Hayao Miyasaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio known worldwide for their stunning, emotional, beautiful stories and movies. At the core of Studio Ghibli’s work is a deep engagement with questions of humanity. About what it means to be a human, about how to care for one another and the world […]
To answer your question, it’s more about arguing for basic freedoms consistently than about arguing for disrespect.
When approaching these ethical questions, I think it’s best to focus on the individual & moral reciprocity: should someone be able to express themselves in a way that offends me?
As long as it obeys the harm principle, the answer is yes.
Accordingly, anyone should be free to express themselves with imagery in the style of Ghibli (using tools such as AI) even if it offends the studio’s founder, since it results in no actual harm.
Since morality should be based on universal principles that don’t depend on contingent facts of an agent (such as their characteristics), I find it clarifies questions to approach technology with their non-technological equivalents.
Would it be wrong to train a person to learn Ghibli art style so they could produce similar works in that style on demand?
The harm of that is unclear, and I would think it’s fine.
I don’t see a general duty for a free society to fulfill a wish unless it’s more of a claim right than a wish.
In particular, criticism is a basic part of art: a duty not to criticize artists (who wish not to be criticized) would be unjust.
While an artist should get credit (and all due intellectual property rights) for their work, once it’s out in the wild it takes on a life of its own: people are free to criticize it, parody it, & make fair use of it.
Some wishes don’t need to be fulfilled.
To answer your question, it’s more about arguing for basic freedoms consistently than about arguing for disrespect.
When approaching these ethical questions, I think it’s best to focus on the individual & moral reciprocity: should someone be able to express themselves in a way that offends me? As long as it obeys the harm principle, the answer is yes. Accordingly, anyone should be free to express themselves with imagery in the style of Ghibli (using tools such as AI) even if it offends the studio’s founder, since it results in no actual harm.
Since morality should be based on universal principles that don’t depend on contingent facts of an agent (such as their characteristics), I find it clarifies questions to approach technology with their non-technological equivalents. Would it be wrong to train a person to learn Ghibli art style so they could produce similar works in that style on demand? The harm of that is unclear, and I would think it’s fine.
I don’t see a general duty for a free society to fulfill a wish unless it’s more of a claim right than a wish. In particular, criticism is a basic part of art: a duty not to criticize artists (who wish not to be criticized) would be unjust. While an artist should get credit (and all due intellectual property rights) for their work, once it’s out in the wild it takes on a life of its own: people are free to criticize it, parody it, & make fair use of it. Some wishes don’t need to be fulfilled.
You really just wrote 4 paragraphs to say “I wanna make other people upset for my own personal gain at little to no benefit to the world at large”