The AI Copyright Conundrum: Billion-Dollar Theft Disguised as Innovation?
ALARMING: Hasbro paid $3.8 billion for Peppa Pig. OpenAI paid $0 to copy it flawlessly.
Hello, I hope you’re doing well.
Apologies for the silence here at Honest AI. I’ve been traveling extensively in the past month and could not devote enough time to it.
Before we discuss the AI copyright conundrum, I need a one-minute favor. Please let me know how this publication is going for you.
To the first five responders, I will gift you a month-long paid subscription — the best Substack (and perhaps source of information) about AI Governance ever.
Great, let’s get to our main topic!
Studio Ghibli-style AI images have flooded our feeds this month. I decided to try something closer to home – Peppa Pig, my children's favorite character.
The results stunned me.
With minimal effort, I generated authentic-looking Peppa Pig scenes virtually indistinguishable from official content. What seemed like innocent fun revealed something deeply troubling: massive AI systems now perfectly mimic billion-dollar intellectual properties without permission or payment.
The $3.8 Billion Discrepancy
Hasbro didn't acquire Peppa Pig through a casual agreement. They paid $3.8 billion – real money – for legitimate ownership rights.
Meanwhile, companies like OpenAI train their models on identical creative properties and pay absolutely nothing to the original creators. Their image generators now reproduce distinctive styles that artists spent decades developing, perfecting, and monetizing.
The economic math feels broken. The ethical equation even more so.
A Decisive Moment for Creative Economics
The viral Ghibli AI trend represents something far more significant than cute images. They expose some fundamental contradictions at the heart of generative AI:
When perfect copies emerge without infringement, existing copyright frameworks collapse.
Creative professionals whose work fuels AI systems receive zero compensation while their distinctive styles become public commodities.
As one commenter on my LinkedIn post noted, "regulations are running behind—and will likely remain fragmented." The legal system cannot catch up with the technological reality.
Fierce Disagreement
When I posted about this on LinkedIn, it sparked heated debate, revealing profound disagreements about creativity and ownership:
"Artists' works have been copied for as long as art existed," argued one commenter. "Creativity isn't a single image or design. Creativity is narrative, storytelling, connection with audience."
Others saw immediate ethical problems: "AI's ability to mimic without compensation isn't just a tech issue—it's an ethical one that challenges the very foundation of creative ownership."
The tech-optimist view emerged too: "No one has the copyright to imagination... The scene which took months can be created in minutes using AI. Saving time, effort, money, manpower."
Efficiency Without Economic Balance
The efficiency argument misses a crucial reality: economic sustainability requires fair compensation.
We enjoy cartoons because of functioning economic exchanges between artists, creators, writers, and distribution platforms. We pay to watch content, and creators sell distribution rights.
Yet we pay subscription fees to AI companies who replicate these creative processes using the work of creators who receive absolutely nothing in return.
Efficiency without economic balance creates market failure.
The Internet Time Capsule Risk
"If Studio Ghibli isn't safe, imagine our data," wrote another commenter.
The implications extend well beyond anime and cartoon pigs. Personal data, journalistic work, scientific publications – all become training material without consent or compensation.
When tech companies extract value from others' work with zero payment, we're witnessing industrial-scale exploitation masquerading as technological progress.
A Silicon Valley friend recently shared a warning that haunts me: nobody seems to recognize that unchecked AI scraping threatens to turn the internet into a time capsule.
Think about it. If creators, publishers, journalists, and artists increasingly lock their content behind paywalls or stop publishing online altogether to protect their work from being harvested without compensation, what happens?
The open internet collapses.
AI systems would function solely on historical data, unable to learn from new human creativity. Innovation would stagnate. The internet would become a frozen artifact rather than a living ecosystem of human exchange and creativity.
This isn't science fiction. We already see major publishers pulling content, artists removing portfolios, and writers reconsidering open publication. Without addressing the fundamental economic imbalance, we risk killing the very resource – openly shared human creativity – that makes generative AI valuable in the first place.
The internet and AI could become a historical failure, left with nothing new to learn from, process, or generate.
Practical Solutions
Responsible AI development requires concrete changes:
Opt-in training data: Using only properly licensed content or implementing royalty systems for creators whose work powers AI capabilities.
Style attribution: Crediting and compensating original creators when AI mimics distinctive styles.
Fair compensation models: Developing systems that share revenue with the creators whose work makes AI generation possible.
Exercise your rights: Ask ChatGPT not to use your data for training or to remove your data here.
One commenter perfectly captured it: "When creativity is commodified without consent, it is not innovation; it is exploitation."
Your Perspective Matters
What's your take on this pivotal issue?
Should AI companies compensate creators whose work they use for training?
Have you generated AI images mimicking specific artistic styles?
What ethical guidelines should govern how AI learns from human creativity?
I read every message and will feature thoughtful responses in our following newsletter.
Until next time,
—a
P.S. If you're concerned about your own creative work being used without permission for AI training, look into Credtent – a platform helping creators declare preferences regarding AI usage of their content.
P.P.S. If this analysis sparked your thinking, forward it to a colleague who might appreciate the perspective.
Memorisation is something you want and not. You don't want infringement. You do want that it delivers you the correct Shakespeare text. You don't want training data leakage. The mechanism has no understanding what is one and what is the other nor is it capable of acquiring that understanding.
https://ea.rna.nl/2023/12/26/memorisation-the-deep-problem-of-midjourney-chatgpt-and-friends/