Pay your muse: AI owes royalties for stolen inspiration

Cities don't get any cooler than Manhattan, New York City. My favorite is the midtown area, purely for the spectrum of human life it displays. Within just a couple of miles, you will find both Billionaire's Row and homeless people, Morton's Steakhouse and street-side food carts, Radio City Music Hall and buskers making music off buckets. But the sharpest contrast is seen between shoppers exiting Bergdorf Goodman with shopping bags slung on shoulders while nearby, cops chase away peddlers of counterfeit designer-label bags.

- JYOTIRMOY SAHA

Recently, when Sam Altman of OpenAI changed his profile picture to an AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style rendering of himself, millions of similar images mushroomed all over social media. The latest update to OpenAI's GPT-40 model had turned the Japanese studio's artistic genius and incredible skill into a cheap digital toy. Since then, Ghibli-style imagery has gone viral. Proponents of AI imitation art have argued that Ghibli's creativity is being democratized and fans can thus engage with it in novel ways.

Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli's 84-year-old co-founder, is widely recognized for his role in greatly elevating the art of animation. His signature style—marked by lush, hand-drawn landscapes, vibrant colors and expressive characters—turns animation into a medium of unparalleled beauty and aesthetic brilliance. His films have won every major award, including another Oscar last year. In a 2016 interview, Miyazaki had famously reacted to an AI animation demo with visceral disgust, emphasizing why art had to have soul and labor. Back then, AI-generated animation looked horribly unnatural. Current AI technology is different. With good prompting, it is indistinguishable from original artworks. In other words, it deserves more than cursory attention.