Are we pretending this is new & their opinion matters in some new way it hasn't before?
There might be an argument to demand licensing royalties on intellectual property. Is that too capitalist? Maybe it's fine if we work that into the word fascism somehow, wear it out a bit more to hit that sweet spot. Ooh.
Cool, another preachy argument that jumps to irrational conclusions. Because Ghibli?
It is a display of power: You as an artist, an animator, an illustrator, a writer, any creative person are powerless. We will take what we want and do what we want. Because we can.
Uh…we always could & did. Imitators have been doing that since always, long before LLMs. No one owns an art style.
This is the idea of might makes right. The banner that every totalitarian and fascist government rallied under.
That's the argument? Plagiarism & imitating art styles is fascism? Wow! The rest of the article is worse.
Please make the word fascism more meaningless.
The number of times I've seen screencaptures of text on a coding job that makes me think/say "you're a coder, I'm a coder, you know we'll need this as text, so what the fuck is wrong with you?" is too many.
Images of text happen way too often everywhere including lemmy. And they grace us without alt text like they're going out of their way to fuck us & people with accessibility needs especially hard.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't, either. It is a fallacy of modal logic to claim an action that is not one that should be done is an action that should not be done.
If we limited ourselves to doing what we should, then entertainment like Ghibli wouldn't exist, and you wouldn't write comments here. There's no reason you should write comments here, yet you did. Does that mean you're "devoid of any morals" & "lack the integrity expected of a contributing adult"?
Imitation & derivative works hardly rise to anything worth fussing or losing total perspective over. If we pay attention, all human creativity is derivative, nothing is truly original. Works build on & reference each other. Techniques get refined. It's why we have genres. From the Epic of Gilgamesh & ancient mythology to modern storytelling, or the development of perspective in graphical works across time, there's a clear process of imitation & development across all of it.
Oddly enough, Princess Mononoke is inspired by the Cedar Forest guardian Humbaba from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Should we also condemn Ghibli's "lack of integrity" for their "intellectual property theft" from the ancient Mesopotamians?
If Ghibli were somehow deprived of economic gain & welfare due to others passing off derived work as their own, then you might have a point. However, I doubt when they sincerely want to watch Ghibli, people decide instead to watch LLM generated stills on social media that no one would pay for. They're no substitute for real, creative output. If anything, the increased exposure stirs interest in the real work of Ghibli. Even the objection is speculation: the article doesn't state Miyazaki objected, it merely argued he would. So, no, you don't have a real point here, either.
This is as much "theft" as any other imitative, derivative expression. I'll take free speech over decrying fake "theft".