Raw LLM Responses

Styles aren’t copyrightable. Individual artworks are, and using those for training should absolutely be off-limits. But a style itself? No. And there is a metric fuckton of Ghibli-inspired, public-domain-adjacent art floating around online that a model could learn from without ever touching a single copyrighted frame. Do I believe they refrained from scraping the real thing? Oh, please. Of course not. But proving it is a nightmare, and “innocent until proven guilty” is still the rule, whether people like it or not. Here’s the core problem: model weights do not preserve the identity of the training data. At all. This isn’t some “we just haven’t figured it out yet” technical hurdle. It’s a mathematical impossibility. You cannot reverse-engineer weights back into source images. They also aren’t human-readable, and there’s no legal framework forcing companies to store or reveal their exact datasets. Not in US. The EU’s AI Act is at least trying to enforce transparency, but it can’t apply retroactively — law doesn’t work by time travel. So the weights we already have? They’re basically permanent. They’ll stay, they’ll circulate, and no one is putting that genie back in the bottle. P.S. Before anyone even goes there: fantasies about “banning AI art entirely” are just that — fantasies. You can’t reliably detect AI art, and as models improve, even the illusion of detectability evaporates. Enforcing a ban would require mass device surveillance or scanning every uploaded image, which is both unworkable and dystopian. Open-source models already run locally and will only spread further — you can’t outlaw math that fits on a USB stick. And culturally, nobody is about to burn half of digital media to appease a purity cult; artists simply don’t have the clout, especially when corporations are salivating over dirt-cheap content pipelines. And yes, this includes Disney. They’ll fight for their own IP, squeeze whatever concessions they can, and position themselves to profit from AI as fast as possible. They don’t give a single flying fuck about “protecting art” or “defending artists.” They care about revenue streams, full stop.