For the past few days, the internet has been awash with snapshots in the signature style of Studio Ghibli — the beloved Japanese animation studio behind classics like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. Everyone and their mother has been Ghibli-fying images of friends, pets, politicians, and pop culture icons; we may or may not have done a few ourselves.
I tried it too. I made Ghibli versions of myself, my cats, and funny images taken on my phone.
But here’s the thing. The man behind Ghibli almost surely hates this.
Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli and the creative force behind its most iconic films, has strongly rejected the rise of artificial intelligence in animation. In a resurfaced clip from 2016, Miyazaki watches an AI-generated animation demo and reacts almost viscerally.
“I am utterly disgusted,” he says. “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.” While he was referring to a horror-type creature, his aversion is to all AI.
“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he adds.
Why People Are Ghibli-fying Their Photos
It seems the internet didn’t get Miyazaki’s message.
The new “Ghibli-style” image generator is part of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s most advanced multimodal model. It produces high-resolution images with a few words or a single photo (it’s not restricted to one style). Since its launch, users have flooded social media with AI-rendered portraits of loved ones, fictional characters, and celebrities—all dressed up in the Ghibli aesthetic. OpenAI’s servers were even struggling to keep up with all the image-making.
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Even Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, joined the trend. On X, he posted a Ghibli-styled profile photo and joked:
>be me
>grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever
>mostly no one cares for first 7.5 years, then for 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything
>wake up one day to hundreds of messages: “look i made you into a twink ghibli style haha”
Things quickly escalated into a viral movement. There are Ghibli-styled renditions of Lord of the Rings scenes, political memes, Olympic athletes, and even tasteless renders of tragic photos. Influencers and brands jumped on the wave, using Ghibli-styled visuals for marketing. But it’s gross.
“An Insult to Life Itself”
It’s one thing to use AI to Ghibli-fy that photo of you and your cat or that vacation image. It’s completely another to try to use it commercially or artistically.
To understand the discomfort, it helps to know what Studio Ghibli represents. Founded in 1985 by Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki, the studio built its legacy on richly textured, hand-drawn animation and profound storytelling. Many Studio Ghibli films are mostly hand-drawn using rich watercolor and acrylic paints. They use traditional techniques to create the whimsical and joyful aesthetic that’s so easily recognizable.
The stories are also inherently human. Ghibli films feature coming-of-age stories that showcase endurance, hardship, and weakness, but also friendship, virtue, and perseverance. They have messages of environmentalism and pacifism and feature their fair share of grief.
For Miyazaki, animation and storytelling isn’t simply a craft. It’s a moral act. When he watched a 2016 AI demo, his disgust wasn’t aesthetic — it was ethical. Pain — and joy, and effort, and empathy — are core to Miyazaki’s art. So when artificial intelligence reduces everything to a visual style, it’s clear why this strikes a nerve.
“Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability,” Miyazaki went on. “It’s so hard for him just to do a high five. His arm with stiff muscle can’t reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is.”
He does not stop there. “I am utterly disgusted. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
Legally and Ethically Questionable
To many fans, these AI-generated images exhibit attachment to Miyazaki’s worlds. For them, the technology is merely playful. For Miyazaki (although he hasn’t commented very recently on this), it’s an abomination. But for all artists, as well as lawyers, there is a growing sense that these tools are being trained on creative labor without consent or compensation. There’s a growing sense that this is a copyright issue.
If ChatGPT can create images in the style of Ghibli, it presumably has some data on Ghibli.
OpenAI insists that it draws a line. In its technical documentation, the company says it has implemented a refusal policy that triggers “when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist.” But broader studio styles — like that of Ghibli — remain fair game. Other AIs (like Elon Musk’s Grok) put even fewer guardrails in place. From what we could find, it’s just Adobe’s AI that uses only the training data that it has license to.
Yet the jury is still out on how copyright applies to AI. In an ongoing copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, the New York Times and other media groups are pushing back against the use of their content in training AI models. The same logic could apply to visual art; perhaps even more so, as a visual style is more distinguishable than a writing style.
ChatGPT did refuse to make some AI-generated images in some instances. It doesn’t like to Ghibli-fy historic photos, though you can bypass that to an extent. It doesn’t mix real names with images; and sometimes, it thinks the Simpsons style is copyrighted (though most of the time, it doesn’t). But there’s a bitter irony that this trend became viral specifically with Studio Ghibli.
Miyazaki’s ethos couldn’t be more different than AI. His work is slow, personal, and inherently human; what this AI creates is simply a shell, a lifeless imitation.
The image generator may be able to replicate Miyazaki’s aesthetic. But it cannot reach his soul.