Wow. Studio Gibli and Open AI potentially going at it. This is absolutely fascinating. Um, is AI art theft is kind of like the question that is on everybody's mind at the moment? There's a lot of people having like this ethical debate right now about whether generating things with generative AI that looks so close to the style of somebody else is theft or not. Um, I think this is a really interesting debate that actually even predates open AI and comes back a little bit to what I think of definitely online as this sort of pervasive culture of people taking other people's ideas and styles and the way people do things and repurposing it. Now, there's a lot of people who would say that this is the way human artists work. That um an artist will be influenced by other artists that they've liked and things they've seen other people do and techniques that they've seen other people use. Certainly, you know, all the greats, Van Go, Picasso, Da Vinci, um, Basat, um, Andy Warhol, all of these sorts of people were influenced by other artists around them and art and design, um, in their of their contemporaries and people who came before them. Monet, same sort of thing. A lot of artists even sort of, you know, studied with each other and borrowed each other's techniques. And this happens across the board in literature, in music. you get people suing each other because they come up with riffs that are similar. Um, a really interesting one a few years ago, Robin Thick, the musician, was sued by the family of Marvin Gay um because his song sounded too similar to Marvin Gay's style. And I think the outcome of that, if I remember correctly, was that the court concluded that you can't copyright a style and so the Marvin Gay family didn't uh win that. That's my understanding. I should have actually checked that before I hit record, but I wanted to get this out there. Hey everybody, how you doing? It's editing Nick and um as I was watching back the video, I realized I did need to fact check that and Marvin Gay's family did in fact win that court case. In fact, for copying the feel and style of got to give it up, Marvin Gay's family were awarded $7.4 million in damages. I think that's a hugely important, as it says in sort of some of the articles I've read about this, it's a landmark moment for, I guess, copyright and how much artists are protected. But at the same time, as I understand it in copyright law, and what I'd been led to believe is that you can't just copyright the look and feel of something. So, it's interesting. There was all this stuff in the articles about Robin Thick saying he was too high and he was in fact um a fan of that song had been influenced by it and Farel Williams saying he hadn't intentionally copied it but he wasn't quite sure. So between the two of those guys they messed up there, didn't they? Anyway, back to the video. And I think this conversation about copyright and about what you can copyright um keeps rearing its head online. And I am such a fan and I am such a I am such an advocate of artists being able to experiment in safety and understanding that things will naturally repeat. But um I think that really applies to human artists and I think we have to be very careful with generative AI because it doesn't work in the same way that a human artist works. Naturally the way we tend to work, the way artists will tend to iterate, the true artists who are out there um is what people will do if they're not When a human is working on a piece of art, when a person is creating something, what they will tend to do is iterate and adapt and change things and things go through their filters. Now, the issue is when you're using generative AI as a tool that does so much for you where you give it the sort of inspiration you have in a prompt, generative AI doesn't add that extra 5 or 10% that intangible bit of creativity that you create. um when you when you pass other people's art, if you think of yourself as a computer, and I hate to do that, um but it's good analogy that if you think about the way you pass information, um as an artist, what you do is you take in all these influences and then they sort of get mixed together in your mind and by your subconscious and influenced by your life experiences. And what comes out of you, unless you are trying to copy, unless you're not very original, what comes out of you is something original and something unique. The problem with generative AI is, and you see this when you sort of use it. And definitely while I was even making the thumbnail for this video, spoiler alert, I did it first cuz I jumped on the trend of doing a studio Gibli inspired art and went, "Oh my god, I have to try this out and I have to talk about this on camera because I have such strong feelings about this." Um, and I think that um, the danger with this stuff is that when you go through chat GPT, when you go through midjourney on all these different platforms, although it feels like you are getting something completely unique and completely original in the moment, um, it tends to be when you do deeper research into this and when you look up the results that these platforms give you, quite iterative and quite um, and very heavily influenced by other people's work. so influenced that you might say it's copying. And I think this is what a lot of artists who've gone online and writers who've gone online have found in um scouring the internet for things that are influenced by their works. Um there were some stories recently of writers who've gone online um doing research for books by chat and going into chat GPT and asked it for information on things only to find out chat GPT gives them their writing essentially um with either very little changes or no changes at all um but presented as new material. So it can be a very dangerous thing and I think this is starting to happening in the art world a little bit. So, if we look at the studio Gibli situation at the moment, obviously it's a massive trend. Everybody's jumping on board. I've just done it. Um, Miyazaki's come out and said he's absolutely disgusted by it and he would never use these tools. And I do completely understand why he's had that reaction. Um because there are millions upon millions upon millions of people sort of diluting the unique style that Gibli as a studio and Miyazaki as an artist have spent artists have spent years refining and years creating. And without that refinement, without without those years of refinement, without the individual life experiences that the individual artists have had um that they put into the creative process, creating these stories and creating the art and then the art informing those stories. Oh, sorry. The and even the stories informing that art to get that unique style. It's what chat GPT is missing. Jack G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G GPT is sort of skimming the the the the the the surface and extrapolating the key visual points that are the culmination of these years and years of refining the process and the collective human experience of these artists who've come together to form studio Gibli and it's giving you a faximile approximation of that and I think that comes down to the crux of why AI art is so essentially dangerous is it completely theft then to come back to the question in the thumbnail and the question in the title. Well, it's a difficult one. Like from a technical standpoint, you are not getting an exact faximile and copy of an exact piece of work, but it's you are getting an exact faximile and copy without any of the depth behind people's bodies of work. And I think that is even more dangerous in a way. Um it's very difficult to quantify and it's very difficult ethical situation. I think this is going to take a sort of a confluence of lawmakers and philosophers and different people to come together to figure out how best to deal with this. But is it theft? Ultimately, in my opinion, I do kind of think so a little bit. It is kind of riding off the backs of other people's work, riding on the shoulders of giants, if you will, but without putting in any of the um without earning the right to do so, if that makes sense. I think the real danger with this technology is that there are ultimately real creative people who are real artists using it to create incredibly interesting work. And I have seen people create stuff online which is iterative but they iterate on their own work and then use chat GPT and platforms like that to help refine that even further. But I think the danger is everybody else, the unwashed masses if you will, and I hate to call them that, but it's so true, um, who are going to jump onto all sorts of platforms and flood them with really lowquality flaximiles of this work that other people, artists, um, studios like Gibli have spent years and years and years refining. Um, and not just in the art space and the video space and the film space, but in the music space as well. There's AI now which will create you songs in the style of um different artists as well. And I think it's so incredibly dangerous because the casual listener can't discern the difference between it. And some people may say, well then if you can't discern the difference, why is it any less artistically valid? But the problem is it is less artistically valued because it's not informed by any real human experience. It's a computer's approximation of that. And because of that, I don't think it's art because it doesn't move anything forward in any real way. It remixes previous experience from other people. And because it misses that human element until AI becomes sentient, which is a very dangerous thing, a very scary thing until it is able to have that extra 5% where it's got that sort of human soul and it starts to get into sort of quite a spiritual philosophical realm here as well. And I don't know what that is. I'm not a religious person per se. I'm not a subscriber to any one particular religion. But I do at the same time acknowledge that there is something sort of spiritual, something soulful that humans sort of have that is above and beyond what AI and what computers can do at the moment. And I don't know whether it's technically possible for a computer or machine to develop a soul, develop that. And it's such an interesting philosophical and spiritual conundrum. And there's going to be all sorts of haters who leap on and leap into the comments and go, "Of course not. Technology can't do that. It will always be approximation." And maybe it will be. I think it definitely is at the moment. But what if we do accidentally create life? Gosh, this is a bigger, deeper question. Is AI out stealing? Absolutely. At the moment, it definitely is. Will it be always in the future? I don't know. I'm interested to see what happens. Is there any basis to what Miyazaki is saying about it being soulless um and a theft of their work and their hard-earned uh reputation? Yeah, I think so. Um all you people who are going out there jumping on the bandwagon, cheapening every social media platform, posting that stuff, it's cool. It's fun. I jumped on the bandwagon. I did it. But like, and we all are. But I hope this wave kind of clashes a little bit. I do enjoy the AI tools to some degree, but at the same time, I don't want this to be the only way that stuff gets created. My LinkedIn feed at the moment, if you jumped on LinkedIn, which is the most laughable social media platform out there, um, is full of people saying advertising agencies are dead and they're creating print campaigns that haven't been relevant for, you know, multiple decades right now and doing posters with terrible AI generated gibberish saying stuff is campaign ready. Um, it's absolutely ridiculous and I don't think real human creativity is in any danger of losing its steam. But I think over the next few years, we're going to go through this interesting and very difficult and challenging time for a lot of creatives and professionals in the creative space where people are trying out these tools and seeing if they can't get the same results from them. And happily, I still don't think that's possible. But could it be in the future? This again raises an incredible question about AGI um artificial general intelligence and whether again sentience does come to the machines and it could do could be the rise of the machines um Terminator in the future is scary. The Terminator won't be the T-1000 hunting down John Connor. It will be a soulless machine in a server farm somewhere stealing people's jobs. Maybe I think it's already happening to a degree. Scary scary times. Fun times as well cuz I think for a lot of people who are doing great work, you're going to float to the top. You're going to be the the the bastions of human creativity. The people who fly the flag for what is right and what is truthful and what reflects the human experience both across the world of art and perhaps even I think across the world of advertising and marketing and communications as well. Um so fly that flag. Let's take it back. Let's plant our feet firmly on the ground. Let's not get lazy. Let's not get complacent. Let's not let AI take over. Anyway, this is a rant I thought was important to put out there. I actually did a video earlier on where I talked about my feelings on using chat GPT as a writing kind of co-pilot for scripts and things like that. And I loved it. Check out that video like up here. It's an awesome and fascinating journey and I'm probably going to be doing updates of that very soon because the tools have come so far in so many few short months. But anyway, until then, check that video out. Check my beginners video playlist up here as well. And see you in the next one. Bye.