What the Hell Happened: The AI-ification of Studio Ghibli

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Japanese animator and face of the Studio Ghibli production company Hayao Miyazaki is being worshipped by a new internet trend that transforms ordinary photographs into his signature style. On March 25, OpenAI released the GPT-4o model in ChatGPT, which generates images from prompts, other images, or a combination of both. CEO Sam Altman’s X post promoting the update has since received 19,000 likes and sparked a massive social media trend of people uploading their side-by-side comparisons of themselves with their Ghibli-fied avatars.

From a technical standpoint, the images are good. It’s certainly impressive that ChatGPT can almost instantly replicate Miyazaki’s distinctive aesthetic. Large language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT are trained on enormous datasets. ChatGPT specifically was trained on almost the entire internet, including copyrighted works like Studio Ghibli films. Consequently, when ChatGPT reconstructs a picture so it resembles a “Kiki’s Delivery Service” frame, it first consults thousands of Studio Ghibli frames in the dataset it was fed. Then it refines the data to match the prompt as accurately as possible.

But from an artistic vantage point, this trend is alarming. The copyright issues are obvious — artists have been sounding the alarm over their work being scraped by large language models since the first, cruder image generation models. What the Studio Ghibli trend specifically exposes is the danger of separating an artist and their values from their art. In 2016, Miyazaki called AI animation “an insult to life itself.” But Miyazaki’s moral aversion to AI is totally ignored by the people using the tool to create images defined by his aesthetic because of its convenience and stylistic accuracy.

The role of the artist is further debased when AI image generation is used to produce images with messages that run counter to the original artist’s legacy. For example, the official White House X account posted an AI-generated Studio Ghibli-like illustration of a woman being arrested for deportation.

It is difficult to fathom the cruelty of displaying the harsh reality of deportation using an animation style popularized by a children’s animation studio. Even the Israeli Defense Forces decided to “hop on the Studio Ghibli trend,” posting four animated images of IDF soldiers on ground, air, and sea. Many of Miyazaki’s films have anti-war themes, so using his artwork to improve the public perception of a military power is, at best, disrespectful to his life’s work, and at worst, thinly veiled propaganda.

Supporters of AI image generation may argue that it makes more art accessible, but imitation is not art. Generation tools like GPT-4o are only computer programs that have learned how to visually replicate a style. While being able to generate pictures of you and your friends in the style of your favorite childhood cartoon is certainly cute, it opens the door to more sinister uses when art is only taken at face value.

—Staff writer Khadijah A. Olufayo can be reached at khadijah.olufayo@thecrimson.com.