Studio Ghibli, Bandai Namco, Square Enix Demand Openai to Stop Using Their IP

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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).

We can argue if that should be the case or not, which is a different issue.

However, it should not be legal to automate something at scale that is illegal when done by an individual human. Allowing it just tips the scale against labor even more.

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

If you paint a Studio Ghibli totoro on your cup, pillow, PC, T-shirt, nobody is going to care. If you do this a thousand times it obviously is an issue. And if you charge people to access you to do this, it is also obviously an issue.

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.

If I make a for profit AI, that AI is a product. And if that product required others' copyrighted works to derive it's deliverable, it is by definition creating derivative works. Again, creating a small human, not creating a product. Creating a for profit AI, creating a product.

If my product couldn't produce the same output without having at some point consumed the other works, I've triggered copyright concerns.

If I make and train a small human, I am not creating a for profit product so it doesn't come in to play at all. The two are not similar in any way. The human is not the product. If THEY create a product later (a drawing in this case) then THAT is where copyright comes in.

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.

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.

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

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.

But the AI companies are making billions off of this (and a lot of other) IP, so it totally makes sense for the IP holders to care about copyright protection.

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

This is the future.