How Much Ghibli Is Too Much Ghibli?

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Ghibli Studio is my favourite anime studio with some of the most beautiful movies ever. Some of my favourites are Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle. Add them to your watchlist.

Over decades Ghibli’s distinctive art style has become instantly recognizable to anime-watchers around the world.

AI image generation has been around for more than two years now. You must have heard names like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL E 2. Different AI image generator tools and models have been capable of generating ‘Ghibli-esque’ images since some time but what happened in the past week that has made Ghibli-styled AI images probably the most popular internet trend of 2025?

4o Image Generation

On March 25, Sam Altman posted this:

The image generation capabilities in GPT 4o was launched on 25th March with a livestream by OpenAI.

Around the 3:35 mark in the live stream replay below, the team clicks a selfie and converts the image into anime style:

I consider this as the origin of the current Ghibli images trend. People saw what they can do with their own images in the demo. I consider this the origin of the current Ghibli image trend. In the demo, people saw what they could do with their own images. This felt like the most personal part and it took off - “What if I convert my image to anime style?”

Sam Altman changed his X profile picture to an anime-styled one generated by ChatGPT fueling the trend further.

Ghibli Fever

The Ghibli trend has been noticeable especially on X and Instagram with profiles from different fields including media houses, sports pages, politicians, celebrities, and others who began posting images in anime style made with 4o.

People without ChatGPT Pro access also tried different models like Grok 3 and Gemini with varying results.

Some popular examples:

OpenAI Runs Out Of GPUs

Three days into the trend, OpenAI ran out of GPUs because there were so many image generation requests by users worldwide. GPUs are critical for AI model training and generation, and the trend's viral nature may have strained resources.

Is It Fair?

The AI art debate has been raging on for the past couple of years.

Is it fair to the artists whose copyrighted works OpenAI and other companies have allegedly used in training their models?

If GPT 4o and other models can generate such likenesses of the Ghibli-styled animations, is it not clear evidence that the hard work of Ghibli artists over decades has been fed into a model that can generate many more such works of varying quality?

If yes, don’t the original artists deserve royalties? But how would such an arrangement be ever established?

Copyright laws on AI have been ambiguous. How can you strike down something that is, in fact, not owned by anyone? AI-generated work is new, created by an LLM, and owned by no one.

This is where the debate stalls and AI companies are exploiting this loophole to the fullest. Try generating an image of Thanos or JD Vance or Elon Musk on Mars with any popular AI model and you will get quite a realistic result.

Businesses have now turned a blind eye to AI ethics. There’s no time to discuss ethics. No company wants to lag. We are talking hundreds of billions of dollars of investors’ money here - copyrights, IP, and ethics can all take a backseat for now.

Not Just Ghibli

Let’s not undermine GPT-4o’s image generation capabilities by just talking about anime images.

GPT-4o has also achieved character consistency just like the Gemini Flash Experimental models but better.

But, the biggest advantage is the accurate text generation by the model:

Due to the character consistency, GPT-4o also allows multi-step generations. There are many other powerful features which can make ChatGPT a great tool for graphic designing. ChatGPT can make consistent ads, posters, YouTube thumbnails, logos, etc.

This also probably creates an environment of threat among some designers. My opinion is designers should celebrate and incorporate ChatGPT into their workflows. Use ChatGPT for both inspiration and some quick wins while freelancing.

New World Order

We have to embrace it. AI art and image generation are here to stay. You can abhor it as much as you want but it delivers both aesthetic and business value.

It also feels like a good idea to remind that existing artists and designers are going nowhere. Human art will still be valued as much as it was valued earlier if not more.

For small businesses who know how to use AI, visual editing has become a whole lot easier and cheaper. AI is turning out to be a great business enabler in this sense.

The editing features are only going to get better. The same will apply to video and audio editing in the coming few months or years. We will get movies made with AI tools in the coming years complete with character consistency. Individual artists will become movie makers.

Humanity will be enabled by stochastic parrots to unleash their creativity faster than ever before. Human creativity will be irreplaceable at least for the foreseeable future.

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