The Week Everything Went To Hell, Studio Ghibli-Style

Have you ever wanted to re-create images of JFK’s assassination using Studio Ghibli-style animation?

Because that’s exactly what happened last week when ChatGPT maker OpenAI released an updated version of its image generator tool that loosened the rules on what kind of images its users can make.

There’s Ghibli Saigon. Ghibli 9/11. On the lighter side, there’s also Ghibli selfies and Ghibli recreations of popular internet memes, like this one of the “Bro Explaining” meme.

The Trump Administration even got in on the trend on March 27, when the official X account for the White House posted an OpenAI Ghibli-fied photo of a ICE officer arresting a crying woman. The White House said the woman was a fentanyl dealer who had previously been deported. In the new, Ghibli version, it looks like President Trump himself is arresting the woman.

All of this is igniting more debate about copyright law and whether machine learning programs can or should use copyrighted material to train its systems.

One X user apparently falsified a cease-and-desist letter from Studio Ghibli in order to get more support for the AI images.

“Our goal is to give users as much creative freedom as possible. 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,” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood told the Washington Post. “We’re always learning from real-world use and feedback, and we’ll keep refining our policies as we go.”

‘An insult to life itself’

Between the copyright for these images and the often violent subject matter of some of these images, one would assume Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki would be radically opposed to OpenAI using an animation style he helped pioneer. And you would be right! He said as much way back in 2016, when some members of his team presented him with an AI animation test:

“I am utterly disgusted…I would never want to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel it is an insult to life itself.

“I feel like we are nearing to the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

Miyazaki’s movies are often anti-fascist, anti-war and pro-environment. Most importantly, he insists that all of them are done by human animators, like this scene from 2013’s “The Wind Rises,” which took a Ghibli animator 15 months to draw.

Many on X have already decried the usage of Ghibli animation in OpenAI.

“Better a pig, than a Gen A.I. user,” one person posted, in a reference to the “Better to be a pig than a fascist” line from Ghibli film “Porco Rosso.”

Quote-posting the White House post, YouTuber Houston Coley wrote: “Watching a famously anti-fascist environmentalist creator’s artstyle co-opted to sanction literal fascist propaganda…it’s a pure distillation of evil perverting good. I am full of rage.”

All of this is reminiscent of the Wes Anderson TikTok trend from a few years ago. Most of those videos aped Anderson’s exacting style but had no intent behind them other than imitation. This is not art, and it is not creation; it’s a pale imitation of the work of people who love the process of making art, all in service of cashing in on meme recognition.