OpenAI's Ghibli image generation is a viral moment with legal questions
For the last two days, my timeline has been filled with Studio Ghibli versions of people’s photos, memes, movie stills, and pets, all thanks to OpenAI releasing new image-generation capabilities on ChatGPT with the GPT-4o model.
Other platforms and chatbots, such as Google Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and Meta AI, have been able to generate images. But getting a powerful model like GPT-4o to create and edit images is a big deal, given that ChatGPT is possibly the biggest chatbot around. (Meta might want to contest that.)
However, image generation ability — available to only paid users at the moment — was merely a starting point. When people discovered that you can turn photos into the distinct style of Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli — which has produced hits like “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away” — they started converting all kinds of photos. Studio Ghibli holds nostalgic value for those who have seen the movies, and for those who haven’t, it can give you a feeling of looking at something distinct.
The image-generation feature or the event of turning photos into Studio Ghibli-styled images might not matter a lot in the long run. But this event hints at an opportunity and a problem for OpenAI.
The opportunity is one more step towards the company’s vision of becoming a consumer tech company. Stratechery’s Ben Thompson wrote about OpenAI being an accidental consumer company during the early days of ChatGPT. But more recently, Sam Altman has been saying this part out loud in interviews and also to investors.
In a recent conversation with Thompson, Altman shared that his goal would be to get to a billion users for OpenAI consumer products in five years. Altman things, in some parallel to Google or Facebook, users will want to sign in with their OpenAI account anywhere, and that will give other applications more context about the user.
“I really believe in this product suite thing I was just saying. I think that if we execute really well, five years from now, we have a handful of multi-billion user products, small handful and then we have this idea that you sign in with your OpenAI account to anybody else that wants to integrate the API, and you can take your bundle of credits and your customized model and everything else anywhere you want to go,” Altman said.
Viral moments like the image generation feature might not be pivotal to OpenAI reaching its billion-user goal. But it gives the product a somewhat temporary boost in mindshare. People already know about ChatGPT, and some might already use it. Seeing this feature, some of the users might convert to paid users even for a while. OpenAI plans to roll it out to free users, but those plans might be delayed as there is high demand at the moment.
There is an ethical and legal gray area that is to be considered here in relation to Studio Ghibli-styled images. The ethical dilemma is that Ghibli creators made this their own distinctive style over the years. Now a computer tool is allowing users to imitate that in seconds without any compensation to the creators. (OpenAI hasn’t announced any public deals with creators.)
The legal gray area is potential copyright cases. OpenAI is facing several of them already. The problem is that a style of images is not protected by copyright. If OpenAI trained on Ghibli material, we don’t know where the company acquired the dataset from and if there is any precedent for the case.
In any case, OpenAI wouldn’t want to worry about that if enough people are generating these pictures and until there are no lawsuits.