Whither Intellectual Property rights?

Some time back there was a delightful trend of converting photos into Studio Ghibli images. It took the world by storm and people put political, sporting and filmi Ghiblis on their feeds in great numbers. Even India wasn’t spared from this.

But what does Studio Ghibli think of this? What do their animators think? Is it a tribute, or was the tonnes of content a form of plagiarism or Intellectual Property violation? What does it even mean to copy someone’s style? Some used more AIs to convert those images into cartoons. What if somebody made an entire movie based on that? The team of Studio Ghibli has so far avoided high technology and AI, sticking to the classical 2D method. But now what happens when someone replicates that in large numbers without any effort whatsoever? What does it mean to copy someone’s style or voice or mannerism or even someone’s image and face? It’s just a matter of time before someone abuses this on an industrial scale. The desktop publishing revolution put the printing of books into the hands of the common man. Now anyone could publish a limited number of books on a small budget. More so with the advent of the ebook. The internet meant that anyone could publish news or blogs of all kinds. The social media revolution meant that just about anyone could go viral, even a kid. Now add to that the AI revolution.

Could get out of control

Anyone sitting in the comfort of his or her home without any kind of creative thinking can churn out images, videos, films, books, pieces of art in large numbers. They could copy/plagiarise and go viral. How could you undo that? If the living were around to sue, then what of the dead. What if someone masters Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci and churns out masterpieces in large numbers and they become popular? How will the world handle this flood of content? Will it be chaos or will a new form of art and writing emerge at the end of all of this? Will the human brain become redundant, or will we all somehow manage to stay one step ahead of AI? But for how long? How will our brain handle it? How will governments handle it? How will regulation keep up or maybe stifle the AI revolution?

How will the brains of kids who grow up in this era evolve? If we thought that the smartphone generation was the pinnacle of technology, then let’s see what the AI generation has in store for us!