None of this will ever get anywhere. And if it ever does, then way more people are going to be affected than you think.
For a start, no-one has ever managed to prove that an AI physically samples the original artworks people use in their prompts. Not on a commercially-available model, at least. The Afghan Girl "gotcha" was done using close lookalikes without any further forensic analysis (because the pixels would still be completely different, since that's not the way AI works).
The Andy Warhol case went nowhere and at best dictated that AI work can't be copyrighted.
The chimp selfie case dictated that an animal has ownership rights if it manages take a picture with photography equipment you otherwise own. An AI is not an animal.
If an artstyle can be copyrighted, then that's immediately millions of pieces of hand-drawn fan art that would now be illegal, and if anyone made money from them, they would owe the original rights holders.
There is absolutely nothing Ghibli can do unless it uses a commercially-available, non-tampered with AI model and can prove it's using original Ghibli art in the art it produces. And people have tried for the last 3 years.
None of this will ever get anywhere. And if it ever does, then way more people are going to be affected than you think.
For a start, no-one has ever managed to prove that an AI physically samples the original artworks people use in their prompts. Not on a commercially-available model, at least. The Afghan Girl "gotcha" was done using close lookalikes without any further forensic analysis (because the pixels would still be completely different, since that's not the way AI works).
The Andy Warhol case went nowhere and at best dictated that AI work can't be copyrighted.
The chimp selfie case dictated that an animal has ownership rights if it manages take a picture with photography equipment you otherwise own. An AI is not an animal.
If an artstyle can be copyrighted, then that's immediately millions of pieces of hand-drawn fan art that would now be illegal, and if anyone made money from them, they would owe the original rights holders.
There is absolutely nothing Ghibli can do unless it uses a commercially-available, non-tampered with AI model and can prove it's using original Ghibli art in the art it produces. And people have tried for the last 3 years.
Why is that even a problem? Every single artist uses preexisiting art for inspiration or to straight up copy things from. Every last one of them.
It should only be a problem for whoever trained the model, not the consumer who used the software.
Is there really a difference? Models get trained with existing art. So do artists.