> act so callous towards the copyright of another artist
It's not copyright. Specific works of art are copyrightable, but a style is not. We probably do not want to extend copyright protection to style because its boundaries are fuzzy and because art advances through incremental improvements.
However, we give social value to originality. A human artist who could just reproduce the Ghibli style is 'lesser' than one who creates their own.
This speaks to the tension described by the author. On one hand, we deem that human creativity is worthy of status and that copied styles are 'imitation' or 'knock-off' goods. On the other hand, as consumers we gravitate to the familiar, and success breeds just those cheap imitators.
Since you cannot (it is technically not possible) create an ML model reproducing a style without having it ingest original works in that style, and such a tool is producing derivative works based on original work (let’s say, by Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli) at scale and for profit, then I have difficulty seeing how copyright law is not involved.
> Since you cannot (it is technically not possible) create an ML model reproducing a style without having it ingest original works in that style
I very much disagree with this. Certainly no gen-AI model currently does this, but you could reinforcement-learn your way to Ghibli style. In language modelling, that's the entire point of the RLHF step.
As long as the style can be described or even recognized by humans, you can nudge your way towards it with multiple-choice sampling.
> such a tool is producing derivative works based on original work (let’s say, by Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli) at scale and for profit, then I have difficulty seeing how copyright law is not involved.
How is this different than a fairground caricaturist that draws subjects in the Simpsons style? They "ingested" lots of Groening-style media, and now they're creating works that are derivative of that style, at scale and for profit.
Learning from a work and being inspired by a work do not create 'derivative works' for the purposes of copyright. The boundary between that and an infringing quotation is fuzzy (note 'sampling' cases in music), but a style itself needs to be on the non-infringing side of things if art is to progress at all, even by humans.
Note that I'm leaving aside the issue of data-gathering; if OpenAI was downloading pirated copies of the Ghibli corpus then that act itself was copyright infringement, independently of the AI training and output.
> It’s not copyright.
The legal debate in the United States, where most of the relevant models are being trained, revolves around whether or not the use of training data is fair use or not.
That’s to say, it may be a legally permitted form of copyright violation, or it may be a legally prohibited form of copyright violation.
Either way, it is legally an issue of copyright. On a secondary level we can talk about trade dress and moral rights, but that simply muddies the water. The legal discussion centered on copyright is concrete and unavoidable.
This is all orthogonal to moral/ethical/societal concerns.
> That’s to say, it may be a legally permitted form of copyright violation, or it may be a legally prohibited form of copyright violation.
That's arguably not really accurate, since statutory fair use itself (and this is why it is written in a less straightforward fashion than most of the rest of copyright law) is a direct statutory codification of what the Supreme Court found to be a Constitutional limit (based on the First Amendment) on the copyright power.
Fair use is not a “legally permitted form of copyright violation”, it is the space where the federal government has no power under the Constitution to create exclusivity as part of copyright.
> That’s to say, it may be a legally permitted form of copyright violation, or it may be a legally prohibited form of copyright violation.
Where exactly is the copyright violation supposed to be occurring? Is it distinct from the 'copyright violation' that happens in the brain any time someone learns what a Ghibli frame looks like? What if I study Ghibli in an art class and write notes to myself about the art style, to jog my memory later?
If the problem is that model training is considered a weird kind of copying, what's the legal line between that (allegedly infringing) copy and taking a JPEG and re-encoding it as a PNG?