Your reactions to yesterday’s newsletter on AI-generated imagery
Obama’s comms advice, steady progress, and jealousy (Issue #305)
Yesterday, I shared a few perspectives from Medium writers on ChatGPT’s new image generation feature — particularly the Studio Ghibli trend — and received a record number of responses. Here are a few of the most thoughtful ones we’ve come across, from all of you…
- Illustrator : “Give me awkwardly drawn stick figures, or your own unprofessional photos if that’s too hard… I don’t want perfect gradients. I want honesty.”
- , responding to ’s comparison of image generation to photography: “A human photographer needs to, at minimum, be physically present at the location of the subject they are photographing. AI generators have no such limits.”
- : “I’d be flattered if OpenAI decided to replicate my style, and it would motivate me to continue because people only mimic what they find valuable.”
The conversation veered from rejection to openness to cautious curiosity, and a few of you had questions (as do I) about how copyright law figures into all this. Does OpenAI own the copyright to Ghibli’s style? Does it need to?
I did some digging, and found an analysis by two business professors. Because LLMs don’t store whole images (i.e. entire frames of a Miyazaki film) but instead break those images down into component parts and are trained on the parts, it’s creating a new product: a “style,” i.e. a mathematical model of “Ghibli-ness,” that it can then apply to new imagery. There’s no legal precedent for protecting a “style,” only a specific expression of that style.
Basically, “you can’t copyright a music genre such as ‘ska’ or an art movement such as ‘impressionism.’” People coin “styles” and “movements,” but no one owns them — they only own specific artworks. This is essentially the conclusion a U.S. District Judge came to recently in a case involving record companies, who alleged that when Anthropic’s Claude (another popular chatbot) remixes their song lyrics it constitutes copyright infringement. But, as explains, “if the system does not literally copy… there can be no infringement.”
Copyright law may have some catching up to do here, though. Illustrators are already suing AI generators for “collaging” their work, and AI is so good at generating “styles” based on artists’ work that it feels dangerously similar to copyright infringement (even if they’re not literally copying a specific artwork). Legal scholars, if you’re reading this, please weigh in — to me, it seems the law wasn’t designed for any of this, and things (copyright law-wise) will probably continue to get weird.
—
💬 Good quotes
- : “The single most important thing about being an effective communicator is having conviction, believing what you say.”
- “Writing tip: Keep an eye on your ‘was.’ […] Open your draft. CTRL+F ‘was.’ Now see if you can cut that number down by half, just by rewriting those sentences with stronger verbs and clearer descriptions.” (Noam Leon Kaestner)
- “Making significant progress on most topics requires steady effort over time. Our problems were not created in a day and they will not be solved in a day.” ()
- “What’s most valuable isn’t what’s exceptional, curated, or performative, but rather what’s common, authentic, and directly experienced.” ()
🎓 A dose of practical wisdom
If you’re jealous of someone, hire them as your tutor.
Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.
Edited and produced by &
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.
