According to Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Neal & McDevitt, products like GPT-4o’s native image generator operate in a legal gray area today. Style is not explicitly protected by copyright, according to Brown, meaning OpenAI does not appear to be breaking the law simply by generating images that look like Studio Ghibli movies.
However, Brown says it’s plausible that OpenAI achieved this likeness by training its model on millions of frames from Ghibli’s films. Even if that was the case, several courts are still deciding whether training AI models on copyrighted works falls under fair use protections.
“I think this raises the same question that we’ve been asking ourselves for a couple years now,” said Brown in an interview. “What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?”...
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/openais-viral-studio-ghibli-moment-highlights-ai-copyright-concerns