Commentary: Japan’s AI stance is betraying its anime artists

TOKYO: Japan’s artists have given the nation an outsize influence around the globe, with manga, anime and other cultural exports producing some of the world’s most beloved figures – while its once-dominant tech sector sputtered.
From Dragon Ball to Pokemon and Studio Ghibli, this body of ingenuity emanating from the minds and hearts of its people is what has made Japan uniquely Japan. But now, its creative industries are under threat as the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools make it easy for anyone to mimic these art forms. The country must update its laws to protect the people whose works have defined its culture.
This fight for the future of arts in the AI era is playing out around the globe, but Japan’s industry-friendly regulation – and the reach of its homegrown creative industry – has made it a battleground to watch. It can show leadership not by prioritising the data-hungry demands of tech companies, but by protecting the human artists whose products have inspired the world.
Currently, a vague update in 2018 to Japan’s intellectual property law has been interpreted as allowing the widespread use of copyrighted materials to train AI tools without permission. Some industry watchers say this open-armed approach is geared toward attracting tech firms.
A subcommittee for the Agency for Cultural Affairs said it would review AI copyright issues and received nearly 25,000 public comments. The group earlier this year released a draft outline on how to interpret current copyright law that seemed sympathetic to artists, but it is not legally binding. The same agency, meanwhile, is offering free legal consultation to creators and doing outreach to gain a better understanding of specific problems. The government can’t afford to move at a snail’s pace while tech companies are devouring the internet for content to train their AI models.
For artists, this is a devastating double blow. Many feel that their work is being taken to create the very tools that then threaten to their livelihoods. A survey conducted last year by the Arts Workers Japan association found that 92 per cent of illustrators feared their works were already being scraped to train AI tools without their permission. Roughly 60 per cent of respondents were also concerned about fewer employment opportunities.
Already, some of the most beloved Japanese characters seem to have been swept into AI training data. Social media has become flooded with artificial versions of them, including machine-gun wielding Hello Kitties or body-builder Pikachus. And a slew of open-source AI models have made it so that almost anyone can train tools on images they upload from their favorite artists to spit out content resembling that style.
And it’s not just still art. Earlier this year, OpenAI teased a first look at its video tool, Sora, rocking the industry. Filmmaker Tyler Perry said he halted a planned US$800 million expansion of his studio in Atlanta after seeing Sora’s “mind-blowing” capabilities. OpenAI, meanwhile, hasn’t publicly shared details of what data it was trained on.
Chief technology officer Mira Murati sidestepped questions about this in an interview earlier this year, saying “I’m actually not sure about that” when asked if videos from YouTube were used. A few months later, Murati took heat for admitting, rather inelegantly, that “some creative jobs maybe will go away”. (She later defended this remark in a lengthy X post). 
But these comments from the most influential CTO in the AI sector should be alarming for their lack of transparency about what materials are being used to train its tools – and their frank acknowledgment that this technology will impact artists’ jobs. OpenAI announced it was launching its first Asia office in Tokyo earlier this year, with many suggesting Japan’s hands-off regulation playing a role in that decision. 
Globally, issues of intellectual property rights and AI are making their way through courts. China often gets a bad rap for a perceived lax approach to IP, but in the realm of AI it has taken a lead. In a landmark case earlier this year, a court in Guangzhou ruled that an AI service provider was liable for copyright infringement over outputs that resembled the Japanese sci-fi character Ultraman.
Japan should take a more proactive approach by demanding transparency from companies about what data their tools are learning from. Policymakers could then set clear guidelines for how to compensate artists if their work is being used. Allowing tech firms to enrich themselves off free access to the labour of creatives, who are often not paid well, will accentuate income inequality and undermine the future of the industries that rely on them. 
Beyond being produced off stolen work, one of the biggest criticisms of AI-generated art is that it is often soulless – redundant versions of human creations, stripped of the elements that made us feel something in the first place.
Hayao Miyazaki, the Oscar-winning filmmaker and genius behind Studio Ghibli, famously said he was “utterly disgusted” by a clip of AI-generated animation he was shown. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he said in a 2016 NHK documentary.
Japan should remember that it wasn’t its tech industry that propelled its soft power and global influence in recent decades, but the minds of artists like Miyazaki. Creative works kept the country relevant even while its industrial might has slipped. It now has the choice to protect this ingenuity, rather than betray it.