OpenAI’s native image generation feature has been in the spotlight over the past few days for its ability to convert real-life images into Stuido Ghibli-style images, leading to a raging viral trend on social media. However, many ChatGPT users have started complaining that they are now getting error messages when trying to generate Ghibli-style images.
One user posted on Reddit about getting a copyright violation error when generating Ghibli-style images.
“OpenAI has restrictions on generating images in the style of specific artists, including Studio Ghibli. This is due to copyright and intellectual property concerns.” the error message from ChatGPT read.
This is different from the message that the chatbot gives when responding to users who haven’t received the native image generation feature yet.
Many other users on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) have also complained about being unable to generate Studio Ghibli-inspired images with ChatGPT, with similar-sounding error messages.
However, it is unlikely that OpenAI has banned the generation of Ghibli-style images, considering that many users continue to post newer such images. Moreover, even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman currently uses a Ghibli-style portrait image as his profile picture.
Copyright conerns around OpenAI’s new tool:
OpenAI is currently already being sued by New York Times over allegations of the AI startup using millions of its articles to train its GPT models. Similarly, the Sam Altman led company is also being sued by a collective of 17 authors including George R. R. Martin and John Grisham over copyright violation.
While OpenAI’s latest native image generation tool hasn’t being sued yet, there are still plenty of concerns around copyright violation with the system. Other text-to-image generators like Midjourney and Stability AI have previously been sued for generating ‘unauthorized derivative works’.
A similar native image generation feature rolled out by Google with Gemini’s latest model was also used for removing copyright labels off images.
OpenAI limits image generation with GPT-4o:
Recently, OpenAI had also limited the number of images that paying users could generate with ChatGPT after the Ghibli image trend gained popularity.
“It’s super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt. but our GPUs are melting. we are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won’t be long! ChatGPT free tier will get 3 generations per day soon.” Sam Almtan had informed in a post on X.
