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Ghibli. A word that has taken the entire world by storm and sent our social media feeds into a frenzy since an Open AI software started recreating images in the typical style of the Japanese filmmaker-animator, Hayao Miyazaki. A 2016 interview of the famed co-founder of Studio Ghibli soon surfaced that generated much debate, where he had reportedly called the use of AI in art “an insult to life itself”.

These events bring two major questions to mind. One, what are the legalities surrounding AI-generated artworks, especially in the copyright domain? And secondly, what are the ethical dilemmas in the use of technology to reproduce a certain style of art?

To answer the first question, there have been numerous instances of AI-generated art over the years, since the world has embraced this infant of the digital world. Mauritshuis in The Hague had used an AI-generated image of Vermeer’s ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’ when the original piece was loaned out for an exhibition. The Museum of Modern Art in New York too hosted an AI exhibition using generative adversarial network (GAN) that ‘taught itself’ art by browsing through the gallery archives. AI image generators like DALL-E, a word-play tribute to the esteemed painter Salvador Dali, brings ‘art’ into existence by following text prompts, using CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) that has datasets of images, some of which might be copyright protected. The new GPT 4o that is being used to........

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