· By Eduardo Ángel Montes Martínez
In Praise of Artistic Destruction
An image generator that imitates the style of Studio Ghibli reopens three questions: what happens to jobs, who owns authorship, and how intellectual property is to be protected.
In the race to showcase the disruptive reach of artificial intelligence, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, launched its image-generation model in late March.
Other image generators built on the same technology already existed. But the debate over the threat AI poses to the creative industries, both through the disappearance of jobs and through copyright infringement, flared up again when it was discovered that this generator could replicate the creative style associated with Studio Ghibli, a Japanese company that, unlike its competitors in the film animation market, puts artistic creation in its most organic form first.
What looks on the surface like a passing social-media trend is in fact a glorification of creative destruction. It is one more warning about the automation and disappearance of jobs in which, until recently, technology played only a supporting role.
How large the threat becomes depends on whether the market chooses to make the advance of artificial intelligence its guiding principle, above job stability and respect for artistic creation. But as other industries have shown, the convenience technology offers capitalism has proved enormously attractive, and its consequences become more visible every day.
Do we stop to carry out a proper ethical analysis of what this means for the employability of the workforce already in the market, and of those still preparing at universities?
Given this economic picture, academic programs will have to be rethought at a much faster pace, or else this workforce will graduate already obsolete and unemployable.
Then there is the intrinsic value of artistic creation. If we leave it in the hands of this new technology, to whom should authorship be attributed: to the person who, using these advances, proposed an idea and received a work as a result, or to the owner of the technology that made it possible to generate a work in ridiculously short periods of time?
In legal terms: which intellectual property protection mechanisms will be suitable to prevent third parties from exploiting an artistic creation? Studio Ghibli received an answer to that last question in recent days, and the answer was not encouraging at all.
Images that emulate its work can be generated with the latest ChatGPT update by a sneaky workaround: leaving out the name of the studio or of its main creator, Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki had already voiced his contempt for the use of technology to create animation, before public release of the generator that now makes it possible to exploit his work. He acknowledged that, as far as his own work is concerned, its destruction is imminent in the face of an artificial advance that, while it replicates a style, lacks the creative value that comes from a link to an artist, since it does not come directly from one.
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