Social media has been flooded with AI-generated images that ape the style of Studio Ghibli, as seen in movies like Spirited Away and, most recently, The Boy and the Heron.
Where have they come from? You can thank the image generator model baked into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, courtesy of a newly released GPT 4o update.
It’s available to those who have a paid subscription to ChatGPT services.
“Images in ChatGPT are wayyyy more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations). Rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for a while,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X.
OpenAI has since reportedly attempted to restrict those attempting to create brazen Studio Ghibli stylistic copies, according to Business Insider.
One thread with a particular UK bent recreates recent moments in UK politics in Ghibli style.
— Pigeon Feathers (Alpha Male) (@PigeonFeatherz) March 26, 2025
In its 2023 documentation of the Dall-E 3 image generation AI, OpenAI claimed to have adopted a block on prompts that requested an apeing of the style of a “living artist”. There are living artists within Studio Ghibli, of course, but OpenAI does not consider house or studio styles off-limits.
Altman has replaced his X avatar with that of an AI-generated Ghibli-esque portrait.
This meme-ification of Ghibli’s style has seen an old clip of animation auteur and co-founder Hayaro Miyazaki resurface, in which he calls an AI-generated animation project “an insult to life itself”.
That AI content depicted a generated zombie animation.
"I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves,” Miyazaki said in response.
Studio Ghibli is yet to release a statement on the matter.
In December 2024, it announced its intention to take “civil and criminal” action against online stores selling unlicensed Ghibli products. But there is no word of it joining the long list of copyright holders who take issue with OpenAI and others training their AI, without compensation, on their works.
