In spring 2025, OpenAI rolled out an update of ChatGPT that featured a new image generator. The update proved wildly popular in large part due to how easy this new tool made it for users to produce polished custom images of whatever they could dream to prompt. What wild fabulations would OpenAI’s user base conjure? What feats of imagination might these newly democratized users perform? Turns out, most people just wanted to ask ChatGPT to reproduce celebrities and movie scenes and viral meme formats in the style of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Within hours, the internet was flooded with uncanny Ghibliesque images of Kramer from Seinfeld, Mike Tyson, Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at himself on TV.
These images say a lot about the state of AI and creative work. They foreground the kind of proud, amoral acts of copyright infringement, or at least copyright edging, that sustain companies from OpenAI to Anthropic. They apply a warm and friendly filter on a technology whose promise is the total transformation (and possible inadvertent annihilation) of society. And, more than that, they appropriate the work of an artist who is repulsed by the rise of this technology: In a clip from 2016 that’s been in active circulation online in the past few years, Miyazaki famously said he was “disgusted” by AI animation. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he said.
