Wait, what happened to "it's just learning hands have five fingers"? A few comments ago you seemed to be saying that copying one artist's style on purpose might be bad, but that with billions of training images, no one source will be recognizeable in the output, and under that condition the impact to the artist is minimal. (and yet...[1]). Now you're taking the position that even using their work without permission to train AI for the purpose of directly and unmistakably replicating that artist's signature style is OK? Which is it?

And are you not fearful of a world in which nobody ever develops a new Ghibli-tier art style, because they'd starve in the process while competing against low-cost AI interpolations of prior art and AI companies make a fortune selling their efforts?

I'm fearful of a world in which anyone can print "Huggies" on counterfeit diapers and pass them off on Amazon as the real deal, so I hope you at least have room in your philosophy for trademarks, if not trademark art styles.

But either way, the good news is that you yourself can put in the work to hand-paint 100,000 frames of imitation Ghibli-style artwork and then train an AI on your portfolio and give it to whoever you want, or even master a style of your own; the bad news is that this will take sixty years of your life and career, during which time you'll have to feed yourself and your staff, and when you're done you might not feel so generous about giving it away for other people to use to sell greeting cards on Etsy.

But there's more good news, which is that Miyazaki is at least generous enough to allow at least one other studio to use his art style with his blessing, as long as the result lives up to the following standard: "every film you make, you’ll have to realize that has to be a film that is worthy to show to children".[2]

And personally, I do think he's earned the right to ask that much.

[1] https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...

[2] https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/