Creators vs. Artists
Creators vs. Artists
The lesson from Hayao Miyazaki and the line between those who generate vs. create
Getting noticed
A few weeks ago, I noticed a 15-second clip from a Hayao Miyazaki movie circulating online in Japan.
Hayao Miyazaki, if the name sounds unfamiliar, is a legendary Japanese animation film director. He and his colleagues founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 and since then, almost every movie they’ve released has become an acclaimed masterpiece such as Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), and Spirited Away (2001).
Unlike most filmmakers, Miyazaki doesn’t write scripts. He crafts his stories by drawing storyboards from the get-go, making his process extremely rare as a filmmaker. Each scene in Miyazaki’s film is his imagination painstakingly hand-drawn by the master himself.
Except that, this said clip wasn’t produced by Miyazaki or his studio. Or by hand.
It was, as you guessed by now, created using a combination of generative AI tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The creator of this video, based also in Japan, tagged it as “a ‘realistic’ version of ‘Spirited Away.’” By “realistic,” they meant that this footage looks as if it was shot live-action.
It is undeniably a remarkable piece of footage. I have to admit that I was impressed by the creator's technical ability and tenacity to spend time creating such a thing. In addition, the approach of taking a famous piece of work from the past and reinterpreting it in new ways is nothing new and in this case, I did find it captivating, at least initially. It is a tried and tested recipe for creative experimentation and beyond.
Numerous animated films of the past have been reborn with more advanced 3D technologies and/or as live-action remakes. It is a legitimate creative approach.
But is it ethical?
After my initial awe for this AI-generated, faux Miyazaki footage subsided, however, I began to question the work on several levels.
Is this “realistic,” reinterpreted version doing justice to Miyazaki's original, animated version?
Did the creator get permission to create this? Probably not.
If not, is it plagiarism? Is it ethical to take someone else's work, repackage it, and use it to promote themselves? Where is the line of ethics?
But shouldn't anyone, especially young creatives, be allowed to learn by copying, mixing, and reinterpreting great work by masters of the past?
Are they learning to be creative or just learning how to use a tool?
Is this work creative?
Blurred lines
As long as humans have existed and technology evolved, so has copying, sampling, and remixing.
The printing press. Photography. Vinyl. Cassette tapes. VHS. Personal computers. The Internet. They all enabled the copying and sampling of the creative work of others and made the process increasingly easier.
Take hip-hop, for instance. It would not exist without sampling.
“Over its 50 years of existence,” writes Douglas Markowitz, a music writer/journalist, “rappers, producers, and DJs have taken old music and made it new again, remixing and reinterpreting the creativity of previous generations and folding it into the culture of today.”
Even though the legality of sampling in the music industry has been debated for decades, it’s still anyone’s guess how a court might rule on the fairness of sampling.
In 1989, 2 Live Crew had asked permission to use a sample from Roy Orbison’s “Oh! Pretty Woman” but was rejected. 2 Live Crew went ahead anyway and released the song. Orbison’s label, understandably, sued.
One would think that this would warrant a blatant copyright infringement. But in the court of law, all the way to the Supreme Court, it didn’t and ruled in favor of Luther Campbell, also known as Uncle Luke and the leader of 2 Live Crew, who defended the case by claiming “fair use.”
“Fair use” in the US judicial system permits the limited use of copyrighted material without the need to acquire permission from the copyright holder for activities such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, and parody.
It sounds straight forward but in reality, it’s not at all.
The court also said that “the 2 Live Crew song was not similar enough to Orbison’s to constitute wholesale infringement.” “Not similar enough” is subjective and that is the root of many copyright controversies.
Almost 25 years later, another case rewrote the legal precedents of musical copyright law overnight, according to Markowitz.
In 2013, the family of Marvin Gaye complained that a song by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams was too similar to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Although it wasn’t sampling per se, the jury for the case unanimously agreed it was indeed infringement. This broadened the scope of what could be considered illegal and opened up the possibility that the similarity of a given song to one from decades ago could be enough grounds for copyright infringement.
Ironically, this song in question was titled “Blurred Lines.”
It should be noted also that this song was a source of another controversy for “its objectification of women and glorification of rape culture,” and it ultimately led to bans.
Miyazaki on AI
Miyazaki and his business partner Suzuki are in a meeting with an AI animation software vendor. Its CEO is showing off the animation output that mimics grotesque movements of deformed zombie-like characters to the Ghibli founders. The CEO proclaims that humans can’t even imagine these types of movements. You can feel the pride and excitement in the CEO’s voice for presenting such a novel approach to a legendary artist.
After a pause, Miyazaki sighs and shares that he has a friend with a disability who struggles to even lift his arm. “Thinking about my friend, I can’t watch this. Whoever creates this software has no idea what human pain is whatsoever.”
He calmly then defiantly scolds the vendor: "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."
Everyone in the room freezes. The CEO and his fellow engineers are in shock. “Deer in the headlight” is as apt an expression as it can get for a moment like this. He searches for how he should respond, only to dig his grave deeper.
“I have no interest in incorporating such a tool into our process,” declares Miyazaki and shuts down the conversation with a clear conviction. It’s an unusual display of clarity in a culture notorious for the lack of it.
This clip is merely 2 minutes but we could catch a glimpse of the underlying philosophy Miyazaki has behind his art.
Miyazaki isn’t criticizing the output from AI but rather the lack of human empathy in the process. To him, the process of filmmaking is understanding humans and humanity. Miyazaki doesn’t say this explicitly but it’s clear that he takes this matter seriously. A sheer mimicry of surface-level movements with no regard to inner suffering trivializes what real humans have to go through, making the final output shallow and superficial.
Fair use
Asking for forgiveness rather than permission is a common tactic many artists and musicians have used, sometimes successfully—2 Live Crew mentioned earlier citing fair use, for example—and often not.
This approach is what most CEOs of AI companies seem to be taking as of late. There are mounting legal cases against OpenAI, Meta, Google, Midjourney, and other companies unleashing generative AI in a myriad of ways.
Nilay Patel and Sarah Jeong of the Verge, both former lawyers, discuss this legal topic at length in a recent Decoder podcast episode [ Apple Podcast | Spotify ]. They say that while most tech CEOs cite fair use to legitimize their generative AI software, many lawyers think these AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct, drawing parallels between Napster and OpenAI. In Napster’s case, the federal court ruled in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America, rendering the free downloading of copyrighted music illegal, and forced Napster to shut down.
More recently, at the end of 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that millions of articles were used without authorization to train chatbots that compete with the news outlet.
Patel and Jeong, expressing their skepticism towards OpenAI’s argument that it is fair use, imply that OpenAI and its legal team have their work cut out for them.
Intent
Based on the scene from the meeting between Miyazaki and the AI animation software vendor, it’s easy to imagine that Miyazaki would have a violent reaction to this AI-generated, “realistic” rendering of his creation if he saw it.
As of this writing (late February 2024), the said AI creator appears to have taken the forgiveness path. I couldn’t find any direct commentary by Miyazaki on this reinterpreted footage.
The creator may have the liberty to claim fair use here, hypothetically that is since it is a US doctrine. In addition, the legality of fair use isn’t my domain of expertise nor is this essay about scrutinizing whether this reinterpretation of Miyazaki’s work legally constitutes copyright infringement or not.
When I shared this clip on social media and posed questions about the ethics of this work, more people weighed in than any of my recent posts. Many were critical of it for the lack of original thought. There also isn’t that much reinterpreting.
Looking at this creator’s Instagram profile, they list many clips that are remakes of famous animated mangas and films. I for one used to copy old masters’ drawings and paintings to practice when I was a teenager and later in college.
Furthermore, leveraging someone else’s work to show off and promote one’s skill is not unusual. The intent may be both experimentation and self-promotion.
To some extent, I commend this creator’s technical ability and admire their craftsmanship. It’s not just the moving image but also the subtle audio design that adds a dimension to the footage. The music selection “The Name of Life,” one of the key songs from “Spirited Away,” is obvious but effective.
This short sampling and remixing of the old master’s work has struck a chord. It has garnered over 75 million views on Instagram alone. This kind of reach wouldn’t be possible for something mediocre.
Having said this, I do find this particular work extremely shallow, superficial, and opportunistic.
My favorite and most succinct definition of creativity comes from Joel Podolny, the former dean of Yale School of Management and Apple University: Creativity is original thought and skillful action, not one or the other.
By this definition, this AI clip fulfills the second half, we could say, but definitely not the first part.
The real question here is whether this creator and others like them who leverage technology, as well as other people’s work, will one day create original work and be respected as artists in their own right.
Almost anyone can generate and claim to be a creator.
Only those who come up with original thoughts and create something unique and different—whether using AI or not—are the real artists.
Thanks for reading. Please hit reply with any feedback, thoughts, or questions. I’d love to hear from you.