Ghiblification
In plain wordsThe March 2025 craze for turning photos into pictures in the style of Japan's Studio Ghibli using ChatGPT's new image tool, and the debate it sparked over AI copying artists' styles.
The conversion of photographs and memes into images imitating the hand-drawn look of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki, using generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like.; specifically, the viral trend that followed OpenAI's launch of native image generation in ChatGPT's GPT-4o model in March 2025. Millions of users 'Ghiblified' family photos, pets, historical scenes and memes, producing demand that strained OpenAI's servers. The trend crystallized debates over style imitation: artistic style is not protected by copyright in most jurisdictions, but critics argued that reproducing a living studio's signature look without consent or payment exploits its artists' labor, and asked what the training datatraining data, n.: The examples an AI system learns from. Whatever patterns, skills, gaps and biases are in the training data tend to show up in the finished system. contained; defenders called it homage and democratized creativity. Official and political accounts also adopted the style, drawing further criticism.
My feed is nothing but Ghiblified wedding photos this week.
Origin
OpenAI released GPT-4o image generation on 25 March 2025; Ghibli-style images flooded social media within a day, Sam Altman adopted one as his profile picture, and he soon wrote that the company's GPUs were melting under demand. A 2016 documentary clip in which Miyazaki called an AI animation demonstration 'an insult to life itself' recirculated widely as a rebuke.
Usage note
Miyazaki's 2016 remark responded to a grotesque motion-generation demo, not to image generation in general, though it is now widely quoted in that sense.
Related
- AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.
- text-to-image modeltext-to-image model, n.: An AI system that creates a picture from a written description, such as 'a fox reading a newspaper, in watercolor', usually within seconds.
- generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like.
- training datatraining data, n.: The examples an AI system learns from. Whatever patterns, skills, gaps and biases are in the training data tend to show up in the finished system.
- AI slopAI slop, n.: Low-quality content churned out in bulk by AI — bland articles, fake-looking images, filler videos — posted to grab clicks or fill space, with little care for accuracy or value.
- synthetic mediasynthetic media, n.: Images, video, audio or text created or substantially altered by AI rather than recorded or written directly by people, whether for art, entertainment, business or deception.