Ghibli fever: ChatGPT's new image tool floods social media with anime-style pictures

Punjab First News · 27 March 2025, 5:30 PM

Studio Ghibli's studio building surrounded by trees in Koganei, Tokyo — Studio Ghibli's studio building in Koganei, Tokyo (file photo) (Akonnchiroll / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the last week of March, social media feeds filled up with the same kind of picture: soft colours, big eyes and a hand-painted look. People were redrawing their photos and memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the celebrated Japanese animation house.

The craze began after OpenAI launched GPT-4o image generation in ChatGPT on March 25. Within days, users around the world were trying it out.

Demand was so heavy that on March 27 OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman wrote on X that the company's "GPUs are melting" and announced temporary rate limits. Altman also changed his own profile picture to a Ghibli-style portrait.

The trend also reopened the copyright debate. A 2016 clip of Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki calling an AI animation demo "an insult to life itself" went viral again.

For many observers, the episode showed how quickly AI tools are reaching ordinary users, and it made questions about artists' rights louder than ever.