It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter Many people are having fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with OpenAI's ChatGPT. I see it as copy-and-paste intellectual property stealing on an industrial level. It was sort of cute for, oh, say, five minutes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced you could use his business's GPT-4o model to generate images when everyone …
GenAI art has always sat in uncanny alley for me. I was never comfortable with it - even if they'd licensed the training data. But the idea of generating Ghibli-esque images crosses whatever line had not yet been crossed.
Ghibli is the artist's animation studio. Whilst Disney were churning out twee cliches and hoovering up the world's folklore and heritage, Ghibli came along and told novel stories, laden with meaning, subtext (and usually an environmental bent). The occasional diversions and adaptations - Howl's Moving Castle (wonderful) and Earthsea (muddled) - were properly licensed from their authors and paid for (what a concept!).
Ghibli were telling great stories long before Pixar came along and made genuine family movies (by which I mean there are as many subtle adult themes for parents in Pixar as there are plotlines for kids. Ten minutes into "Up" and the kids are thinking "that's sad" whilst their parents are having an emotional breakdown). Ghibli's sophisticated story-telling is why Disney didn't know what to do with them when they bought the US distribution rights and found these weren't the twee kids cartoons they expected.
But Ghibli don't just tell great stories. They films are a labour of love. The Boy and the Heron took seven years to make, used hand-cell animation throughout and is the most expensive movie ever made in Japan. One four-second scene in "The Wind Rises" took over a year to animate, because it's a crowd scene in which every element moves in every frame. They could have interpolated from a handful of key frames, but instead the artist hand-painted ~96 frames. Lunatics. And we love them for it.
To generate (not create) rip-off Ghibli-esque scenes through AI (OpenAI have surely not paid a license fee to ingest that material) is cheap and nasty. It assigns a value of "zero" to the artistry built up over decades. And this applies to evey creator who has been stolen from, but to mess with a beloved house like Ghibli is the sort of silliness that hardens people's resolve.
It's time Miyazaki's lawyers went to war. Or Ghibli tell a story about a sad world in which nothing new exists because all "cultural output" is just a mid-slop coming out of factories.
The fact that outside of IT circles (and even within some of them) people don't understand LLM's and the current generation of "AI" is no more intelligent than an eight ball and a spreadsheet with a bayesian function picking from a larger list of responses based on input makes this harder. To get the electorate or even just the house of commons to stop the government allowing the proposed piracy (AI exemption from copyright), or to convince a jury of harm, individuals need to understand that the "AI" is not creating anything but using statistics to respond to the prompt based on the material it was trained with, in this case copyrighted Ghibli art. With all the marketing hype and the bias of the social media lenses: google (including you-tube), Facebook, twitter et al towards AI its not an easy message to get through.
P.S. The historic hostility to digital from a small subset of copyright holders like RIAA as well as the conspicuous wealth of some organisations which buy up a lot of copyrights has not helped the chances of getting a sympathetic audience. Even if these individuals and groups could not be further from artists like those at studio Ghibli if they tried.
But many people first _choose_ not to use their intelligence, to be ignorant much of the time, because it's _effort_ to think, read, learn and inform yourself.
Then, after a while, the capability to think and learn becomes more and more hard to activate.
As a final stage they become fully dependent on external entities taking over the thinking for them. Most end up at that stage. Few are able to reverse that descent.
Just like people who would deliberately choose to use wheelchairs all the time instead of walking forget how to walk.
Just think of FOX News as a wheelchair company preying on people able to walk, tying them to wheelchairs until they forget how to walk and finally become dependent on wheelchairs...
Eternal customers...
With the subject matter being animation, one is reminded of the passengers on the Axiom in Wall-E.
I generally prefer the earlier Ghibli films such as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa Castle in the Sky, but for a quizzical view of life, Only Yesterday was very engaging (although I did not really enjoy the Daisy Ridley dub), and Whisper of the Heart are both very good.
I was wowed by the animation in The Wind Rises. It is so beautiful, and the earthquake and the following panic scenes were just unbelievable when considered that they were hand-drawn.
But for a story with a real impact, you should watch Grave of the Fireflies. It's not my favourite, but the subject matter and the way it is treated gives you a real jolt. Definitely not a children's film.
Half-agree. Ghibli is still just a business, just like Disney. One shouldn't be favoured over the other. Businesses are still just machines.
If you trace it back to the times when different animation studios in Japan really were quite mercenary. And many of its stories are also based on folklore, albeit less-western ones.
So far, it looks like the stolen style generated by AI is just for memes. Freeware. If a commercial company is formed around stealing the art, that is a different matter.
Half-agree. Ghibli is still just a business, just like Disney. One shouldn't be favoured over the other. Businesses are still just machines.
Naturally, neither should be favoured in terms of their entitlement to copyright. But the idea that they are "still just a business" overlooks the attachment to the craft. There is absolutely nothing wrong with an Ikea Billy bookcase. It does a very fine job of holding books. But if one were building a grand design or renovating a chateau, one would likely get a carpenter in to hand-build the shelving in the library or study. This won't physically support the books any better than an Ikea Billy, but clearly there is a perceived value to the artisanal version.
And so people feel a more instinctive desire to protect the - increasingly rare - repositories of true artistry. The low-output/high-quality creators. The material that AI training sets value the highest. The craftspeople that were able to rebuild Notre Dame. What you're paying for is often of a subjective value, but as a society we would somehow be tangibly poorer without it. Which is why aping Ghibli's art style is a striking choice for OpenAI, given the virulent reaction it was likely to produce (and has).
So far, it looks like the stolen style generated by AI is just for memes. Freeware. If a commercial company is formed around stealing the art, that is a different matter.
A commercial company has been formed - OpenAI (and Anthropic, et al). They are selling this service for money (with a free tier). These images are not inherently "just for memes", and they are not simple fan art being posted on DeviantArt by other artists "in the style of", but fundamentally created by the artist themself. There is nothing to stop a person using these images commercially once generated. OpenAI's terms of use permit this.
> Most people instinctively know that "AI" is just bullshit generation
Actually, that's the problem... in my experience, most people DON'T know that AI is statistical bullshit. They kneel down to it and accept it like a small tin god.
I had a co-worker not get his roof fixed "because he sent the drone photos to chatgpt and it said his roof was ok"
Then why the f*ck is it leaking? That's the definition of NOT OK. Whatever. It's your roof, and you go on the list of "shit flinging monkeys"
LLMs and generative antagonistic network systems are just one facet of some/many humans' overcredulity. Consider:
* "The GPS TOLD me to turn!" (off the roadway and onto a footpath -- so they did)
* "But the computer says your account is in arrears. The computer is never wrong." (to the irate customer holding a box of cancelled cheques proving the account is currently paid-up.)
* People donating their lives' savings to charismatic TV evangelists. (You can believe in God without acting like a dumbass.)
* People electing politicians who promise to give those voters what they want, despite hearing those same politicians promising the exact opposite to some other voting bloc.
* People unquestiongly believing what they read, see, or hear on the Internet. (e.x.: "Apply horseradish to broken bones to help them heal.")
* People who interact with simulations such as the "Eliza" program, and think/feel they are chatting with an actual human.
I have a feeling that AI is what's going to make the capitalist market economy finally show its true face to everyone, not just to those billions who already have been and continue to be suffering badly from its inability to humanely distribute resources and goods across the planet, let alone in a peaceful way. Art is only where this starts.
I don't entirely disagree, but I also think AI happens to be the hot-button thing at a time when decades of Friedman economics is coming back to bite. It is perhaps emblematic of the problem, but only coincidentally provides an excellent illustration of the rot that has been taking place in our society for decades.
We have no shortage of examples of the public sector collapsing under the cost of renting hospitals and long-term infrastructure deals with dodgy PFI providers. The notion that renting services and buildings in perpetuity is somehow cheaper than ownership is hilarious when the same people telling us this have mortgages because they simultaneously know that growing equity in their home is better long-term than renting.
Thatcherite-Reaganomics have effectvely seen maintenance deferred past breaking point across western government estates. This siren song that the private sector will save us and do it all cheaply and efficiently has been thoroughly discredited.
Alas, governments are still locked into this thinking, with the British Chancellor under the impression that the private sector will build a new station at Euston for HS2 out of the goodness of their hearts - that they won't cut corners, and that it will represent a good value bit of infrastructure with space to grow over the next 50 years. Excuse me whilst I pick myself up off the floor laughing.
Early failures like RailTrack were written off as exceptions. But the dam is no longer crumbling - water is coming over the top. High profile problems such as school maintenance in Stoke, and shifts in policy such as the nationalisation of Sheffield Forgemasters and reacquiring the MoD Married Quarters Estate - as well as recents goings on in Scunthorpe over the weekend to secure the country's last blast furnaces. There is growing recognition that the private sector will generally just asset-strip any business you throw their way unless they're regulated into oblivion. Likewise, recognition that boards do not owe a fiduciary duty to their shareholders (Friedman's great lie that people ended up thinking was actual law!). Board members owe their duties to the company - and manipulating share prices or quarterly results to do a good turn for their shareholders are increasingly recognised as unlawful if they harm the stability and long term outlook of the business. Not that we can expect to see any sort of enforcement on this point...
Unfortunately we haven't reached the second part of the epiphany - that we fund this by taxing the tossers who have been making out like bandits (and by not caring too much about running a deficit if the spending is on infrastructure investment which increases the wealth of the nation). Inevitably we will see more cuts to social security, and to public services such as the courts and CPS - which will then be met with <surprised pikachu face> 12 months later when crime stats become a disaster because the Police can't get defendents to court in a timely fashion, MPs find out the hard way that even a £90k salary is not enough to fund a legal defence in the absence of legal aid, and the railways continue to fall over.
Booo-hoo
As long as no money is made off it and it's for personal use, people should take a chill pill. Ghibli surely already have, as they have not reacted - and they shouldn't, other than to make sure Disney+ has enough streaming pipe available for all those watching queues that will be brushed off and squeezed to screens world-wide (or at least - everywhere where it's available).
The name "Ghibli" has been pushed to a number of people worldwide that is orders of magnitude larger than the amount of people who have seen a Totoro plush but don't know what it is, which in itself is orders of magnitude larger than the amount of people that know what Ghibli is. Someone should look at before/after streaming numbers, if any are available.
As for Hitler or JFK Ghibli-style - they have always been available to anyone who would think of such thing, on DeviantArt and whatnot.
I am saving my outrage for the day when ChatGPT will be able to output Schindler's List - Michael Bay style (Ghibli-style is not needed, as Death of the Fireflies was already more depressing), or Dora the Explorer Zack Snyder style, or The Fifth Element with Alexandra Daddario as LeLoo.
And on that day, my outrage will be about not having enough lives to watch them all.
Anora? The Substance? Heretic? The Assessment? The Brutalist? Kraven the Hunter? A Real Pain? Conclave? The Friend?
I'm just browsing down the list on IMDB of movies released last year, all those titles are in the first 20. None of them are part of any preexisting franchise. People have been saying this "there's nothing but sequels and remakes" for at least 30 years to my personal knowledge. It's never been true, and it's not now.
I haven't seen Homer in a bar surrounded by Ghibli style characters...
[0.003 seconds on google..]
Aaaaand there it is...
https://www.reddit.com/r/simpsonsshitposting/comments/1jmickx/this_ghibli_ai_on_socials_disgust_me/
I think it is wrong. It should pay to Ghibli studios for. every. single. image.
This one is ok though, made still in Simpson style (the image can be update at any moment, hence a description of what I saw):
https://imgflip.com/tag/homer+bar?sort=latest
Think, if you will, of how today, instead of genuinely new movies and TV shows, all we get is endless reboots and remakes. If the AI companies get their way, that will be true of art, novels, music, and – yes – movies and TV shows as well.
I just noticed in this morning's news that Max (aka HBO Really Expensive) has announced a Harry Potter TV Series.
Any further questions?
There is a BBC remake of Threads (hopefully they get it made before it comes true)
No news if it will be made in Sheffield, although with CGI today they can probably remodel a post-apocalyptic Sheffield without have to spend all the money cleaning it up first.
I haven't a clue about the looks of Studio Ghibli-style images. I can't be bothered to find out. Yet, the whining about so-called 'intellectual property' (IP) infringement by imitators of the images' style adds to a crescendo of 'rentier' protest emerging after digital technologies completely upset prior notions of connecting ideas inextricably to the physical medium upon which they were represented, and thereby inducing faux scarcity.
Whoever claims 'ownership' of the abstraction known as 'artistic style' of the mentioned images should be delighted in its popularity, imitation, and the possibility of other talented people building upon it (aka 'derivation').
The arrival of supposed 'AI', an interesting yet perhaps misnamed technology, is 'icing on the cake' for we who know putative IP to be a specious notion based on false premises. It brings the indefensible - in two meanings of the word (i.e. unwarranted and unstoppable supposed 'infringement' thereof) - mode of business dependent upon an artificially maintained monopoly, one backed by a dog's breakfast entanglement of statute and case law, to the attention of people who otherwise might not have thought deeply about the matter: a body of law as silly as that once enacted in California to decree acceptable behaviour between man and wife in the privacy of their bedroom and, likewise, soon to be discarded.
A sound non-rentier basis for funding creative endeavour has been outlined elsewhere by others and by me. It fits properly within market-economics where, in principle, monopoly positions are not favoured. In essence, 'scarcity' is attached to the skills for idea development, but not to digitally represented end-products. The key protection afforded to creative individuals rests upon an entitlement to attribution of source when someone else's creations are independently distributed or derived from; this can be encapsulated in simple to frame law designed to protect creators' reputations when they compete for recognition and funding.
It always does for them. I'll do them a favor and rephrase it in English:
"Nobody owns a specific art style. You can't blame someone for making something else in a style similar to that someone else used. I hate copyright, so I'm going to claim that's what happened here so you'll agree with my main point. Every piece of data should be freely available whenever I want it. Who cares about any of the people who spent time or effort making that."
All else aside, I think claiming complete ownership of an art style makes about as much sense as claiming ownership of a story/movie/writing genre.
Specific content? F yeah, you're even welcome to claim being its creator and having the skill/talent to accomplish this, but the actual style? F no.
... to make AI copyrighted work ripoff acceptable by the large public.
It's like drug-deealers, give people what they like for free in the beginning, and attack someone like Studio Ghibli that cannot bury you under a very heave lawsuit like Disney or the like could do...
Altman is really creepy.
>It's like drug-deealers, give people what they like for free in the beginning
Can I say I was demonstratively lied to by my teachers - nobody has ever offered me free drugs to get me hooked.
They did try and offer me free Matlab licenses in Uni, but I had learned to "just say no"
A couple of observations:
1) As I understand it, not being a pop music fan, much of modern pop music, particularly genres like Hip-Hop relys upon "sampling" of previous hit music, all remixed1. There's even a subgenre knows as plunderphonics2 dating back to the 1980s or, arguably, earlier.
2) Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, music industry companies and organizations fought tooth and nail against music sharing sites3 and even sued individual sharers, including a 12-year-old girl4.
Who were the heroes?
Who were the villians?
Which side were you on then?
Compare and contrast.
Finally, as have in the past, I will recommend Molly White's thoughtful essay “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI5 for your consideration. While it largely relates to the use of Creative Commons licensed material, perhaps provides some general insight as well.
______________________
1 Sampling
3 Trade group efforts against file sharing
4 12-year-old settles music swap lawsuit
5 “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
The music sites weren't the villains there because they wanted to stop people from copying the music they paid to produce. They were villains because how they went about it. When they took actions that were or should have been illegal, like installing malware on people's computers, that made them villains. In my mind, the people who shouted about wanting their music for free weren't heroes. They were selfish people who were getting me into this fight I didn't want to be in, a fight I'm still in any time someone makes me use DRM on something I bought legally. I did not support either side. When the copyright companies tried to sue over knowledge of a number, I sided against them. When they tried to take down obvious piracy sites, I sided against the pirates.
Actually, it was exactly the advent of the first large scale information diffusion tehcnology - the movable type print technology - that led to the need of copyright. Before, when books had to be copied painstakingly by hand, there was little need of copyright.
Most authors had to rely on other sources of incomes than selling books. But the new printing technology made bot living by selling their own works or copying someone else's work a business, hence the need of copyright to ensure authors have a way to make money from their work and instead of depending on mecenates who liked their "butts licked" (which is till appreciated by some megalomaniac people).
Internet is no different - it makes possibile to distribute our own works far more easily than before, or it could be used to copy someone else's at industrial scale. And just like printing, it can turn into a system were a few large companies control most of the market. Even worse, because now they do it worldwide, with a few authoritarian exceptions.
Yet, I'm not surprised by the EFF position. Stallman and Altman share far more than most of the letters in their last name.
EFF believe Altman AI will "democratize" the internet just like they believed Stallman open sorce would. Open source just created the actual Internet molochs like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, and their rapacious business model which led to "enshittification".
They are able to bet on the wrong horse everytime, because they are libertarians who don't understand how the world works, and are blinded by the idea they should get for free what needs people effort and thereby money to create. But they are paid by the same entities that need to exploit others' work without paying for it, making billions in doing so.
But freeloaders like it... parasites who can't create anything, and like all parasites, will destroy the being they attach to.
I you examine the history carefully you will realise that Stallman was reacting to the fact that work he had done had been stolen by being paywalled. The GPL was designed to make that impossible in the future. The FSF and the FOSS movement comes from academia where the idea is, or was, to publish one's work and, for avoidance of doubt, "publish" meant "make publicly available". It's the commercial world that steals from academia, not the other way around.
This may be hard to grasp for someone who obviously believes that nobody gives stuff away and that anything free of charge must have been stolen, but please make the effort. You would do well to check up on the FOSS contributions of your "molochs".
There has, admittedly been a bit of bad blood resulting from start-ups jumping on the FOSS bandwagon without realising what they'd done and then getting upset when they found out. The moral of that story is that you should check what a licence means before you apply it to your product.
Not that this means I approve of anything OpenAI does - as far as I'm concerned they're just getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.
kmorwath
>Stallman open sorce would
Referring to Stallman's work on free software as "open source" is a grave insult against freedom.
He does free software; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
>Open source just created the actual Internet molochs like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc
The concept of "open source software" did not exist prior to 1998 and Amazon existed before that and it did not "create" such monoliths.
Doctor Syntax
>I you examine the history carefully
Unfortunately, it seems you haven't.
>Stallman was reacting to the fact that work he had done had been stolen by being paywalled.
No, that was not what Stallman was reacting to - businesses were known to make software proprietary long before the GPLv1.
He explains why he started the free software movement in this speech; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt but I'll summarize it for you.
Businesses started to turn a bunch of software proprietary via NDAs, which he eventually ended up on the receiving end of, despite being in a University, as someone who could have given him the source code to let him fix a printer refused to do so because of an NDA (this was before copyright applied to software and when many different CPU architectures were in common use - thus binary-only software was only feasible per machine model for a default configuration and actually using the software beyond that required the source code - thus businesses restricted the software by making people sign an NDA not to share before providing what was needed to use the software).
Then the PDP-10 system was discontinued (which the Incompatible Timesharing System OS was written for), which turned all that work to dust and caused the community around that OS to collapse, as it was written in assembly language using machine-specific tricks that made emulation non-feasible at the time.
He then realized that he had two choices of writing proprietary software or doing something else and then he realized he had a 3rd choice, as he was an operating system developer and all the world needed at the time was a free OS and then computers could be used in freedom again.
He therefore announced the GNU OS and then started writing it and finding existing free software that would do, taking account of lessons learned by making sure to use portable languages like C and lisp and not assembly.
There was an agreement that the software would be shared freely and then suddenly software fell under copyright, which necessitated that the software be licensed and it was realized that one could write a free license that didn't give permission to sublicense and make the software proprietary and therefore per package licenses were written (the software not being easily available to some people without payment was not a concern - after all he did sell copies of Emacs on tape with the source code) and eventually it was deemed that a per-package license was a mistake and all the different licenses were formalized into the GPLv1.
>The GPL was designed to make that impossible in the future.
The GPLv2 and GPLv3 were specifically modified to allow legitimate business practices where money is charged for the software while respecting the users freedom.
>the FOSS movement
There is no "FOSS" movement - it's an attempt to be neutral between the freedom of free software and the corporatism of "open source", but it fails to even be neutral; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.html
Almost any image editing program can do it or there's a plugin for it.
So what is new ?
AI is just another tool that makes the process a bit easier and does not require skill
The "art" is in the story and the way it is told.
If i draw a bunch of black rectangles and fill them with bold base colors, have i ripped off Mondriaan ? It's his style but i have not violated his copyright ?
Can "styles" be copyrighted ?
This is Baroque style, or Louis XIV style ...
It's also legit to use styles and techniques of living artists.
Ask Dale Chihuly.
Actually, go into any second-tier glass gallery and you'll find tons of Chihuly knockoffs, all very legal, as long as you sign your own name and not Dale's -- that'll get you in a load of trouble.
Actually, using styles and techniques of living artists is known as learning.
How many guitarists, for instance, started off copying Jimmy Page? Once you get famous, you get to call it "being influenced by."
"But, in 2016, he called an automated animation tool "an insult to life itself," so I think we know where the elder statesman of fantasy animation stands."
With his head up his arse, by the sound of it. Such a tool is exactly that, a tool, no different than a pen or brush, it's just another means to achieving the same result.
Sure, he may not like the tool, may prefer to do it the old fashioned way, spending countless hours and calling it art, but the end result will be indistinguishable from the automated output of the tool. He is certainly entitled to work in any way he sees fit, but in the real world, if it looks like a duck and quads like a duck who cares whether it's an actual duck?
If the AI thingy were churning out identical copies of this gerbil studio's works then of course there would be a copyright issue. But it isn't. It is given an original image, such as may be captured by a phone camera, then reproduces that in a style similar to that of the studio. Just drawing in a similar style is not a copyright infringement; reproducing specific pieces is. Nothing to see here.
When you here radio presenters talking about AI images as if it was collage and only can be used for pasting celebrity heads on other bodies more realistically than with scissors and glue you realise that pretty much everyone who is vocal about it doesn't know what is actually going on.
Not that there aren't good arguments against it and good arguments for the other side, but the conversation misses the point which is currently copyright legislation does not apply very well and if shoehorned in to the legal argument it opens up as many loopholes as it seeks to close.
And the worse argument is people arguing that AI isn't intelligent, as if anyone thinks it is, and thinking they are making a genius contribution to the debate. If that what was all that mattered then AI is literally just a tool just like the scissors were, and anything permissible under fair use legislation with scissors would be permissible using AI.
Fair use does not specify the tool used, just the valid reasons for doing it.
As it does not exist; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
What is being done is not theft either, as nothing is being stolen if you make a copy.
What is occurring is copyright infringement and copyright is not a property law, as it eventually expires.
It's quite sad to publish an article with such major errors.
If this I were human not A, these "style of" images would be perfectly everyday and legal. I can walk up to a Hockney in an art gallery and make a freehand copy on my own canvas. As long as I do not claim it to be an original Hockney, I am street legal. If I take a photo, set it up next to my easel at home and ditto, the same applies. But if I put tracing paper over the photo and copy it that way, then I am in breach of copyright and my effort is illegal. Working "in the style of" is commonplace, it is how fashions evolve and spread. Speaking "In the style of" some famous character was and is the everyday meat and drink of impressionists such as Mike Yarwood. This has been the state of affairs since long before any of us was born.
The onscreen equivalent is to put the photo on one monitor and work up a gimp copy on another next to it, fine. But build the new on a second layer over the old, and the alarms go off.
However the dividing line can be blurred, especially in music, and here the copyright owners and lawyers smell money. Sometimes they are justified, sometimes not. But when Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Neil Innes (Bonzo Dog Band) formed The Rutles, wrote songs with titles and musical styles which were pisstakes of Beatles hits, dressed up in 1960s style Beatles costumes, made documentaries, and albums with pisstake artwork, everything was totally legal. George Harrison even got involved.
But swap Idle and Innes for AI (which, I suppose means Artificial idle and Artificial Innes), and move into Ghibli territory, and oh what a fuss!
think of all the game developer programmers and movie directors who never had access to an artist to improve the work they're doing, definitely not without significant payment. Now AI gives these people voice, they can create art for their productions without involving real artists to the process. The real artists were never willing to work on these projects anyway. there never was any promise of riches to the artist/probably the end result gathers dust somewhere deep in the internet and noone ,would be interested of the end result. But the lack of artist involvement in these projects is striking. Real artists never cared about our projects enough to work for free in them. Now AI folks found a way around the blockage, let computer do the work that artists are unwilling to do.
I see significant improvement to the status quo in what artificial intelligence is doing, mainly serving those people who had no access to artists in the previous world order.
Complaints from artists i hear are all focused on lost opportunities for artists to do work. But artists never offered to work on these projects. AI is not replacing artists work, since no artist was willing to work on these projects. This is the future of AI: art will be more widely available to the general public, even on situations that real artists never cared enough to fix.
