OpenAI's Studio Ghibli AI: 'An Insult to Life Itself'

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1:17Hello and welcome to the 404media podcast. Joseph is out this week. So this week, I'm your host, Jason Kevler. With me are Sam Cole and Emanuel Mayberg. No room to say hi. Hi. No room to say hi. No pauses. Few things. Well, Amanda, do you want to say hi? Hello. Few things. I bought a teleprompter, so the eye contact during this is going to be insane. You seem really on point. If you're watching on YouTube, I'm going to be on point. The thing is that I haven't written a lot of dialogue for me to say, but this thing is very cool. I really feel like I'm on MSNBC right now. We just need to get a scroll going.

1:56All right. Let's hop into it. Let's just hop into it. So we're going to talk about OpenAI's new anime generator. That's not what it is, but we're going to talk about the Miyazaki AI. And the title of the story is Hayao Miyazaki, who said AI is an insult to life itself reduced to AI generated meme by OpenAI. Emmanuel, you wrote this story with Matthew Galt, who is going to be writing a little bit more for us coming up. Should we start with Miyazaki first? I was going to suggest if we could each establish our relationship with anime and Miyazaki individually. I feel like it's not necessary, but it's useful information for our readers.

2:45It feels like a trap. Establish your relationship with anime. It feels like a trap. Total transparency, yes. personally i am i've had i had an anime phase as a teen which included uh princess mononoke which is my favorite miyazaki in general i'm not a huge fan of anime in general but his movies studio ghibli's movies in particular um but i like mononoke that's my that's my favorite one usually i just find his work to be like too i don't know magical realism it's like very loosey-goosey. There's not a lot of plot to follow. It's like vibes and amazing-looking visuals, but not a lot of story I can latch onto.

3:29Sam, I feel like you're more of an anime fan than I am. I don't know. I mean, I had a phase also as a teen. I was really into Fruits Basket, which is an anime about boys who turn into cats.

3:46But yeah, I loved Totoro, obviously. I was introduced to Mizaki kind of late like in college and a boyfriend was like you should watch Totoro and I was like we watched it together so it has like a nostalgic vibe I haven't watched a lot I mean I haven't watched a ton of Ghibli but yeah I'm a fan I'm you know I would consider myself a fan for sure I saw Mononoke in theaters and it was incredible so Jason where do you stand? So we've established that you two are both anime fanatics I have not seen anything by Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli nothing at all I've not we should end the pod before we get cancelled I'm going to be the AI copyright discusser on this podcast because and also the stand in for people who have no idea what we're talking about because I've not seen any anime other than like Pokemon okay that's anime that's only I know well I know like big fan of Pokemon I watched like a very small amount of Yu-Gi-Oh I would say but and I saw a little bit of like Ranma one half I believe it's called no not familiar I haven't heard of it it's really not it's very very very famous considering that I've seen it but I forget what it was about In any case, let's talk about...

5:18So what is Studio Ghibli and who is Miyazaki? For people like me who do not know. I know the name. I know that he made beloved movies. That's all I know. Yeah, it is the most celebrated and I think award-winning anime studio. and it is... I don't know if it's the most mainstream because you have things like Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z, but Studio Ghibli, which is led by Miyazaki, he's a co-founder of the studio, has been around forever, has a very distinct visual style, and everybody knows about it because the movies have wide appeal, they've been nominated for Oscars when they're dubbed to English, like big movie stars dubbed the movies, and the reason we're talking about it is that But last week, OpenAI updated ChatGPT with a new AI image generator, which is, you know, it's a race to who has the best image generator.

6:28It feels like every week there's a new one that can do something really impressive. one thing that people figured out very quickly with this one and that made it go viral is that it is very good at copying the studio ghibli style which is instantly recognizable if you've ever seen it it's um not quite like other anime that you've seen it has like a warmer palette it's a bit like softer angles when you think about i don't know goku's spiky hair and things like that and a style that people really love. And all you have to do is feed it an image and ask the model to recreate that image in the style of Studio Ghibli.

7:13And it does that very, very well. And that caught on, A, because understandably, it's pretty novel and fun to feed it an image of your family or your friends and see what you would look like if you were part of a Studio Ghibli movie. But then also, I think people were having fun with it and testing the limits of what the model would do. And they found that it is way more permissive compared to previous OpenAI tools and OpenAI image generators. so they fed it like images of uh historical figures stalin uh the top image in our article is an image that matthew gall generated which is the moment that saddam hussein was captured in iraq by the u.s um and it will produce similarly kind of graphic or suggestive images um napalm girl which is a famous image from the Vietnam War is something that would recreate it in the Studio Ghibli style uh the Saigon execution another like very famous horrible image of a person being executed in Saigon during the war um it created a Studio Ghibli version of that as well not kind of blew up all over the internet if you were on social media at all I'm sure you've seen it yeah i think that um i guess some additional context um studio ghibli animation i learned this like reading articles about about this but like it's notoriously like painstaking work it's like the artists who do it sometimes spend like a year on a single scene is that correct yeah it's um Over the years, this is true in Western animation studios, but also in Japanese animation studios.

9:17A lot of work has been outsourced. If you know Disney movies at all, it was a big deal when Disney started doing 3D for some of the background stuff, which saved them some of this labor. But yeah, animation is, you're doing, I think, what, 24 frames per second and you're hand-drawing all of that if it's a Studio Ghibli movie. So they're very, very labor-intensive works of art that many people work on. And the quote in the article comes from a documentary that came out in 2016 about Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. And what happens there is that I think it's a few students that come in and they're demoing a 3D model that is animated with AI.

10:14So if you're making a Toy Story, a Pixar movie, and you're moving a 3D model, you're kind of puppeteering that 3D model frame by frame to make it walk or do anything. And they created this AI tool that animates the character, which in this case, I think, was kind of a zombie that was crawling, laboring across the screen. And Miyazaki sees that to this group of excited students, and he just shuts them down and says that it's an insult to life itself. Yeah, so here's the full quote. He says, quote, Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it.

11:03I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. Yeah, pretty strong condemnation of this demo that he got, which, of course, kind of circles back to the fact that almost 10 years later, his signature style is reduced to an AI-generated, AI-powered meme. Yeah. And I think also notable, Sam Altman has shared images in this style. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also changed his profile picture on X to a Ghiblified version of himself. and I think that this has started, I mean, the conversation has been going on for a very long time, but it started yet again, the conversation about one AI generated art, but then also the theft of this art and the fact that this is clearly trained on tons and tons and tons of copyrighted work.

12:09And then as you mentioned, it feels like the guardrails on this new tool are worse than ever. I mean, I've seen not just, you know, Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli AI versions of, you know, horrifying things, but I've also seen people just say like, hey, generate me an image of the Pope. And it does. Generate me an image of LeBron James. And it does. That's not, that's something that in the past, OpenAI has attempted to prevent. And it suggests that the company is really flouting this idea that it's going to win these lawsuits that are against it, that it is trying to take off as many guardrails as possible, I guess.

12:59Yeah, so a few things about that. One is that since we published this article, Sam Altman has said a bit more about what a big moment this was for the company. It wasn't just a viral thing that was happening on social media. He said that the biggest week the company had was when they first launched ChatGPT3. And that was like 500 ,000 users joined in a day. and he said that a million people join in like the two days or a day after this update so it's like a big last night when we're recording this we're recording this tuesday morning on monday night he tweeted that a million people joined in an hour yeah right okay yeah so that's even more impressive than i thought it's like it's like legitimately a big deal for their business so So in terms of the guardrails, I think there's two things that are happening.

13:58One is that OpenAI has taken a lot of flack and is also facing real lawsuits from artists who are mad that previously you could go to DALI, which is one of its AI image generators, and say, generate me an image in the style of fill in your specific artist. and they're getting sued over that. And what they said in response to our request for comment is that they now will prevent generation of images in the style of a specific artist, but they're okay with generating images in the style of a specific studio. So you could say, generate an image in the style of Pixar, generate an image in the style of Studio Ghibli, but not generate an image in the style of Samantha Cole's watercolors, you know, which is, I don't know.

14:56I don't know. Clearly, this is in response to the lawsuits, but I don't know what the legal thinking is behind the scenes that they think this is somehow, that's a lawsuit that they're less likely to lose. the other thing is that i think it was in 2023 that sam wrote about how dolly refused no it was actually yes it was dolly that refused to generate images of julius caesar that is how strict the guardrails were back then and those are just not there anymore and some sam altman has talked about this a little bit that they want to have more open models they want less restrictions and i think honestly it's like i don't know the thinking behind that either but that seems to me a reaction to the competition and other models being more permissive and then also just the fact that trump is in the white house and they think that um restrictions are like woke and left-coded and they feel like they're not as likely to get in trouble for doing that kind of thing.

16:06Yeah, I mean, it feels to me like, you know, if you can't generate, you know, a fucked up image on chat GPT, you'll just go somewhere else and do it. And Sam Altman might see this as like, oh, we're like losing users to Chinese image generators, we're losing users to like these startup image generators, so on and so forth. And they're just making a bet that they're not going to face some sort of enforcement here. And it's interesting, we're going to talk about this in the subscribers section, but I did an article about brain rot AI and how it's taking over Instagram. And a lot of these are like really graphic depictions of like sexual situations between LeBron James and Steph Curry and Diddy and things like that.

16:52And it's like, I don't know, you can imagine what these things might be. And the way that those are being created is they're not being created on chat GPT, but the people who are making it are having chat GPT write the prompts that they can then go put into another image generator. And so it's interesting that the people who are like, quote unquote, doing this for a living or doing this to make money are using, they're like, they're using an interplay between a bunch of different image generators and video generators and like finding out where one guardrail ends and where one doesn't. And maybe Sam Altman is making the calculation that like, fuck it, let's just let people do whatever they want on our platform.

17:35Trump is in office. FTC is not going to come after us. Who knows? Yeah, and I think we're also going to see... There was some confusion about when OpenAI was allowing people to do this and when it wasn't. And the short answer to that is that some people were testing an older model of the image generator, which had more guardrails. And the newer one, the latest one, doesn't. And it makes me wonder if... Because Open... I'm sorry, Sora is very guarded right now. But when they release the next Sora model, is that going to be more lax? And then are you going to see the type of thing that we're going to talk about later just coming directly out of OpenAI tools without all these workarounds?

18:20Yeah. Just another thing that I really wanted to know, mention is that, as you said, animation is very labor-intensive and Studio Ghibli's stuff is very labor-intensive. And I suspect that they are not going to change that because that's part of the studio's legacy. And they're very proud of how they do this work. But there's been a long history in animation of outsourcing a lot of the work. Do you know about Keyframe? Have you ever heard the term in-betweener do you know about this uh i know that technology has like come for animation over the years and that like um not every single cell is animated by the same person necessarily or not every single cell is even animated by hand anymore so it used to be like in the 90s that American studios and I think some Japanese studios, they would draw the key frames, as it's called.

19:26So it's like one frame every second or a couple of frames every second that are the key positions of the character, like the primary action. And you kind of send all these key frames to another studio. I believe Korea was a big country that did this at the time. and a totally different studio would draw all the in-between frames in the style that you gave them to tie all those key frames together. So that has happened for decades. And now some Japanese anime studios are outsourcing that exact same labor to AI tools, which to me seems like one of those applications of generative AI that makes sense.

20:15It's like very rote, difficult work that is already outsourced and you're just outsourcing it somewhere else now. So I can imagine very easily that generative AI has a role in animation in the future. but the thing that i think people found very annoying and i found very annoying is that like the ai booster crowd conflates the ability to replicate the studio ghibli style with the people who are using this tool somehow being the equivalent of a miyazaki which is obviously not the case and obviously missing the point um and i don't know this is a thing that has happened with generative ai the entire time we've been covering it but yeah it's like there's a tool there's probably a practical application of it in the future but the ai booster crowd has so much glee about the possibility of putting artists out of work or somehow devaluing their work.

21:26There was this meme that was going around like, oh, it's over for illustrators. It's game over for animators, which I'm sure there will be an impact, but that is not what the tool is. The tool is a proof of concept and a fun fad, but replicating the style of Studio Ghibli does not make you a master artist like a Miyazaki. Yeah, I want to hear from Sam in a minute because she's done the most reporting on the fact that all of these things are trained on tons and tons and tons of cartoons, videos, YouTube videos, real photos, etc. This is all trained on the work of real artists. But one thing that I saw going repeatedly viral would be like a VC or Silicon Valley worker Miyazaki-fying an image that they took of themselves with their bros and being like, yo, look, I turned this into art.

22:30And I thought that was a really interesting and smart point you just made because it's like taking a picture of five of your co-founders on a couch and turning it into a Studio Ghibli anime is not turning it into art. Like that's not art. It's not animation. There's no story there. There's no... Like taking an art existing image and just like running it through a filter is something that we have been able to do for an extremely long time. And that is not creating stuff that people are like willing to pay for or consume. And I think that that's very stupid. That said, if I were an illustrator, I would probably be pretty concerned because there clearly is going to be some impact and it already has been some impact on like graphic designers and artists.

23:23You know, we've seen a lot of like corporate clients, like people who used to do a lot of high paying design work for like PowerPoints and stuff like that. Like stop doing that and just replace it with AI because they're doing things that don't matter that much or maybe aren't public facing or maybe are intended for clients who don't have like a particularly discerning eye. And so I know that a lot of graphic designers have seen their illustration clients kind of dry up, which is really concerning. Sam, we don't know exactly what this was trained on, of course, but you've done a lot of reporting on other companies, you know, training on just like tons of YouTube channels, things like that.

24:15I mean, what do you, I think it's pretty obvious what is going on here, but is there anything new for us to learn or is it same old, same old? I mean, yeah, it's pretty obvious what's happening here. And I think just like what I keep seeing and what people are, as a direction I think is new compared to like what you said with the filters that are art that have been happening for like five years almost where it's like oh i turned my face into stained glass before we even called it like generative ai or whatever it was just like filters um people have people who are into the ghibli stuff as like um a personality almost seems to be a thing and it's not that they're like fans of the studio even it's that they really gleefully hate artists and i think that there's something going on there that maybe a lot of people wouldn't even admit it's like oh i don't hate artists i love art look how much i love art i'm i'm imitating it um but there is just kind of like this real disdain for the process of making art itself that seems to be happening and there's like people who super hate generative AI and there's people who super hate the concept of artists continuing to make money.

25:34And that, there are people, those are extremes and there's few people on those sides and there's more people in the middle who are kind of like, oh, this is fun, whatever. I'm going to put it on my Instagram. But that rift is getting wider and like people are more and more fighting over those concepts as people actually lose their jobs over it. you know it's like people are losing their jobs left and right in every industry so you know of course AI is impacting graphic design as well as like programming and coding I don't know it's just like it's I got I was really pissed off at the Studio Ghibli stuff when it was happening like Thursday Friday because of that attitude that I kept seeing where people were like, ha ha.

26:21They were generating that scene from that documentary of Miyazaki being like, this is an affront to life itself or whatever he says. And I was like, okay, Sam Wattman is spitting in the face of artists clearly and blatantly and people think it's funny. And then I read Emmanuel's behind the blog and he was like, this is a trend. This is like a stupid trend that people do all the time with technology and with these kind of consumer tools. And that calmed me down a lot. I was just like, okay. People have been doing this forever. But that cultural rift, I think, is real and worrisome. And I try not to contribute to it by getting super worked up.

27:08But it does piss me off to see people with that kind of attitude. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I guess the last thing I'll say is I'm very interested in the fact that they said that they gained a million users in an hour yesterday because when ChatGPT launched, they did gain a lot of users very quickly, but a lot of those users fell off very fast. And of course, like ChatGPT, I know people who use it and rely on it for all sorts of stuff. Not saying it's good. I just know that it's become a daily habit of people when they want to look up something or, I don't know, like rewrite something. And I am curious if this is a million users who are like, ha ha, I'm going to make like one anime image and then never use it again.

28:01Or if these people are then going to like use it to write emails and become subscribers and so on and so forth. Like surely some amount of people will stick around but i don't know this feels it still feels very flash in the pan to me if you've if you've come there to like make a specific meme or to run an image from your vacation through this and send it to the group chat like i don't know i'm very curious i i know that um open a i just raised like 40 billion more dollars yesterday but the staying power of something like this like i I really don't know. All right, let's leave that one there. When we come back, we are going to talk about OnlyFans.

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33:21Okay, we are back. Sam, this is yours. And it was published today, this morning. Only fans sued after two guys realized they might not actually be talking to models. First of all, ha ha ha ha ha. LOL. What's going on here? Yeah, I'm going to try to talk about this story without litigating the case myself. Because it is pretty absurd, but it also touches on something kind of serious. So these two men in Illinois, both of them, say that they started suspecting that the OnlyFans models that they were subscribed to, who have hundreds of thousands of fans in some cases, subscribers, and they were one of 700 ,000 fans of one particular model, they say that they started getting suspicious that they weren't actually speaking directly to her personally that she wasn't texting back to them herself and it's a couple of models are mentioned in the lawsuit but um they the basis of the lawsuit is that only fans is allowing models to use chatter agencies.

34:43So the agencies pay a group of people to manage someone's OnlyFans accounts and reply to probably a million messages they get every day directly to fans. So you're not talking directly to the model, you're talking to someone that she employs. And this is a huge industry. There are so many, There are probably like hundreds of agencies at this point, but it's a really common practice. It's been talked about for years. I think some of the really big models use it and use different agencies to represent them, to help them kind of schedule out their content, to do lots of different tasks other than just like DMing back their fans.