On Tuesday, OpenAI updated ChatGPT with new AI image generation capabilities that make it especially good at recreating specific visual styles. People trying the new feature immediately flooded social media with images in the style of Studio Ghibli and Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, who famously called artificial intelligence “an insult to life itself.”
Miyazaki’s quote comes from a 2016 documentary in which he’s shown a demo of a 3D model whose movements are animated with AI as opposed to manually, by a human, as is usually the case in 3D animated videos or video games.
“Thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting,” Miyazaki says after seeing the demo, saying it reminds him of a friend with a disability. “Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. 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. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
ChatGPT’s new AI image generation capabilities are not substantively different from what many other AI image generators can already do. There are many AI image generation models on Civitai, for example, that are trained on Studio Ghibli movies and are good at imitating them. This is one thing generative AI is inarguably good at: copying the work of human artists, be they visual artists, musicians, or writers.
ChatGPT’s Ghibli moment is notable, however, because it’s extremely viral—even OpenAI founder Sam Altman has changed his X profile picture to a Ghiblified version of himself—and because it shows how far OpenAI, the company that started the current generative AI boom, and one that artists and publishers are currently suing for infringing on their copyrighted work, is willing to go in terms stealing from artists and content guardrails on its AI tools.
“Our goal is to give users as much creative freedom as possible,” an OpenAI spokesperson told 404 Media in an email. “We continue to prevent generations in the style of individual living artists, but we do permit broader studio styles—which people have used to generate and share some truly delightful and inspired original fan creations. We’re always learning from real world use and feedback and we’ll keep refining our policies as we go.”
Some of these “truly delightful and inspired original fan creations” allow users to use studio Ghibli’s style to recreate the assassination of JFK, an infamous example of censorship of Stalin’s image in the Soviet Union, or the moment U.S. forces captured Sadam Hussain in Iraq.
Our testing showed ChatGPT would also generate famous and graphic war photographs in the style of Ghibli movies, including “napalm girl” and “Saigon Execution.”
Previously, OpenAI was known for having very aggressive guardrails that prevented people from generating images featuring any real people, even historical figures. For example, in 2023, we reported that its AI image generation tool DALL E prevented people from generating images of Julius Caesar. The viral Ghibli images show the company’s position on this has clearly changed.
OpenAI told us that it is not blocking the model’s capability to depict adult public figures, but that they “implement the same safeguards we employ for editing images of photorealistic uploads of people. This is to enable helpful and beneficial uses in areas like education, historical, and satirical speech.”
Despite the lawsuits, outrage, and general resistance from artists, generative AI is already working its way into the workflows of many creative fields, including anime. Animation, which requires meticulous drawing of thousands and thousands of frames is famously grueling work, and some anime studios are already incorporating generative AI into their process to help with that workload. This, however, is not the same thing is the wholesale lifting of someone else’s style, and a model’s ability to copy the look of Spirited Away does not at all indicate its ability to create a work of art of that caliber.
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