Every artist I know is furious. The illustrators, the novelists, the poets — all furious. These are people who have painstakingly poured their deepest yearnings onto the page, only to see AI companies pirate their work without consent or compensation.

The latest surge of anger is a response to OpenAI integrating new image-generation capabilities into ChatGPT and showing how they can be used to imitate the animation style of Studio Ghibli. That triggered an online flood of Ghiblified images, with countless users (including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman) getting the AI to remake their selfies in the style of Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro.

Couple that with the recent revelation that Meta has been pirating millions of published books to train its AI, and you can see how we got a flashpoint in the culture war between artists and AI companies.

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When artists try to express their outrage at companies, they say things like, “They should at least ask my permission or offer to pay me!” Sometimes they go a level deeper: “This is eroding the essence of human creativity!”

These are legitimate points, but they’re also easy targets for the supporters of omnivorous AI. These defenders typically make two arguments.

First, using online copyrighted materials to train AI is fair use — meaning, it’s legal to copy them for that purpose without artists’ permission. (OpenAI makes this claim about its AI training in general and notes that it allows users to copy a studio’s house style — Studio Ghibli being one example — but not an individual living artist. Lawyers say the company is operating in a legal gray area.)

Second, defenders argue that even if it’s not fair use, intellectual property rights shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of innovation that will greatly........

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