A Japanese trade organization representing publishers like Studio Ghibli wrote a letter to OpenAI last week, calling for the AI giant to stop training its AI models on their copyrighted content without permission.
Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind films like “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro,” has been especially impacted by OpenAI’s generative AI products. When ChatGPT’s native image generator was released in March, it became a popular trend for users to prompt for re-creations of their selfies or pet pictures in the style of the studio’s films. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman changed his profile picture on X to a “Ghiblified” picture.
Now, as more people get access to OpenAI’s Sora app and video generator, Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) has requested that OpenAI refrain from using its members’ content for machine learning without permission.
>be me
>grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever
>mostly no one cares for first 7.5 years, then for 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything
>wake up one day to hundreds of messages: "look i made you into a twink ghibli style haha" — Sam Altman (@sama) March 26, 2025
This request does not come unprompted. OpenAI’s approach to working with copyrighted content is to ask forgiveness, not permission, which has made it all too easy for users to generate photos and videos of copyrighted characters and deceased celebrities. This approach has yielded complaints from institutions like Nintendo, as well as the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who could very easily be deepfaked on the Sora app.
It’s up to OpenAI to choose whether to cooperate with these requests; if not, the aggrieved parties can file a lawsuit, though United States law remains unclear about the use of copyrighted material for AI training.
There is little precedent thus far to guide judges on their interpretation of copyright law, which has not been updated since 1976. However, a recent ruling by U.S. federal judge William Alsup found that Anthropic did not violate the law by training its AI on copyrighted books — the company did get fined for pirating the books it used for training, though.
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