This column is about AI-generated art and crisps, starting with the more significant of the two.

Once a month, my uncle gives me a bin bag of crisps. Staff at the crisp factory where he works can claim as much as they want from the overspill chute, so each haul is a chance-assembled cross-section of British fried-potato snack trends. This month’s bag includes crisps from two of the big-four supermarkets, a German discounter, and a sandwich retailer of strategic national importance. They all fell off the same production line.

That’s not to say they’re identical. Vinegar can be malt or cider. Cheese is sometimes given a geographical designation, and the semiotics of “ready salted” versus “lightly salted” deserve academic study. What I can say with rare authority is that, whatever the packet says, such differences are insignificant. Crisps are crisps.

Chips are different, but can also be fried. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman claimed this week that demand for its ChatGPT bot was so high it was cooking the GPUs. User numbers surged after OpenAI allowed its image generator to plagiarise a wider universe of unlicensed intellectual property.

How it works isn’t that interesting, which is why we started with crisps. To summarise: the first AI image generators stacked individual pixels. The newer type splits images into tokens and predicts which elements fit best together, so can form scenes in a unified style. International law has not settled on whether this kind of tokenisation infringes the copyright of training materials, and OpenAI isn’t waiting to find out. Through its preference for the possible over the responsible, a new word was added to our cultural lexicon: “Ghiblified”.

It refers to Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation house known for a visual language crafted over 40 years that is as emotionally layered as its stories. ChatGPT made pidgin Ghibli available via simple text prompts and, this being the internet, it went exactly as you’d expect.

Ever wanted to see 9/11 rendered in soft Japanese pastels? How about a US officer handcuffing a sobbing woman, stylised to look a bit like a scene from Porco Rosso? Can we interest you in a mechanically reconstituted cartoon of Hayao Miyazaki, Ghibli’s revered co-founder, telling the studio that computer-aided art is “an insult to life itself”? Probably not, but anyone online this past fortnight didn’t get a choice.

By now you may be wondering what this has to do with crisps.

AI’s harvesting of intellectual property has an echo in private label regulation. There’s no copyright for styles — a snack maker can’t claim exclusive use of a flavour any more than an artist can copyright a look, for example — but the relevant law in the UK and elsewhere, passing-off, still seeks to deter copycats using another brand’s distinctive features in a way that could confuse or mislead customers.

One product can resemble another as long as there’s no piggybacking on its creator’s reputation and goodwill. And while passing-off actions rarely succeed, there’s enough precedent established for companies to know the limits. Potato chips in a tube: probably fine. Moustachioed man on the tube: probably not.

I propose giving artists as much protection as crisp makers. Judge the product by how it looks, not by how it was made.

The wrong starting point when trying to understand generative AI is to treat what it does as creation. It’s not. It’s consumption. The users don’t want to make things, they want to have things. The machine doesn’t invent, it assembles. It’s the production line of a commodity producer.

For proof, look at the arc of the Ghibli meme. It started with parodies of famous images, descended within hours to shock value, then had nowhere left to go. Among the terminally online, who are best placed to learn and identify the specific grind of a content mill, the novelty had worn off in less than a day.

Most non-science AI breakthroughs seem to fizzle out this way. Almost nothing made by an algorithm has left a lasting impression, probably because no life was involved in its creation. Generative art is an oxymoron.

Crisps, meanwhile, are crisps. It’s too easy to get bogged down in the philosophy of whether encoding an artwork without compensating its creator is theft. A better question relates to whether someone is seeking to profit from someone else’s hard-earned reputation and goodwill. A look at the product is all it takes to know.

Having endorsed and promoted the Ghibli stunt, Altman said ChatGPT added a million new users in an hour. Put in the right context, it sounds a lot like a confession.

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