Pryor Cashman Partner Josh Weigensberg, a member of the Litigation and Media + Entertainment Groups, was quoted in an Associated Press article about the use of OpenAI’s image-generation tools to render pictures in the “style” of a well-known animation studio.

The article, “ChatGPT’s viral Studio Ghibli-style images highlight AI copyright concerns,” discusses how OpenAI’s AI tools enable users to transform photos into Studio Ghibli-style art, raising a number of questions under U.S. intellectual property laws.

The article includes commentary from Josh regarding the potential legal challenges surrounding AI-generated art where the necessary permissions have not been secured from the copyright owner:

Josh Weigensberg, a partner at the law firm Pryor Cashman, said that one question the Ghibli-style AI art raises is whether the AI model was trained on Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli’s work. That in turn “raises the question of, ‘Well, do they have a license or permission to do that training or not?’” …

Weigensberg added that if a work was licensed for training, it might make sense for a company to permit this type of use. But if this type of use is happening without consent and compensation, he said, it could be “problematic.”

Josh was also quoted on his perspective on the legal complexities of AI-generated content and protections for artistic “styles”:

[T]here is a general principle “at the 30,000-foot view” that “style” is not copyrightable. But sometimes […] what people are actually thinking of when they say “style” could be “more specific, discernible, discrete elements of a work of art[.]”

“A ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ or ‘Spirited Away,’ you could freeze a frame in any of those films and point to specific things, and then look at the output of generative AI and see identical elements or substantially similar elements in that output […] Just stopping at, ‘Oh, well, style isn’t protectable under copyright law.’ That’s not necessarily the end of the inquiry.”

Read the full article using the link below.