Everything Is Ghibli: What You Need to Know About the Hottest AI Image Trend

The world hasn’t actually turned into an anime, but it sure does feel that way. 

An accelerating trend of turning images into styles made popular by Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli has taken over social media, leading to overloaded OpenAI GPUs and growing debate about artificial intelligence’s role in art and creation—plus a new Solana meme coin that’s reached a nearly $30 million market cap. 

What exactly is going on? Here’s everything you need to know about the hottest AI image trend.

What is Studio Ghibli?

Studio Ghibli is an award-winning Japanese animation studio co-founded by well-known animator and filmmaker, Hayao Miyazaki. 

Founded in 1985, the studio boasts more than 20 films and is perhaps best known for its Oscar-winning anime features, “The Boy and the Heron” and “Spirited Away.” The latter film is listed inside the top 50 films by user rating on IMDb, and is critically acclaimed.

Fantastical landscapes and a keen attention to detail permeate all the Ghibli films, which maintain a similar art style and aesthetic—one that now is the influence behind a bevy of image-altering requests made to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. 

All of that may be much to the chagrin of Miyazaki, who in a 2016 documentary said that AI technology was an “insult to life.” 

Nevertheless, the popularity of his studio’s work and imagery has flooded social media timelines as users flock to “Ghiblify” their own photos, turning ordinary images into those that look like they came from a Miyazaki film.

How do you 'Ghiblify' an image?

Want to make one of your pictures look like it was produced by Studio Ghibli? It’s easy.

With the latest image generator from OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, users can quickly and easily swap an everyday photo for a “Ghiblified” version with a few simple prompts.

Getting an image “Ghiblified” can be done in a few different ways. To have an existing image turned into the popular anime style, users can upload an image to the GPT-4o model and prompt it with something like, “Reproduce in the style of Studio Ghibli.” 

After a minute or two of image generation, users should receive an updated version of the provided image. For example, we asked GPT-4o to reproduce the popular Bitcoin logo like Studio Ghibli, as seen below:

You can also ask the image generator to create something new in that style, creating a scene of their liking, but asking that it be generated in the style of Studio Ghibli. For example, you can prompt GPT-4o to produce an image of a crypto enthusiast staring at the charts, like so:

Internet users and even the White House have been “Ghiblifying” nearly everything over the last couple days, including popular memes and even a trailer for “The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.”

The impact on OpenAI

As the Ghibli trend began to build, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quipped that for most of his 10 years of work on AI, people didn’t care—or they even hated him. But then he woke up to hundreds of messages of him in “Ghibli style” as the world embraced his company’s latest capabilities. (As of Thursday afternoon, Altman is still using his Ghibli-style profile picture).

But the fun in producing Ghibli images has had a material impact on OpenAI as well. 

On Wednesday, the firm’s CEO indicated the demand was so intense that it would need to delay the capability rollouts to its free tier, despite expectations of high demand.

Following up on Thursday, Altman said that demand was “melting” the company’s GPUs, ultimately leading to rate limits as it scrambles to make the process more efficient. As part of his latest message, he indicated that the free tier would soon get “three free generations per day.” 

The future of creation?

While Miyazaki’s thoughts on AI are well-documented, a larger debate about art and IP has stemmed from the recent trend’s proliferation through social media. 

“It's profoundly depressing seeing all the Studio Ghibli-styled AI output tacitly being used to promote OpenAI's latest product. Miyazaki famously called AI-produced art ‘an insult to life itself’—and this in turn is an insult to one of our greatest-ever animators and artists,” posted author Brian Merchant.

Merchant’s thoughts are echoed by a wide variety of artists and others who are disappointed in the irony that Miyazaki’s body of work is promoting a non-human tool, and art produced by a computer in minutes—rather than the laborious process behind real hand-drawn anime art.

But others see a path for crypto to help. 

“Studio Ghibli lost out on millions today,” said Story Protocol co-founder Jason Zhao, whose protocol aims to create solutions for monetizing IP. “This is because AI is forced to operate in a broken marketplace of ideas: either creators win, or AI wins. This is a zero-sum game that benefits nobody.”

Pseudonymous Post Fiat token project founder goodalexander noted the problem as well, suggesting “the ‘main game’ is now ensuring your life's work doesn't get Ghibli-ed without receiving any compensation.”

“The alternative is just getting steamrolled by machines,” they added, “who have unlimited budgets, unlimited clout, and society who already doesn't really care about property rights.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward