What is this article even talking about? It’s making no sense.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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They're trying to make some type of argument that a private studio should have exclusive rights to a specific style of art and that by openai allowing users to generate art in that style, we are slipping into anti-democratic authoritarianism.
My opinion is that you can't own "styles" of art and that there's nothing wrong here. Legally speaking I can copy any art style I want.
Thanks for that explainer. I thought the verbiage in the article was a little over the top.
However there is a point at which the "style" of the art is the thing that is copyrightable, sort of by implication.
The standard for proving a copyright violation where a defendant claims a transformative use or a derivative work is "substantial similar."
For as long as I can remember that includes the overall presentation of the work, and it's hard to describe that as anything other than a "style."
The article draws a comparison that allowing copyright protection for styles would be like allowing copyrights for entire genres. I don't think that's right. Nobody could copyright all "landscape paintings" as a genre, but look at landscape works by Katsushika Hokusai, and that style, to me, is creative enough to warrant protection, if it were made originally in America today and not already in the public domain. And he didn't invent woodblock prints or even woodblock prints of landscapes, but the way he did it is so unique as to be insperable from the copyrighted work itself and arguably deserving of protection simply for its advancement of the art.
If you made a woodblock print in the same style but used it to portray a scene typical in anime, rather than a landscape, that's clearly transformative and derivative, but not substantially similar. If you use the style to make prints of waves breaking around Mt. Fuji, that's substantially similar. So like, as to dude's anime style, if you use the same style to make landscapes, certainly that's not infringing, as it's not substantially similar.
I also don't see the threatening outcome the author suggests as worrisome. There are still exceptions for blatant copying that apply, mainly parody and fair use.
As you have described the situation my question is if it would be similar to copyright Donald duck, despite not having drawn all possible poses and situations?
That's already the case. There would be two copyrights for a cartoon for Donald duck, and possibly, in fact likely, many others.
A copyright is essentially a right of enforcement. You don't have to register anything or file anything in order to gain that right. It's a right to sue someone to enjoin further use and potentially to recoup money damages if you can prove loss.
The standard for whether something is copyrightable at the outset is whether it is the product of a modicum of creativity, and reduced to a tangible medium of expression.
So far one cartoon of Donald duck, each drawn frame of the show would have its own copyright. Also, the character would have a copyright. The dialogue of the script would have another copyright. And the test for whether a particular character is something that can be copyrighted is to ask whether the character is separable from the overall work and whether the character is "well delineated."
Donald duck is certainly the product of creativity, it is reduced to a tangible medium of expression when it is drawn on paper, and it is the main character of the show and has its own personality and behavior. So it is pretty clearly of deserving protection. Although at this point in time, I believe some of Disney's earliest characters are now in the public domain, Even Mickey mouse, which people like my IP professor in law school said was never going to happen. This is because I believe in 1984 there was a law called the copyright act of 1984 but was colloquial referred to as the Mickey mouse copyright act. It was championed by Sonny Bono, who I believe was friends with Walt Disney personally, and which many said had the sole purpose of extending Mickey mouse's copyright for another 25 years or whatever it was. My memory is a little fuzzy on this. My professor figured that Disney was such a powerful institution that anytime Mickey mouse was about to fall into the public domain, Congress would stop it.
A doctrine sort of related to your question is called scen a faire. It is a French phrase which I have no doubt spelled wrong because I am on mobile. It means that elements essential to a scene of the kind which would be common to all scenes of that type, are not copyrightable. So this would include some background characters such as those that, despite being drawn in a creative way, are more so the product of the scene itself rather than any creativity. For example, if there is a scene in a cartoon where the character gets onto a train and hands the ticket to a ticket taker, the ticker taker character is probably not copyrightable.
Yeah they want corporations to own styles so the rich can be more powerful, the rich push this sort of propaganda out endlessly
This is just like china, copying stuff, or rather called steeling. the original companies need to build their brand and style for decades and spend 100s of millions to improving to perfection. then we have AI just copying it in matter of minutes.
and you think 1 person should be able to steel all this work and legacy from 1000s of employees because its "protecting the rich"?
first let's get something out of the way
the actual way that copyright works is that a few giant megacorps buy up everything and they end up owning copyrights to the vast majority of recognizable content.
so for example in 2019 over half of the movies released in theaters was owned by Disney. The same company that unilaterally has the ability to change US federal law when convenient for them.
studio ghibli is no different- they're a subsidiary of Nippon Television which has a $2B+ annual revenue
so keep in mind when you advocate here for stronger copyright protections, you are essentially saying that the biggest companies in the world deserve more money.
2nd- the "style" is not copyrightable. anybody can mimic the style. and guess what? if I make a cartoon and I make it look like studio ghibli style.. people are still gonna recognize it as "studio ghibli" style. they are basically getting free marketing. they are not losing out here.
Anyone who doubles down this hard to defend AI art theft machines fucking hates human artists, who are a branch of intellectuals. Nazis are known to openly hate, abuse the rights of and mistreat intellectuals. Fuck kava.
You may or may not be correct in hating me but do not let my comments bring down the good name of kava
As for "doubling down so hard" I'd flip the message and ask you why you are simping for mega corps? simping for mega corps is about as fascist as you can get- a populist ideology idolizing elites
An AI is not doing anything a human wouldn't do. You look at a bunch of content. You learn from it and incorporate it in new synthesis.
It's not fundamentally different. So unless you can make a meaningful statement (beyond mild personal attacks) that illustrates the difference between the two, you will convince no-one
I’m not entirely sure what this style even is - wouldn’t this same argument apply to Apple’s “Memoji” that has been out a few years?
If you need to use AI, be aware that there are MANY free models and training options. No reason to be locked into proprietary service.
I wonder how Nintendo will react when it's their turn 😆
We already have AI yet people are still illiterate and misspell words in the title. Really makes you think
Is this fashion comeback ? Style transfer was popular 10 years ago.
Ugh, why are they quoting that blowhard David Gerard
Edit: Lotta David Gerard fans here
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
I say this as someone who frequently uses generative ai, and actively chooses to pay for the service.
Fuck openai.
This company has utterly failed to fulfill their mission statement, and they will be unable to make right by humanity until ALL software they have created is available to the public as FOSS (free and open source software). Openai claimed that this is exactly what they were going to do, and then they just didn't. So fuckem.
Have you heard of ollama? You can run deepseek and stuff locally super easy. I know it’s not a complete replacement, but it feels nice to use an LLM guilt free. I’ve compared the 14b distilled model from deepseek vs the paid version of ChatGPT and it made me cancel my account.
I would prefer to run my ais locally, but my brain glazes over if I see github. I found a a program called "gpt4all", but it's very limited in what models it can run, and what I could get just wasn't as good for my use case as openai's 4o model. Also, being able to generate images in the same conversation as text work is a feature that I'm fairly certain no other ai model can do (yet).
I think whats really happening behind the scenes is that the model you’re talking to makes a function call to another model that generates the image.
I haven’t seen it either so if you want that and don’t want to code it might be best to stick with paid, but something like that could easily exist somewhere else.
I bet you're right, but the fact that I never see it is a feature worth paying for, especially for a smooth-brain like myself.
What do you use to run it locally? If there was something that could use speech to text reliably to be able to use a open source option, I consider switching.
FWIW speech to text works really well on Apple stuff.
I’m not exactly sure what info you’re looking but: my gaming PC is headless and sits in a closet. I run ollama on that and I connect to it using a client called “ChatBox”. It’s got a gtx 3060 which fits the whole model, so it’s reasonably fast. I’ve tried the 32b model and it does work but slowly.
Honestly, ollama was so easy to setup, if you have any experience with computers I recommend giving it a shot. (Could be a great excuse to get a new gpu 😉)
If you don’t mind my asking, how do you not have a moral objection to using AI? With everything we know about it, the theft, the benefit to the technocrats, the environmental toll, I could not bring myself to wave away those issues. Not to mention the power imbalance of this tech being controlled by the ruling class, looking to eliminate people’s livelihoods for the sake of profit. What do you use it for? I feel like we should be boycotting them en masse.
I pick my battles.
If I took a hard stance of not engaging with any business that did things I morally object to, I'd be forced to be a self-sufficient hermit in the woods.
The problem is ownership, financialisation, blitzscaling, growth hacking, betting against us with our pension funds and buying our government with the profits.
Disown all intellectual property, destroy enclosers of the common.
This isn't an AI problem, it is just another facet of our vampiric elites perpetually disempowering us, marginalising us. This is the all-encompassing everything-problem.
This will continue until the root of tge problem has been pulled out and burned.
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