches, has previously expressed skepticism about AI’s role in animation.

Addressing copyright concerns, an intellectual property lawyer, Even Brown, told TechCrunch that the style is not explicitly protected. He added that OpenAI is not technically ‘violating’ any laws.

However, Brown pointed out that ChatGPT was likely trained on the studio's previous works.

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“I think this raises the same question that we’ve been asking ourselves for a couple years now. What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?” Brown asked.

OpenAI, in a paper on Tuesday, said that its new 4o tool would be taking a ‘conservative approach’ in the way it imitates the aesthetics of individual artists, as per Associated Press (AP).

“We added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist,” it added. OpenAI is already fighting copyright lawsuits over its flagship ChatGPT.

Artist Karla Ortiz, who has been a fan of Miyazaki’s movies, is suing other AI image generators for copyright infringement. He said that the Ghibli trend is ‘another clear example of how companies like OpenAI just do not care about the work of artists and the livelihoods of artists’.