Ghibli Style ChatGPT Takes Over...

Okay, here's a summary of the video, covering the new ChatGPT feature, the viral trend, the tech details, the copyright debate, and a touch of the presenter's perspective, all in a casual, friend-to-friend style.

So, the big news is that OpenAI's servers are pretty much melting because of a super popular new image generation feature added to their GPT-4o model. This model, called "Omni" because it handles pretty much everything (text, visuals, sound, speech), now has this killer ability to turn anything you give it into a Ghibli-style image, and everyone online is obsessed with it, creating Ghibli versions of everything they can think of. The demand is so wild that it's only rolled out to paid users right now.

Here's a breakdown of what's going on:

• The core feature is GPT-4o's new, powerful image generation. It's a multimodal model, meaning it understands and works with various types of data like text, images, and audio all together, which is a big step.
• The main driver of its current viral spread is the ability to generate images in the distinct style of Studio Ghibli films. People are turning selfies, pets, memes, and historical events into this whimsical, animated style.
• Demand is incredibly high, leading to the feature being initially limited to paid ChatGPT subscribers as they scale up.
• There was a funny, somewhat tense moment when someone posted a supposed cease and desist letter from Studio Ghibli about using their style. It sparked outrage from people who felt it was deserved for "stealing" art. However, it quickly became clear the letter was fake, likely an AI-generated troll, which the presenter found pretty hilarious.
• The image generation capabilities are seriously impressive. People are showing examples like recreating complex conceptual scenes (like from the TV show Severance) and generating intricate images like a Wikipedia page about recursion that correctly shows an infinite loop effect (though the text gets distorted further in).
• It can handle surprisingly complex and abstract requests, like trying to generate an image of a "Ringworld" structure from science fiction. While the attempt shown wasn't perfect, the fact that any model could produce something even resembling it is considered unique and impressive.
• A technically cool and slightly mind-bending capability shown is generating depth maps from standard 2D images. This connects to research suggesting AI models implicitly learn about 3D space, light, and shadows just from being trained on tons of 2D images – essentially, they figure out how the real world looks without being explicitly taught 3D concepts.
• The model isn't just for static images; it can generate useful assets for other creative work. It can create iMessage sticker sets directly from a photo of you and even multi-frame sprites that look ready to be dropped into a video game engine for simple animations. People are also using AI video tools to animate the images created with GPT-4o.
• This viral trend has reignited the intense debate around AI and copyright, especially regarding artistic styles. While the presenter believes that training AI models on existing public data (like "reading" images or text) isn't a copyright violation, similar to how search engine bots crawl the web, the issue gets complicated with the outputs.
• The main question in the copyright debate is whether the AI generating an image in a recognizable style, especially if prompted to do so or if it's used commercially, constitutes infringement. Current copyright laws feel outdated for this new reality. Japan, interestingly, has taken a stance that training on data is generally not copyright infringement.
• The presenter mentions Studio Ghibli's founder, Hayao Miyazaki, expressed negative views on machine-created art back in 2016, highlighting the long-standing tension between traditional art and automated creation.
• On the AI safety side, GPT-4o is described as potentially more "unhinged" and less restrictive than previous models, capable of generating content like deepfakes that might have been blocked before. OpenAI is reportedly trying a new approach to guardrails.
• The presenter thinks OpenAI was incredibly lucky that the Ghibli trend became the first massive viral use case for this model. The positive, whimsical nature of the Ghibli style is seen as helping to "tone everything down" and distract from the potentially negative or harmful content the model could generate, focusing public attention on fun, harmless uses.
• On a personal note, despite the model's power, the presenter found it frustratingly difficult to get it to generate a Ghibli-style image that actually looked like him, sharing several funny failed attempts before finding one that was halfway decent.
• He also has a quirky habit of saying "please" and "thank you" to the AI models he interacts with, joking that it might be a good survival strategy if robots ever take over.