One of the saddest developments this week--and it has had some competition--has been the news that anyone using GPT-4o’s new image generation model, can now generate Studio Ghibli-style images on the fly. And not images that look kinda like the storied animation house; images that are just straight rips of Ghibli's style.
It was a brazen move even by AI image-generation standards, and has rightly resulted in a mountain of backlash online, because singling out Ghibli of all animation styles certainly sends a message. The company's founder, Hayao Miyazaki, isn't just one of the world's most renowned animators, he's also a public (and longstanding!) opponent of AI in art:
If you consider, as Gareth Watkins laid out so wonderfully last month, that AI, which is "embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit" and as a result is "the new aesthetics of fascism", Altman and OpenAI's singling out of Studio Ghibli starts to make more sense. Especially when figures like Altman are being increasingly described as "technofascists". This isn't another laugh, another coy attempt at circumventing someone's rights to their creations; the way this has been pitched and sold is a direct attack, a flex revelling in the fact creators have so far proven largely powerless to stop these vultures from looting the history of human creation wholesale.
openai’s new ghibli “generator” is explicitly an intentional attempt at humiliation of a prominent objectoropenai is culturally fascist as well as functionally fascist it’s not an accident
— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy.bsky.social) 2025-03-27T19:39:53.007Z
So yeah, it sucks! Which is why people need to stop sharing that shit. If you accidentally fell into it via a chat or a message from a friend or whatever, and made an image because you thought it was cute, cut it out. If you're trying to dunk on the practice by linking to articles or examples that showcase the work, inadvertently flooding people's timelines with examples of this ghoulish, stolen work, stop.
Nobody wants to see that shit. Nobody needs to see it.
The power of AI imagery isn't in its capabilities, it's in its attempts to become ubiquitous. It's (likely) illegal and immoral to be making this stuff, but like so much else in our 21st-century world, laws are developing much slower than technology. Companies like OpenAI are hoping that the longer their tech can stay out there, the more it becomes part of the background noise of the modern internet, and the more likely it is that they themselves will become part of the fabric of the modern internet, and not a bunch of raiders stripping the place for its creative wiring.
