Studio Ghibli icon Hayao Miyazaki – the animation titan behind Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and many more – has spent his career showing everyone why hand-made human creativity is important. In an interview, he explained, “whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul.”
Said philosophy was front-and-center in his Academy Award-winning 2023 hit The Boy and the Heron, which was painstakingly created through hand-drawn animation without any computer shortcuts. Yes, it’s time-consuming to do it by hand. Yes, it requires vision and commitment. And yes, producing visuals like this is beyond the realm of most, but the results speak for themselves.
So it’s all the more galling that OpenAI’s new GPT-4o update includes a new feature that lets users convert any image they choose into a mock-Ghibli style. Over on OpenAISea.com they underline that there’s “no official collaboration between OpenAI and Studio Ghibli” (no kidding…) but that the model has been “trained on an extensive dataset of artistic styles, enabling it to remarkably recreate the Studio Ghibli aesthetic”.
Or, to put it another way, “we fed one of the greatest modern artist’s life’s work to our garbage machine and now you can burn the planet by making mock Ghibli pictures of your cat”. It goes without saying that Studio Ghibli fans are depressed and horrified by this onslaught of mock-Ghibli trash, with many reposting this video of Miyazaki himself being clearly depressed by AI art:
Since this utter garbage is trending, we should take a look at what Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli, said about machine created art. https://t.co/1TMPcFGIJE pic.twitter.com/IvaM9WZL3T
— Nuberodesign (@nuberodesign) March 26, 2025
Posts by other fans – who identify the existential horror of stealing the environmentally conscious Ghibli aesthetic and piping it through computers that consume “a staggering amount of electricity“. Ghibli being used to kill the planet? Welcome to hell:
irony is dead and all but it’s pretty depressing to see Ghibli A.I. slop on the timeline not only because Miyazaki famously thinks A.I. art is disgusting but because he’s spent the last 50 years making art about environmental waste for petty human uses
— Brendan Hodges (@metaplexmovies) March 27, 2025
personally i think that if you ask a computer to draw a studio ghibli image, Hayao Miyazaki should ask a computer to kill you pic.twitter.com/71gOwJ61Vj
— Paul Muad’Dib (@trygraptor) March 26, 2025
Miyazaki spent his entire life building one of the most expansive and imaginative bodies of work, all so you could rip it off and use it as a filter for your vacation photos.
— Robbie Shilstone (@shilstone_arts) March 26, 2025
Not into this one bit. Protect artists.
This reply hits particularly hard:
My late brother was a talented animator/illustrator (worked for Disney etc.)
— 787 (@787FKA) March 27, 2025
As my kids have grown up, they’ve asked questions about him, and I’ve always shown them his artwork or films that he worked on — for years this was enough to show them and others what made him so… https://t.co/AuWrdpvVxP
And this post probably sums up the weird sadness seeing all the AI slop caused in me:
Imagine being Miyazaki, pouring decades of heart and soul into making this transcendent beautiful tender style of anime, and then seeing it get sloppified by linear algebra
— Nabeel S. Qureshi (@nabeelqu) March 26, 2025
Let’s wrap things up with another pointed quote from Miyazaki himself. He’s a notoriously gloomy person despite the uplifting stories he tells but, based on the evidence on social media over the last day, who wouldn’t be?
“I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire—all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.”
Sounds great! Bring on the deluge. We humans had our chance, and we blew it.
Published: Mar 27, 2025 06:31 am