OpenAI's Studio Ghibli AI: 'An Insult to Life Itself'

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Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast.

Joseph is out this week, so this week I'm your host, Jason Kebler.

With me are Sam Cole and Emmanuel Mayberg.

No room to say hi?

Hi.

Hi, no room to say hi.

So, a few things.

Few things.

Well, Emmanuel, do you want to say hi?

Hello.

Few things.

I bought a teleprompter, so the eye contact during this is going to be insane.

If you're watching on YouTube, I'm going to be on point.

The thing is that I haven't written a lot of dialogue for me to say,

but this thing is very cool.

I really feel like I'm on MSMBC right now.

We just need to get a scroll going.

All right.

Let's hop into it.

Let's just hop into it.

So we're going to talk about

OpenAI's new

anime generator.

That's not what it is, but we're going to talk about the Miyazaki AI.

And

the title of the story is Hayao Miyazaki, who said AI is an insult to life itself, reduced to AI-generated meme by OpenAI.

Emmanuel, you wrote this story with Matthew Galt, who is going to be writing a little bit more for us coming up.

Should we start with Miyazaki first?

I was going to suggest if we could each establish our relationship with anime and Miyazaki

individually.

I feel like it's not necessary, but it's like useful information for our readers.

That feels like a trap.

Establish your relationship with anime.

It feels like a trap.

Total transparency, yes.

Personally,

I had an anime phase as a teen, which included Princess Mononoki, which is my favorite Miyazaki.

In general, I'm not a huge fan of anime in general, but

his movies, Studio Ghibli's movies in particular.

But I like Mononoki.

That's my favorite one.

Usually, I just find his work to be like too,

I don't know, magical realism.

It's like very...

It's very loosey-goosey.

Like, there's not a lot of plot to follow.

It's like vibes and amazing-looking visuals, but not a lot of story I can latch on to.

Sam, I feel like you're more of an anime fan than I am.

I don't know.

I mean, I'm

I had a phase also as a teen.

I was really into Fruits Basket, which is an anime about boys who turn into cats.

Um,

but yeah, I loved uh, I love Totoro, obviously.

I was introduced to Miyazaki kind of late, like in college, and a boyfriend was like, you should watch Totoro.

And I was like, we watched it together.

So it has like a nostalgic vibe.

I haven't watched watched a lot, I mean, I haven't watched a ton of Ghibli, but

yeah, I'm a fan.

I'm, you know, I would consider myself a fan for sure.

I saw Mononoke in theaters, and it was incredible.

So, Jason, where do you stand?

So, we've established that you two are both uh anime fanatics.

Um, I have not seen anything by uh Miyazaki or Studio Jubilee, really, nothing at all.

I've, I've not, I've, I've not, we should end the pod before we get canceled.

I'm gonna be the uh AI

copyright discusser on this podcast

because, and, and also the stand-in for people who have no idea what we're talking about, because I've not seen any anime other than like Pokemon.

Okay, that's anime, that's why it cancels.

I know you're a Pokemon.

Well, I know, like, big fan of Pokemon.

Uh, I watched like a very small amount of Yu-Gi-Oh!, I would say, but, um,

and I saw a little bit of like um

Ranma one half, I believe it's called.

No,

not familiar, I haven't heard of it.

Wow, it's a deep.

It's really not, it's very, very, very famous

considering that I've seen it, but um, I forget what it was about.

In any case, let's talk about um

so what is what is Studio Ghibli and who is Miyazaki like for people like me who do not know.

I know spirit, I know that the

name, I know that he made beloved movies.

That's all I know.

Yeah, it is the

most celebrated and I think award-winning

anime studio.

And it is,

I don't know if it's the most mainstream because you have things like Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z,

but

Studio Ghibli, which is led by Miyazaki, he's a co-founder of the studio, has been around forever, has a very distinct visual style.

And everybody knows about it because the movies have wide appeal.

They've been nominated for Oscars.

When they're dubbed to English, like big movie stars

dubbed the movies.

And the reason we're talking about it is that last week, OpenAI updated ChatGPT with a new AI image generator, which is, you know, it's a...

It's a race to like who has the best image generator.

It feels like every week there's a new one that can do something really impressive one thing that people figured out very quickly with this one and that made it go viral is that it is very good at copying the studio gbli style which is instantly recognizable if you've ever seen it it's um

not quite

like

other anime that you've seen.

It has like a warmer palette.

It's a bit like softer angles when you think about, I don't know, Goku's spiky hair and things like that.

And a style that people really love.

And all you have to do is feed it an image and ask the model to recreate that image in the style of Studio Ghibli.

And it does that very, very well.

And

that caught on, A, because

understandably, it's like pretty novel and fun to feed it an image of your family or your friends and see what you would look like if you were part of a Studio Ghibli movie.

But then also, I think

people were having fun with it and testing the limits of what the model would do.

And they found that it is way more permissive compared to previous

OpenAI tools and

OpenAI image generators.

So they fed it like

images of

historical figures, Stalin.

The top image in our article is an image that Matthew Gall generated, which is the moment that Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq by the U.S.

And it will produce similarly kind of

graphic or suggestive images.

Napalm Girl, which is a famous image from the Vietnam War, is something that would

recreated in the Studio Ghibli style.

The Saigon execution, another like

very famous, horrible image of a person being executed in Saigon during the war.

It created a Studio Ghibli version of that as well.

And that kind of blew up all over the internet.

If you were on social media at all, I'm sure you've seen it.

Yeah, I think that

I guess some additional context.

Studio Ghibli animation, I learned this like reading articles about this, but like it's notoriously like painstaking work.

It's like the artists who do it sometimes spend like a year on a single scene.

Is that correct?

Yeah, it's

over the years,

this is true in like Western animation studios, but also in Japanese animation studios.

A lot of work has been outsourced or, I mean, if you know Disney movies at all, it was like a big deal when Disney started doing 3D for some of like the background stuff, which saved them some of this labor.

But yeah, animation is you're doing, I think, what 24 frames per second, and you're hand-drawing all of that

if it's a Studio Ghibli movie.

So they're very, very

labor-intensive works of art that many people work on.

And

the quote in the article comes from a documentary that came out in 2016 about Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

And what happens there is that I think it's

a few students that come in and they're demoing

a

3D model that is animated with AI.

So if you're making like a toy story, a Pixar movie, and you're moving a 3D model, you're kind of puppeteering that 3D model frame by frame to make it walk or do anything.

And they created this AI tool that animates the character, which in this case, I think was kind of a zombie

that was crawling, laboring across the screen.

And Miyazaki sees that

to this group of excited students, and he just shuts them down and

says that it's an insult to life itself.

And yeah, so here's the full quote.

He says, quote, whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever.

I am utterly utterly disgusted.

If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it.

I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.

I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.

Yeah, pretty strong condemnation of this demo that he got, which, of course, kind of circles back to the fact that

almost 10 years later, his signature style is reduced to an AI-generated, AI-powered meme.

Yeah, and I think also notable, like, you know, Sam Altman has shared images in this style.

Sam Altman, you know, the CEO of OpenAI, also changed his profile picture on X to a geeblified version of himself.

And I think that this has started,

I mean, the conversation has been going on for a very long time, but it started yet again, the conversation about, one, AI-generated art, but then also, you know, the theft of this art and the fact that this is clearly trained on

tons and tons and tons of copyrighted work.

And then, as you mentioned, it feels like the guardrails on this new tool are worse than ever.

I mean, I've seen not just

Miyazaki

Studio Ghibli AI versions of horrifying things, but I've also seen people just say, like, hey, generate me an image of the Pope, and it does.

Generate me an image of LeBron James, and it does.

That's something that in the past, OpenAI has attempted to prevent.

And it suggests that the company

is like really flouting

this idea that it's going to win these lawsuits that are against it, that it is trying to take off like as many guardrails as possible, I guess.

Yeah, so a few things about that.

One is that since we published this article, Sam Altman has said a bit more about what a big moment this was for the company.

It wasn't just like a viral thing that was happening on social media.

He said that the biggest week the company had was when they first launched ChatGPT3,

and that was like 500,000 users joined in a day.

And he said that a million people

in like the two days or a day after this update.

So it's like a big

last night when we're recording this, we're recording this Tuesday morning.

On Monday night, he tweeted that a million people joined in an hour.

Yeah, right.

Okay, yeah.

So that's even more impressive than I thought.

It's like, it's like legitimately a big deal for their business.

So

in terms of

the guardrails, I think there's two things that are happening.

One is that OpenAI has taken a lot of flack and is also facing real lawsuits from artists who are mad that previously you could go to DALI, which

is one of its AI image generators, and say, generate me an image in the style of fill in your specific artist.

And they're getting sued over that.

And what they said in response to our request for comment is that they now

will prevent generation of images in the style of a specific artist, but they're okay

with generating images in the style of a specific studio.

So you could say, generate an image in the style of Pixar, generate an image in the style of Studio Ghibli, but not generate an image in the style of Samantha Cole's watercolors, you know, which is, I don't know, I don't know.

Clearly, this is in response to the lawsuits, but I don't know what the legal thinking is behind the scenes that they think this is somehow that's a lawsuit that they're less likely to lose.

The other thing is that I think it was in 2023 that Sam wrote about how

Dali refused.

No, it was actually

Yes, it was Dali that refused to generate images of Julius Caesar.

That is how strict the guardrails were back then.

And those are just not there anymore.

And some Sam Altman has talked about this a little bit: that they want to have more open models, they want less restrictions.

And I think, honestly, it's like, I don't know the thinking behind that either, but that seems to me a reaction to

the competition

and other models being more permissive.

And then also just the fact that Trump is in the White House and they think that

restrictions are like woke and left-coated.

and they feel like they're not as likely to get in trouble for doing that kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, it feels to me like, you know, if you can't generate, you know, a fucked up image on chat GPT, you'll just go somewhere else and do it.

And Sam Altman might see this as like, oh, we're like losing users to Chinese image generators.

We're losing users to like these startup image generators, so on and so forth.

And they're just making a bet that they're not going to face some sort of enforcement here and it's interesting we're going to talk about this in the subscribers section but i did an article about um brain rot ai and how it's taking over instagram and a lot of these are like really graphic depictions of like sexual situations between lebron james and steph curry and diddy and things like that and it's like i don't know you can imagine what these things might be and the way that those are being created is they're not being created on chat GPT, but the people who are making it are having chat GPT write the prompts that they can then go put into another image generator.

And so it's interesting that the people who are like, quote unquote, doing this for a living or doing this to make money are

using

They're like they're using an interplay between a bunch of different image generators and video generators and like finding out where one guardrail ends and where one doesn't.

And maybe

Sam Altman is making the calculation that, like, fuck it.

Let's just let people do whatever they want on our platform.

Trump is in office.

FTC is not going to come after us.

Who knows?

Yeah.

And I think we're also going to see, there was some confusion about

when

OpenAI was allowing people to do this and when it wasn't.

And the short answer to that is that some people were testing an older model of the image generator, which had more guardrails.

And the new, newer one, the latest one, doesn't.

And it makes me wonder if, because open,

sorry, Sora is very guarded right now.

But when they release the next Sora model, is that going to be more relaxed?

And then are you going to see the type of thing that we're going to talk about later just coming directly out of OpenAI tools without all these workarounds?

Just like another thing that I really

wanted to mention is that,

as you said,

animation is very labor-intensive, and Studio Ghibli's stuff is very labor-intensive.

And I suspect that they are not going to change that because that's part of the studio's legacy, and they're very proud of how they do this work.

But there's been like a long history in animation of outsourcing a lot of the work.

Um,

do you know about like keyframe?

Have you ever heard the term in-betweener?

Do you know about this?

Uh, I know that technology has like come for animation over the years and that like

um

not every single cell is animated by the same person necessarily or not every single cell is even animated by hand anymore so it used to be like in the 90s that American studios and I think some Japanese studios, they would draw the key frames as it's called.

So it's

like one frame every second, or a couple of frames every second that are the key positions of the character, like the primary action.

And you kind of send all these keyframes to another studio.

I believe Korea was a big country that did this at the time.

And they, like a totally different studio, would draw all the in-between frames in the style that you gave them to kind of like tie all those key frames together.

So that has happened for decades.

And now

some Japanese anime studios are

outsourcing that exact same labor to AI tools, which to me seems like one of those applications of generative AI

that makes sense.

It's like very rote, difficult work that is already outsourced, and you're just outsourcing it somewhere else now.

I can imagine very easily that generative AI has a role in animation in the future,

but the thing that I think people found very annoying and I found very annoying is that like the AI booster crowd conflates the ability to replicate the studio Ghibli style with

the people who are using this tool somehow being the equivalent of Amiyazaki, which is obviously not the case and obviously missing the point.

And I don't know, this is a thing that has happened with generative AI the entire time we've been covering it.

But yeah, it's like there's a tool, there's probably a practical application of it in the future.

But

the AI booster crowd has so much glee about the possibility of putting artists out of work or somehow devaluing their work.

Like there was this meme that was going around, like, oh, it's over for illustrators, it's game over for animators, which I'm sure there will be an impact, but that is not, that is not what the tool is.

The tool is a proof of concept and

a fun fad,

but replicating

the style of Studio GBLI does not make you a master artist like a like a Miyazaki.

Yeah, I want to hear from Sam in a minute because she's done the most sort of reporting on the fact that all of these things are trained on, you know, tons and tons and tons of like, you know, cartoons, videos, YouTube videos, real photos, et cetera.

Like this is all trained on the work of real artists.

But one thing that I saw going repeatedly viral would be like a

VC or a Silicon Valley worker Miazocyting.

an image that they took of like themselves with them with their bros and being like yo look i turned i turned this into art.

And I thought that that was really interesting

and smart point you just made because it's like taking a picture of five of your co-founders on a couch and turning it into a Studio Ghibli anime is not turning it into art.

Like, that's not art.

It's not animation.

There's no story there.

There's no, like, taking an already existing image and just like running it through a filter is something that we have been able to do for an extremely long time.

And that is not creating stuff that people are like willing to pay for or consume.

And I think that that's very stupid.

That said,

if I were an illustrator, I would probably be pretty concerned

because

there clearly is going to be some impact.

And it already has been some impact on like graphic designers and artists.

We've seen a lot of

corporate clients, like people who used to do a lot of high-paying design work for, I don't know, like PowerPoints and stuff like that, like stop doing that and just replace it with AI because they're doing things that don't matter that much or maybe aren't public-facing or maybe are intended for clients who don't have like a particularly

discerning eye.

And so I know that a lot of graphic designers have seen their

illustration like clients kind of

dry up, which is really concerning.

Sam, we don't know exactly what this was trained on, of course, but you've done a lot of reporting on other companies, you know, training on just like tons of YouTube channels, things like that.

I mean, what do you, I think it's pretty obvious what is going on here, but

is there anything new for us to learn or is it same old, same old?

I mean, yeah, it's pretty obvious what's happening here.

And I think just like what I keep keep seeing, and what people are as a directional I think is new compared to like what you said with the filters that are art that have been happening for like five years almost, where it's like, oh, I turned my face into stained glass before we even called it like generative AI or whatever.

It was just like filters.

Um, people have people who are into the Ghibli stuff as like

a personality almost seems to be a thing.

And it's not that they're like fans of the studio, even it's that they

really gleefully hate

artists and i think that there's something going on there that maybe a lot of people wouldn't even admit it's like oh i don't hate artists i love art look how much i love art i'm i'm imitating it um but there is just kind of like this real disdain for

the process of making art itself that seems to be happening.

And people, there's like people who super hate generative AI and there's people who super hate the concept of artists continuing to make money.

And that there are people, those are extremes, and there's few people on those sides.

And there's more people in the middle who are kind of like, oh, this is fun, whatever.

I'm going to put it on my Instagram.

But that rift is getting wider.

And people are more and more fighting over those concepts as people actually lose their jobs over it.

You know, it's like people are losing their jobs left and right in every industry.

So, you know, of course, AI is impacting

graphic design as well as like programming and coding.

I don't know.

It's just like, it's,

I got, I was really pissed off at

the Studio Ghibli stuff when it was happening like Thursday, Friday

because of that attitude that I kept seeing where people were like, ha ha, like they were generating like that scene from that documentary of Miyazaki being like, this is an affront to like life itself or whatever he says.

And just like, I was like, okay, Sam Wattman is spitting in the face of like artists clearly and blatantly, and people think it's funny.

And then I read Emmanuel's behind the blog, and he was like, this is a trend.

This is like a stupid trend that people do all the time with technology and with these kind of consumer tools.

And that calmed me down a lot.

I was just like, okay,

you know, people are, people have been doing this forever.

But that cultural rift, I think, is real and like

worrisome.

And I try not to contribute to it by getting super worked up, but like it does piss me off to see people with that kind of attitude.

I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the last thing I'll say is I'm very interested in the fact that they said that they gained a million users in an hour yesterday because when ChatGPT launched, they did gain a lot of users very quickly, but a lot of those users fell off

very fast.

And of course, like ChatGPT, I know people who use it and rely on it for all sorts of stuff.

Not saying it's good.

I just know that it's become a daily habit of people when they want to look up something or,

I don't know, like rewrite something.

And I am curious if

this is a million users who are like, haha, I'm going to make like one

anime image and then never never use it again.

Or if these people are then going to like use it to write emails and become subscribers and so on and so forth.

Like, surely some amount of people will stick around.

But I don't know.

This feels, it still feels very flash in the pan to me if you've come there to like

make a specific meme or to run an image from your vacation through this and send it to the group chat.

Like, I don't know.

I'm very curious.

I know that OpenAI just raised like like $40 billion more dollars yesterday, but

the staying power of something like this, like, I really don't, I really don't know.

All right, let's leave that one there.

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Okay, we are back.

Sam, this is yours, and it was published today, this morning.

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What's going on here?

Yeah, I'm going to try to talk about the story without

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cache of photos that they can use to keep the conversation going.

And then sometimes AI is involved to some extent.

i don't know if on only fans that is the case but i know that on some other only fans competitors like you can outsource all of this to ai um

like i i i know a lot of um models have created like telegram bots where you can like pay to talk to someone on telegram and that is like almost fully hands-off um

just for people who like are not familiar with this world like that's that's vaguely like how it works, correct?

Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, and this obviously, if you if you're subscribing and you're thinking, oh, I'm subscribed to this woman who wants to talk to her fans,

well, I'm a fan, she must want to talk to me.

And then, you know, you start to kind of see inconsistencies, which is what the lawsuit claims, inconsistencies in messages,

or you're like, oh, I wonder, like, how is she making so much revenue?

She has so many, like, hundreds of fans, but she's talking to each one individually.

That can't be possible.

You know, putting two and two together, I guess

it kind of comes to light.

It's like, oh, maybe this is someone who's using one of these agencies that is very widely publicized and documented.

And maybe I am talking to some rando

in their own house, like

one of hundreds of chatters for this one model.

So that's what the lawsuit is

bringing OnlyFans to task for.

And they're a lot of the lawsuit, it's like, I don't know, it's like 60 something pages.

It's really long.

But a lot of it is kind of building on this idea that OnlyFans is marketing authenticity and direct connection and safety and moderation and all this stuff.

And

it's basically saying OnlyFans is defrauding users by breaking that promise of authenticity and not being upfront about not being upfront and also just letting people use agencies to begin with

through the platform.

So they're not even suing individual models, they're suing OnlyFans as

a platform itself.

Yeah.

Two extremely funny lines from this lawsuit.

Plaintiff created an account primarily in order to engage in friendly conversations with models and share photographs of his cooking creations.

Yeah, for sure, bro.

Very, very funny.

And then the other point is that they basically became suspicious

because they saw one of the models had 700,000 fans and saying, like, how could they talk to all these people?

And something that really stood out to me is that there is no like smoking gun in this lawsuit.

Like, they don't say, we are sure that

they were using chatters because,

you know, I spoke to one of the chatters and they said that they were not actually

model.

It's just that they saw that they had a lot of followers, a lot of fans, and they're like, well, it would be impossible.

And I don't know.

I just don't think that that is probably the basis of

a successful lawsuit.

Like, generally, I would think you would need more evidence of this.

And it's also like not clear that.

Again, this is like a really well-known industry.

This is not something that is like, oh, yeah, which they say in the lawsuit, they're like, OnlyFans fully knows that this is occurring.

And what they use as examples is like years of reporting about the agencies in these major publications.

It's like, OnlyFans knows, OnlyFans knows.

But

why did the guys not know?

Yeah.

You know, it's like, does it not go both ways?

I don't know.

I mean, that's obviously that's for the courts to figure out.

And I think they're probably banking on this going to trial as a class action

because they're seeking national level and also people specifically situated in Illinois.

But

they're hoping that it shakes out in court, I'm sure, where it's like the, there's some kind of discovery process where it's shown that they're,

they have to then like

go through every claim that every person in the class action is making against a specific model, which would be a fucking nightmare, just like

logistically.

But,

you know, it's there was a trial just went to a trial just went to um a case just went to trial

or it was set to go to trial in two years from now it's like they decided that it would go to trial eventually um last month it was decided i saw that in your article and that's really crazy it's crazy they're like uh this is going to this lawsuit from 2024 will go to trial in 2027 that's a really long time just to get this thing started yeah for sure

sam just to be clear like your twelve dollars a month does not get you unlimited attention from models, personal like reviews of your cooking creations and things like this.

Like this is not part of the

deal.

To be fair to our cooking enthusiasts in this particular story,

a lot of the bios and like the advertising that the models use is like, talk to me.

You know, it's like, talk directly to me about your day.

It's late, like that is kind of the pitch in a lot of ways.

It's like, you get to talk to me, um, and I think a lot of models do it that way, actually.

Like, they do actually put in the time and the work to talk directly to their fans.

They do use automated systems a lot, where it's like, they'll send if you subscribe to some particular tier, you'll get an automatic, like, short video clip about her day or something.

But, like, a lot of them do have levels where it's like you can talk directly to them, um, almost like a sexting kind of situation, but there are platforms for that also.

It's like you can go use like Sex Panther or something and like talk directly to a model.

You know, it's like, I mean, maybe those platforms have the same problem, but that is the pitch in a lot of places.

And a lot of models do use that kind of language.

But, you know, it's,

I don't know, like, like you said, it's like, that's not built out in the lawsuit or in the complaint

whether or not they actually were found to be, you know, caught red-handed using these agencies.

And a lot of people do use them.

So they're not illegal to use.

Can you imagine if, regardless of how the lawsuit shakes out, that OnlyFans

starts requiring creators on the platform to disclose whether they use a service like this or not?

I can imagine them doing that just to

not

have this be an issue.

And I don't necessarily have a problem with it.

I think it's pretty crazy to

bring a lawsuit forward about this and to not understand that a model with 700,000 followers would obviously not be texting you.

But I also don't see a problem with just like resolving this.

You know, there are double warning labels and disclosures on the internet and other products.

Yeah, I could see that for sure.

I could also see them limiting logins from various locations, which is something that the complaint mentions that OnlyFans does send you like an email that says new login detected like every other platform.

It's like new login detected at this location.

So OnlyFans knows where the logins are coming from or how many people are logged into an account at one time.

So,

you know, do they know that people are logged in to one specific models account at the same time?

If it's like 50 people logged in at the same time, maybe that's something that triggers some kind of,

I don't know, like warning for the model or something.

Or maybe they're using platforms that don't even, you know, like schedulers that you use for social media.

It's like, maybe they're not even required to be logged in directly.

So

yeah, I mean, I was going to say, I, I could see a world where that happens.

I don't, I don't necessarily think that is fair to the models, um, depending because it's like,

I don't know, we schedule some of our social media posts to go out.

It's like, do you need to know if I like click the button

at that moment or if someone else is clicking the button or what?

And I know that there is

a difference between

we scheduled a blue sky post to go out in 15 minutes and it went out and there wasn't a human being clicking that button at that time versus like a back and forth text exchange or chat exchange.

But

I could see that having like quite a quite an impact on

models

finances, of course.

And I bet that there's like, there's like layers of gray to it, I guess, where there's like fully automated, semi-automated, like

where, where is the line, I guess, would probably be somewhat tricky.

Yeah, I would think some kind of like disclaimer, like Emmanuel said, would be a middle ground.

You know, it's like if we were, if our blue sky bio said,

we're skeeting directly at you personally

every 15 minutes, we push the button.

I don't know.

It's like, maybe we should be pushing the button, but it doesn't say that.

So

maybe some kind of like,

I like OnlyFans is so fucking full of like restrictions and like rules and stupid arbitrary shit because of the credit card companies at this point.

It's like you hate to see another goddamn lawsuit

that could end up more rules and more regulations and more things that would push models off the platform and onto like different platforms.

And then those platforms get attacked.

So you hate to see what happens.

There would be false positives and stuff.

It would just be another thing that goes wrong.

Yeah.

And once that precedent is set, you know, it's like then the floodgates are open.

People can be, you know, suing for this all over the place.

I don't know.

It's just

like, it's such a,

I don't know.

It makes me nervous to see this kind of thing go to the courts, but

there it is.

Well, I mean, this is definitely like

local, local men upset they have been swindled lawsuit, which is a, it's a good topic for us.

I like this sort of thing.

Um, I like when this happens reporting-wise.

Yeah.

Um, but I do think that it's a good chance to talk about some of the economics behind OnlyFans and some of the technologies and platforms that are used here.

Anything else on this one?

I'm going to sue about there not being actual hot singles in my area.

Dude, that's really good.

That's really good.

Okay, we'll leave it there for now.

If you are a paying subscriber to 404 Media in the bonus section, we're going to talk about where Brain Rot AI comes from, which is super viral AI on Instagram.

You can listen to that segment segment if you subscribe to us by going to 404media.co and clicking subscribe.

You'll get a super personalized sent directly by us RSS feed where you can get that content.

Otherwise, we will see you next week.

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