The old adage, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” is being implemented by Sony in the war on AI on the side of human artists, with the company reportedly using an AI model trained on Studio Ghibli anime to prevent the generation of all the copyright-infringing content that’s been slopping up the internet.
According to the Japanese website Nikkei (translated by Automation), Sony’s AI division has created new tech called “Protective AI.” Its purpose, as one might surmise from its title, is to stop AI-generated content from videos to music. Protective AI is also reportedly creating a system that gives the original creators and rights holders fair compensation, though how that’s possible isn’t exactly spelled out. According to IGN, a lot of that has to do with Protective AI still being in the research and development stage, so Sony hasn’t decided exactly how to use it internally yet.
But what is clear and a little counterintuitive in the grand scheme of things is that Protective AI was trained to avoid digital plagiarism by feeding the AI tool Studio Ghibli data. Basically, the whole situation reads like when Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian, had to walk back the backlash against generative AI it had received in the wake of Divinity‘s announcement, saying it’d only be used internally. Only here, the idea is that by feeding Protective AI data to generate prompts aping Studio Ghibli’s art style, it can be used to prevent them. Fighting fire with fire, as it were. Whatever the case, we’re sure its famed animator, Hayao Miyazaki, sees this solution as an insult to life as well.
All of this is happening a bit late to the races since AI slop has felt inescapable on every corner of the internet. We’re way past the point where the jingle-keys crowd and out-of-touch relatives on Facebook who rush to generate Studio-Ghibli-style profile pictures and images of themselves have clued in to how blissfully unaware they’ve been sharing algorithmic slop on the timeline. All the while, Studio Ghibli has become the epicenter for this kind of slop, with the likes of the White House using Ghibli-styled AI for its vile ICE deportation propaganda.
While it’s not like Japanese companies haven’t taken all this lying down, seeing the only major point of recourse as a solution to AI being an environmental and artistic problem, as the only way to prevent the problem from occurring, is crazy work.
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