Studio Ghibli's Artistic Legacy Faces AI Challenge: Copyright and Creativity in the Digital Age

Studio Ghibli hasn't commented on OpenAI's onslaught of AI copies, but the fan subreddit has | TechCrunch

When OpenAI debuted its image-generation feature in ChatGPT last week, social media exploded when users realized that they could make AI-generated images that looked like something out of an animated film from Studio Ghibli. Fans hoped that Studio Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki would take a stand, but the 84-year-old animator has remained silent. In the Ghibli fan subreddit, however, fans are enforcing a long-standing ban against AI art. "I just noticed about a dozen different 'BAN AI NOW' posts here seemingly spurred on by an influx of AI Ghibli art on other sites," a moderator posted to the Ghibli subreddit last week. "We don't allow AI art. We haven't allowed it basically since it became a thing." These fans don't see the AI-generated copies as an homage to the iconic artist. Rather, these generative AI models are trained on copyrighted images from artists like Miyazaki, who never gave OpenAI or any of its competitors permission to use their work as such. This issue is one that's impacted other creators and writers, too. The New York Times and other publishers have sued OpenAI, alleging that the company used its copyrighted materials to train its models without payment or consent. Similar complaints have been filed against Meta and Midjourney. The Ghibli situation struck a particularly strong nerve among fans since the studio's mastermind, Hayao Miyazaki, has been vocal about his hatred for AI-generated artwork. "I can't watch this stuff and find it interesting," Miyazaki said in documentary footage from 2016 in which he was shown AI-generated 3D animation. "Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted." People have also generated portraits in the style of Pixar movies or Dr. Seuss illustrations. Even the White House's X account posted a Ghibli-style image, crudely mocking a woman for crying while being handcuffed by ICE. As more "Ghiblified" images spread across the internet, fans of the legendary 84-year-old animator resurfaced his commentary to discourage others from imitating his work, but the damage had already been done. Of course, not all of these are Ghibli-style images, but the popularity of these images has stretched the AI company's capacity. OpenAI's Brad Lightcap, who oversees day-to-day operations at the company, said that over 130 million users have generated more than 700 million images with this new ChatGPT feature. "The range of visual creativity has been extremely inspiring," Lightcap wrote.

ChatGPT Image Generation Is Now Free for Everyone

There's been a lot of buzz around the image generator recently as people have been using it to generate images in the style of Studio Ghibli animation. The rush to use the image generation tool in ChatGPT prompted Altman to say its servers "are melting" in a post on March 27. Altman said at the time that image generation would be free, but that users would be limited to three images per day. Those who pay for ChatGPT for $20 a month for a standard subscription of $200 for a Pro subscription won't have that limit. I tested the tool to create the lead image for this post. The ChatGPT app struggled a bit with a lost connection, but eventually generated an image of a ChatGPT flying over New York in less than five minutes. OpenAI's move to widen the audience for ChatGPT further with its image generator marks the latest chapter in an increasingly heated competition among companies developing AI technology. In addition to plenty of startups in the US, China and other countries, there's Apple, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, which just introduced Gemini 2.5, its latest AI model, a week ago. ChatGPT is estimated to have about 500 million weekly users, but other AI models are gaining ground. In addition to improving their ability to handle tasks and solve problems, AI models are increasingly being asked to create content such as images and video. ChatGPT also has a feature to create videos called Sora, but that's still only available to paid accounts. Serena Huang, an AI consultant and author of The Inclusion Equation who holds a doctorate in economics, said she, too, was flooded with Ghibli images on her social media recently and has been thinking about the impact of widespread use of image generators like that of OpenAI. "AI image generation is a powerful catalyst for enhanced productivity and innovation," she told CNET. "It can speed up the content creation process, enabling rapid development of marketing materials and potentially facilitating more engaging communications. Overall, the fun aspect of AI also helps with the adoption and can turn many AI skeptics into a user overnight." That said, Huang noted that people should be concerned about the copyright complexities of AI-generated content, the energy consumption required to perform AI tasks, and the effects that image generation could have on creative industries, including lost jobs. Huang said she expects other companies offering rudimentary image creation, like Microsoft Copilot, to likely up their game. "I anticipate significant advancements as the competition for users intensifies," she said.

The Limits of A.I.-Generated Miyazaki

If asked to come up with a quintessentially "human" work of art, one could do worse than to name a film by Studio Ghibli. The Japanese animation studio, founded by the legendary eighty-four-year-old director Hayao Miyazaki, is known for its hand-drawn imagery, lushly organic color palettes, epic narratives, and evocation of both the emotional ambiguities of childhood and the twisting path to becoming an adult. We American millennials were blessed to have the films translated and distributed in English just as we were growing up, and so movies including "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke," and "Spirited Away" are nigh-universally recognizable touchstones of our youth. Any Ghibli imagery is primed to make us feel a combination of pleasurable nostalgia and mournful shivers, evoking the doomed forest creatures, greedy bathhouse ghosts, and missed connections featured in Miyazaki's cinematic story lines. Unfortunately, that sense of poignancy quickly erodes when you are bombarded with thousands of Ghibli-esque copycat images, as we all were online last week, thanks to OpenAI's latest version of its ChatGPT tool. GPT-4o, as this newest version is called, can generate images with much higher fidelity than past iterations could, and can do so right within the program's chat window. (The tool is currently only available to paid accounts.) Last year, on OpenAI's image generator DALL-E 3, users were likely to produce renderings depicting wonky hands and gibberish text; trying to repeat the same images produced unreliable results. The new model, by contrast, can generate clear text, maintain a consistent protagonist over multiple images, and faithfully replicate artistic styles ranging from hand drawing to photorealism. During a release demonstration on March 25th, OpenAI staff, including the C.E.O., Sam Altman, prompted the tool to turn a group selfie into "an anime frame," which resulted in a cartoonish scene, drawn in precise lines, with characteristic cel shading and detailed fig-leaf plants in the background. (One figure did have four fingers on a hand, but who's counting.) After seeing the demo, an engineer named Grant Slatton posted a family photo to X that he had "converted to studio ghibli anime." It showed him and his wife with their pet corgi on the beach, sporting the kind of shining pupils, voluminous hair, and softly creasing clothing familiar from Miyazaki's films. The effect was uncannily convincing; any flaws -- pixelated chin scruff, say -- revealed themselves only on close examination. Slatton's post now has nearly fifty million views and has inspired a rash of other Ghiblified scenes, including ones very unbefitting of the Miyazaki cinematic universe -- a Ghibli Donald Trump raising his fist defiantly in the aftermath of an assassination attempt; a Ghibli airplane hitting the Twin Towers. The bizarre nadir of the trend may have been reached, on Thursday, when the official White House X account posted a Ghibli-filtered photo of a sobbing alleged drug dealer from the Dominican Republic getting arrested. (Why are we surprised? This is the same Administration that previously posted an A.S.M.R. video of people being deported.) The use of Ghibli-esque anime in the OpenAI demo was intentional; "we put a lot of thought into the initial examples we show when we introduce new technology," Altman later posted on X. He has since boasted about his company's servers "melting" from the demand placed on it by GPT-4o. The success of the Ghibli meme marks a new chapter in the evolution of A.I. mimicry. Previous A.I. tools have produced memes celebrated for their otherworldly glitchiness -- a 2023 Midjourney image of the Pope wearing a swagged-out puffer jacket, or an A.I.-generated version of Jay-Z's voice singing a retro rap track. In those cases, the technology's failure to produce flawless verisimilitude was part of the charm. With the Ghibli images, one can almost enjoy the winsome color palettes and line work for their own sake, forgetting that they are the ersatz creations of a machine. That potency has as much to do with GPT-4o's capabilities as with the indelible archetypes that Miyazaki created. One popular post on X last week crowed, "Art just became accessible," over a photo of six male friends, the frame transmuted, in turn, into three different visual styles. But it is not art that is becoming accessible per se; it is a Xerox of art, a more extreme version of, say, a photograph of a painting. One bitter irony of the faux-Ghibli meme is that Miyazaki is an avowed hater of A.I. technology. In an infamous clip, from 2016, he described an automated animation tool as "an insult to life itself." That Miyazaki's lifework is now grist for the generative-A.I. mill might be not only an insult but a copyright infringement. OpenAI argues that copying the style of a movie studio, rather than of a living artist, is allowed. (I imagine Disney would not support this argument.) Yet other artists in the United States are already suing OpenAI, and other A.I. companies, for training its tools on their artwork and infringing on their styles; those lawsuits are still making their way through the court system, and their outcomes will determine much of how A.I.-generated images are treated going forward. (In 2023, one case set a precedent that A.I.-generated art cannot, itself, be copyrighted.) Artists have confronted reproduction plenty of times before, of course. Painting survived the advent of printmaking, then the advent of photography. Older media has survived because some kernels of insight and expression cannot be replicated away. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1933 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction," "The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity." The photograph of the cathedral has no meaning without the cathedral itself; the replication of Studio Ghibli's style has no meaning without the collective feeling we have for the Miyazaki aesthetic, inspired by its films. In our present moment, I worry much less for artists, who are driven to create things, than for audiences, who may be content to settle for so many pale imitations. Miyazaki's most recent film with Studio Ghibli, "The Boy and the Heron," is a sui-generis blend of autobiography, Japanese history, animism, and surrealism that probes the artist's very urge to create something that will outlast him. The film's energetic abstraction -- accelerating into the deepest, ineffable parts of our souls -- is one way art can respond to the challenge of technology. Even as Miyazaki's style proves memetic in this moment, his work might foretell the future of aesthetics, too. ♦

Opinion | With ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli filter, creativity is being spirited away

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. His Substack is Oliver Bateman Does the Work. This op-ed was adapted from an article in UnHerd. Last week, X was filled with eerily familiar yet off-putting images that represent a new frontier in AI's consumption of human art. Users had discovered that OpenAI's latest update of ChatGPT allows them to transform any photograph into what looks like a still from a Studio Ghibli movie. Within hours, the internet was awash with these uncanny renderings -- everything from the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the "I'm flying" scene from "Titanic," all reimagined in the distinctive style of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. This is more than just a passing trend, though. Instead, it's another milestone in artificial intelligence's ongoing appropriation of human artistic expression. First came the novelty of seeing serious historical events transformed into whimsical anime pastiches. Then came the rush to feed every conceivable meme template into the algorithmic maw. By Wednesday, Elon Musk was participating, a sure sign that whatever subcultural cachet the trend might have briefly possessed had evaporated. There's something particularly depressing about Miyazaki's aesthetic, so affecting in "Spirited Away" and other films, becoming the unwitting template for this mass AI experimentation. The 84-year-old animator's meticulously crafted style -- the product of thousands of hours of human labor -- has been crudely approximated by the very technology he so openly disdains. In a 2016 demonstration that has resurfaced amid this trend, Miyazaki watched AI researchers present a grotesque digital creature that moved by dragging its head along the ground. His response was unequivocal: "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." He continued: "I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves." Nine years later, Miyazaki's words seem almost prophetic. What is this flood of AI-generated Ghibli knockoffs if not a collective surrender of our artistic sovereignty? The modern internet user, bombarded by an endless stream of content, has outsourced even the act of image manipulation -- once a legitimate form of digital folk art -- to machines. The lazy shortcut of asking an AI filter to simply "make it look like Ghibli" replaces genuine creative expression with the press of a button. This hollowness points to a deeper artistic crisis. Human-created memes, at their best, represent a legitimate art form that emerges organically from distinctive individual sensibilities. Consider Donald Trump, whose idiosyncratic communication style spawned endless memorable memes that helped propel him to political prominence. Trump's linguistic peculiarities (whether it was "covfefe" in 2017 or "Everything's computer" last month) have been adapted by others for novel cultural moments that resonated far beyond their immediate context. The memes were jokes, yes, but also carried the unmistakable signature of individual creativity that AI cannot replicate. The Studio Ghibli meme trend, however, constitutes the further "ensloppification" of internet culture. When anyone can generate unlimited variations of the same basic template with minimal effort, we're left with an undifferentiated mass of content -- or "slop," to use the increasingly common internet parlance. The speed with which the Ghibli AI cycle played out illustrates this perfectly. What might once have been a week-long trend with distinct phases of adoption, refinement and eventually ironic meta-commentary was compressed into what seemed like less than a day. By the time average users became aware of the phenomenon, it was already being declared "over" by those who'd led the charge. And unlike organic memes that might experience revivals or evolve into new forms, this AI-generated trend is unlikely to resurface except as a footnote in some future digital archaeologist's catalogue of fleeting 2025 phenomena. Musk's involvement sealed the trend's fate. When platform owners participate in meme culture, they strip away any remaining countercultural energy. Throughout his tenure at X, Musk has functioned as a one-man validation system for content that catches his eye, transforming niche humor into broadly accessible but quickly exhausted cultural products. His participation marks the moment a trend becomes mainstream -- and thus passé. Yet the larger pattern represented by the Ghibli trend -- the algorithmic consumption of human art, the devaluation of artistic labor and the surrender of creative agency to machines -- continues unabated. Of course, that's in addition to AI's ravenous consumption of the written word, including fiction, prompting novelists such as Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham to sue Meta, OpenAI and other developers in (probably doomed) efforts to enforce their copyrights. The real tragedy of ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli hijacking isn't just that AI can now imitate Miyazaki's style but that we increasingly seem content to let algorithms replace the human artistic impulse entirely. When we surrender art to automation, we risk losing not just the distinctive voices of individual creators but our collective power for creative expression.

Stealing Ghibli: How AI Has Crossed The Line Into Creative Theft

This, from her Instagram on Saturday, is Jaqueline Cristian, the top-ranked Romanian women's professional tennis player and the 61st ranked woman player in the world. This, a fan creation that Cristian uploaded to her Instagram, is also, evidently, Jaqueline Cristian, which is deeply problematic. Last week, the Studio Ghibli AI controversy entered our timelines, disgusting its founder and raising deep concerns about the state of intellectual property law and how it applies to the rapidly advancing world of artificial intelligence. If an artist's work -- especially one as distinctive and culturally significant as Studio Ghibli's -- can be copied, modified and distributed by AI without consequence, then we may have crossed an irrevocable line. This situation does not merely present a challenge to copyright law but threatens to upend the entire foundation of how we define creative ownership. At the heart of this issue is the question of what intellectual property law protects and how those protections apply when AI is involved. Copyright law has traditionally shielded artistic works from unauthorized reproduction and distribution, ensuring that creators retain control over their intellectual and artistic output. Under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which became the Paris Act in 1971, original works of authorship -- such as films, illustrations and designs -- are protected the moment they are created, requiring no formal registration. This is the very law that safeguards the hand-drawn artistry of Studio Ghibli from being reproduced by others without authorization. However, these protections were drafted with human creators in mind, not machines that can be trained on millions of images and instantly generate works that mimic a particular style. One of the key problems with AI-generated art is that while specific works are protected under copyright, style itself is not. Studio Ghibli's films are a unique artistic canon, composed of thousands of unique illustrations, all of which are protected under copyright law. But an AI model that has been trained on these works can produce art that "looks like" a Studio Ghibli creation without directly copying a specific frame, such as in the AI creation of Jaqueline Cristian, above. From a legal standpoint, this distinction creates a loophole that AI companies exploit. They argue that since the generated images are not direct copies, they do not infringe on copyright. This technicality makes it incredibly difficult for studios such as Ghibli to take legal action against AI-generated replicas. This argument only addresses the letter of the law and ignores the spirit of intellectual property law, which exists to protect the originality of creative works and ensure that their creators receive recognition and control over how their work is used. The entire premise of copyright is that those who invest time, effort and creativity into producing something original should not have their work taken, modified or commercialized by others without permission. AI-generated art that mimics Studio Ghibli's distinct look undermines this principle by allowing machines -- and the companies that operate them -- to benefit from the studio's decades of artistic innovation without any form of compensation or credit. There is a very strong argument that the process by which AI learns to generate this type of artwork is itself legally questionable. AI models do not create in a vacuum; they are trained on massive datasets that include existing artworks, often scraped from the internet without permission from the original creators. Many AI companies claim that this practice falls under "fair use," a doctrine in copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission under specific circumstances, such as for education, commentary or parody. However, fair use is not an absolute right, and courts evaluate it based on factors like the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, the amount of the work used, and its effect on the market. AI companies that scrape copyrighted works without permission and then use them to generate art that competes with the originals in the marketplace may not meet the fair use standard. In the case of Studio Ghibli, the AI-generated works are not being created for commentary or educational purposes -- they are being used to produce marketable images that mimic the studio's signature aesthetic. This could have a direct economic impact on Studio Ghibli and the artists who work within that style. If companies or individuals can generate Ghibli-style artwork without hiring a professional animator or illustrator, that undermines the value of Studio Ghibli's brand and the livelihoods of artists who specialize in this form of art. Courts have historically ruled against uses of copyrighted material that create direct market competition with the original works. Where AI-generated Ghibli-style images interfere with the market for official Ghibli artwork and related licensed products, they should not be protected under fair use. Another critical issue is the potential for misrepresentation and consumer confusion. Studio Ghibli has spent decades cultivating its distinctive artistic style, which is now synonymous with the studio's brand identity. When AI-generated art replicates that style, it creates a risk that consumers may believe they are looking at an official Ghibli-sanctioned work when, in fact, they are not. In other words, this adds to the last thing we need in 2025 and beyond -- an enhanced inability to determine what is real and what is fake. This brings trademark law into the equation. While copyright protects original works, trademarks protect brand identities -- including distinctive visual styles associated with a particular company. If AI-generated art misleads consumers into believing it is affiliated with Studio Ghibli, the studio could argue that this constitutes trademark infringement under the Lanham Act, which prohibits the unauthorized use of trademarks in a way that causes consumer confusion. The reality is that enforcing these protections in the context of AI is very challenging. Most intellectual property laws were written before AI-generated content was even conceivable, meaning they do not provide clear guidance on how to handle situations where machines create works that closely resemble those of human artists. We need legislative reform to close these loopholes and ensure that artists and studios retain control over their work in the age of AI. Some proposed solutions include requiring AI companies to obtain explicit permission before using copyrighted works in training datasets, establishing clearer rules around the commercial use of AI-generated art, and developing new forms of intellectual property protection that apply specifically to artistic styles. The Studio Ghibli controversy is not an isolated case -- it is part of a much larger debate about the role of AI in creative industries. From visual art to music to literature, AI is increasingly being used to generate content that competes with human-made works. If left unchecked, this could lead to a future in which human creativity is devalued, and artists find themselves unable to protect their own work from being absorbed and regurgitated by machines. If we really think about it with some depth, intellectual property law is, at its core, about balance. IP law should seek to encourage innovation and creativity while ensuring that creators are fairly compensated for their work. AI has the potential to be a powerful tool for artists, but only if its use is governed by ethical and legal safeguards that respect the rights of original creators. The ability of AI to replicate Studio Ghibli's art style without permission represents a dangerous step toward a world where artistic innovation can be freely harvested by machines, with little regard for the people behind it. If we fail to address these issues now, we risk eroding the foundations of intellectual property law and, with it, the incentive for human artists to continue pushing the boundaries of creativity. The danger is not just that AI can copy Ghibli today -- it is that, if unchecked, AI will soon be able to replicate any artist's work, making originality meaningless. We are standing on the precipice of a world where anything can be copied, tweaked and sold without regard for who originally created it. If we allow that to happen, we will have fundamentally changed what it means to be an artist. And once we cross that line, there may be no going back.

Is ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli craze a copyright timebomb? Here's the verdict from expert lawyers

If you're a regular on X or Instagram, chances are your feed's been flooded this week by images that look like scenes from Spirited Away. But these imitation animations aren't the work of famed Japanese company Studio Ghibli: they're from ChatGPT. And that has some copyright experts sounding the alarm. Just a few days ago, OpenAI released the latest version of GPT-4o, the generative AI model which underpins ChatGPT. That update introduced more accurate text rendering, the ability to understand more complex prompts and - crucially - deeper training on a "variety of image styles". Within hours of the update, fans were using ChatGPT to create pictures which emulated the art style of different animations. The most common kind of recreation? Renders that bore an uncanny resemblance to the dreamy, hand-drawn aesthetic of Studio Ghibli's work. Users have given the Ghibli treatment to everything from popular memes to political figures. But with ChatGPT now apparently able to replicate such an iconic look with ease, there are serious question marks over the legality - and morality - of its usage. Does the Ghibli craze breach copyright? And is it ethical to imitate a living artist? We've asked expert lawyers and broken down all of the issues this short explainer. Fan art is nothing new. For as long as there have been animations, fans have created replica artwork. These community creations are usually tolerated by animation houses such as Studio Ghibli, as long as they aren't used for commercial purposes. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. OpenAI's latest GPT-4o update changes that. Now, anyone can generate or transform an image into a Ghibli-style scene. What would previously have taken hours can now be achieved in a matter of seconds. Users can emulate art styles with no appreciation of the effort that it would take to a seasoned animator to create the same scene. On one hand, this opens up the realm to users who want to create their own fan art but don't have the requisite skills. On the other, it arguably reduces the value and originality of the source material. Images circulating on social media faithfully replicate the Ghibli look, without a single human artist being involved. ChatGPT's ability to channel the visual language of animation houses such as Studio Ghibli makes it a powerful creative tool for fans. But there's also a moral dimension: some might see such easy imitation as an affront to the studio's hand-drawn legacy, especially when applied to memes. Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki is known for his painstaking frame-by-frame approach to animation. The studio famously spent more than a year animating a four-second scene in The Wind Rises. In a 2016 documentary, Miyazaki described AI-generated animation as "an insult to life itself". Then there are the legal questions. Many of the visuals seen on social media effectively ape the Ghibli look. Because it's capable of such faithful mimicry, some have questioned whether they infringe on the studio's copyright. Copyright generally doesn't protect a visual style as such. So the dreamy backgrounds, oversized eyes and whimsical creatures which are hallmarks of Studio Ghibli animations probably aren't covered. Unless ChatGPT were to replicate a specific character or scene, it might be hard to prove infringement. There's the matter of training data, too. OpenAI hasn't disclosed specifically what image assets were used to train the latest version of its GPT-4o model. It only specifies that a "vast variety of image styles" featured in the training data. Without more information, it's impossible to say whether the model was trained on copyrighted Ghibli frames directly - or whether the AI simply learned to emulate the aesthetic from publicly available derivatives, such as existing fan art. But here's the verdict today from expert copyright lawyers on where this could all be headed. We asked Chris Mammen, IP litigator and San Francisco Office Managing Partner for Womble Bond Dickinson, for his expert insight. "Copyright law in the US does not protect ideas or styles," Mammen explains. "One artist creating a work 'in the style of' some other artist has been happening for centuries." According to Mammen, AI tools such as ChatGPT are changing two important factors when it comes to fan art creations: "(a) the scale, volume and speed with which new works can be generated, and (b) the fidelity with which these rapidly-generated new works can mimic the style of the original." While the style of Ghibli animations might not be covered by copyright, the studio could have other routes to protecting its intellectual property. Mammen continues: "If someone were to represent that one of these GenAI-created images is, in fact, a product of Studio Ghibli, then it could give rise to issues, such as false designation of origin, under trademark and unfair competition laws." What's clear is that AI tools will continue to give rise to new issues around the rules and grey areas involved with derivative and generative content. "These issues are really testing the boundaries of copyright and other intellectual property laws," Mammen says. These observations echo those of Matthew Sag, en Emory University law professor studying copyright law and artificial intelligence, who recently told Business Insider: "OpenAI took a pretty sensible decision to say 'We are going to stop producing images in the style of living people'. Not because it's copyright infringement, but because people don't like that. Individuals get very understandably viscerally upset by that," he said. Studios, though, are a different matter. Asked for comment by TechRadar, an OpenAI spokesperson said: "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. We're always learning from real-world use and feedback, and we'll keep refining our policies as we go." With tools such as ChatGPT and OpenAI Sora advancing so rapidly, law- and policymakers are scrambling to keep up with the thorny issues arising around intellectual property as a result. As Mammen concludes, "Advocates on both sides of the issue are arguing for legal reform."

Trading Your Face for a Ghibli Filter? Here's What You're Really Giving Up

There is a crucial aspect that users may have overlooked while indulging in the trend -- privacy. OpenAI's GPT-4o image generation model took the internet by storm, with users eagerly generating 'Ghiblified' versions of their personal photos. While the ethical implications of this trend continue to spark debate, there is another crucial aspect that users may have overlooked while indulging in the trend -- privacy. Eamonn Maguire, head of anti-abuse and account security at Proton, told AIM, "Sharing images with AI chatbots, just like sharing any sensitive information, poses several privacy and security risks that people may not be aware of." "The trend of creating a 'Ghibli-style' image has seen many more people feeding OpenAI photos of themselves and their families," he added. OpenAI's policy on handling data states, "When you use our services for individuals such as ChatGPT, Sora, or Operator, we may use your content to train our models." Hence, as per OpenAI's official statement, users' data, including files, images, and audio, can be used to train their models. Commenting on this, Maguire stated, "Sharing your images directly with OpenAI opens a Pandora's box of issues. Aside from the risks of data breaches, once you share personal information with AI, you lose control over how they are used." He mentioned that those photos are then used to train LLMs, which means they could be used to generate content that could be defamatory or even used to harass individuals. "Not only that, but many AI models, particularly those used in image generation, rely on huge training datasets," Maguire further explained. "This means that in some cases, photos of you, or your likeness, may be used without consent. More nefariously, these images could be used to train facial surveillance AI without your permission. Lastly, your data could be used for personalised ads, or sold to third parties." In an exclusive chat with AIM, Joel Latto, a threat advisor at F-Secure, said, "When people upload their photos to ChatGPT for trendy, Ghibli-style transformations, they're essentially trading their likeness for a fleeting moment of novelty -- often without realising how little they're getting in return." Latto explained that this is not a new phenomenon. He observed similar risks with apps like Google Arts and Culture back in 2018 and FaceApp in 2019 -- both of which prompted warnings from F-Secure about privacy erosion. This is the reason why F-Secure has been advising against enabling facial recognition features on social media. "What sets this apart with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT is the potential scale of exploitation: once your image is in the system, it could theoretically be used to generate highly accurate depictions of you by others. That's a steep price to pay for a passing fad," Latto further highlighted. While security experts acknowledge that it is almost impossible to avoid data collection, one should thoroughly research the privacy policy of AI tools before using them. Sooraj Sathyanarayanan, a security researcher, told AIM that ChatGPT and comparable solutions usually function under broad terms, giving companies extensive rights to utilise uploaded content. According to him, the data can be used potentially for model training, product improvement, or other purposes, which is not immediately obvious to users. "The real concern isn't just the immediate use, but the downstream data lifecycle that remains opaque to most users. Your photos contain biometric data and potentially reveal sensitive contexts you might not want incorporated into future AI systems," Sathyanarayanan stressed. The obvious answer to the problem is to stop using tools like ChatGPT, or only share photos that users are comfortable with being repurposed in any form. Awareness of the privacy implications should help users make informed decisions about what they want to share on the internet, or with any services.

ChatGPT's 'Ghiblification' Craze: What Does Ghibli's Creator Think of A.I.?

It's likely the 84-year-old filmmaker would view the trend with unease. Over the past week, the "Ghiblification" trend has swept the internet, with celebrities, tech leaders, and even the White House generating images in the style of Japan's Studio Ghibli using OpenAI's latest tool. Hayao Miyazaki, the reclusive mastermind behind the iconic animation style, has yet to comment publicly on this A.I.-driven development. But based on his past statements, it's likely the 84-year-old filmmaker would view the trend with unease, wary of how A.I. might distort the deeply human essence at the heart of his work. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters In a 2016 documentary, a Japanese media company sought Miyazaki's feedback on its use of A.I. in animation. The artist was shown a demo depicting an animated zombie body dragging itself by the head as if it doesn't feel pain or know how to protect its head. Miyazaki, visibly disturbed, commented, "Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is or whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted...I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." Founded in 1985 by Miyazaki, along with the director Isao Takahata and the producer Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli is known for making films that intertwine Japanese folklore with hand-drawn detail and deeply emotional storytelling. In 1996, The Walt Disney Company (DIS) signed a distribution deal to bring Miyazaki's work to a global audience. The 2003 Oscar win for Spirited Away, the first anime to receive the Best Animated Feature award, cemented Studio Ghibli as an international cinematic force. Unlike Hollywood studios, which pivoted towards CGI animation in the early 2000s, Ghibli stuck with celluloid animation, a traditional technique in which artists draw each frame by hand on transparent sheets known as "cells." Miyazaki personally sketched thousands of frames by hand for each project, insisting that human-level detail and authenticity could not be faked. Although Miyazaki didn't entirely resist innovation, he was never in favor of fully digital workflows. In the late 1990s, Studio Ghibli integrated digital tools like Toonz (later open-sourced as OpenToonz), allowing its animators to digitally color and refine their drawings. However, Earwig and the Witch (2020), the studio's first all-3D film, received lukewarm reviews, with fans underwhelmed by the lack of Ghibli's hand-drawn soul. Is it legal to create Ghibli-style images using A.I.? The U.S. copyright law doesn't protect a visual style, so it's technically legal to give a Ghibli treatment to any image, especially if the user isn't using the work for commercial purposes. "From a copyright standpoint, anyone is free to tell and illustrate their own images and stories using an animation style," Randall McCarthy, an IP attorney, told Observer. "Studio Ghibli may only be able to assert copyright infringement when a particular character from their work is generated through A.I. and is highly similar to its movie resemblance." The work created using ChatGPT isn't necessarily protected by copyright law, either, unless the user can demonstrate "sufficient human control" during the creative process, McCarthy explained. "Merely generating prompts to OpenAI is not enough to show sufficient human control, so none of these images and memes made with a 'Ghibli style' input prompt are protected by copyright." Still, the speed and volume at which A.I. is able to generate these images raise an ethical debate. "OpenAI training on Ghibli's data is a classic example of A.I. models training on data without any compensation or credit. Today, someone can mimic an iconic style like Ghibli with a few prompts and face little to no consequence," Jason Zhao, co-founder of the A.I.-powered IP tokenization platform Story, told Observer. "It's a failure to recognize the value of creative identity in the digital age." OpenAI, which is already facing multiple copyright lawsuits, claims to have limited its A.I. image model from replicating the styles of living artists. "We added a refusal that triggers when users try to generate an image in the style of a living artist," the company said in a recent technical paper.

OpenAI's Sam Altman breaks silence on copyright issues related to Ghibli-style image generation

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has acknowledged the copyright concerns surrounding ChatGPT-generated Ghibli-style art but called the trend a "net win for society." Speaking during a virtual appearance on a YouTube podcast hosted by Indian entrepreneur Varun Mayya, Altman said the widespread ability to create content is a major positive development, despite the complexities involved. His comments come amid renewed controversy over AI-generated artwork, sparked by the viral "Ghibli AI" trend on social media. The trend features Ghibli-style renditions of iconic film moments, memes, and even artistic interpretations of breaking news -- all of which have raised serious copyright concerns. Hayao Miyazaki, 84, the legendary filmmaker behind Studio Ghibli, has long expressed scepticism about AI's role in animation. An old video of Miyazaki recently resurfaced in which he strongly condemned AI-generated animation, calling it "an insult to life itself," as previously reported by ET. What happens to user data? The popularity of the Ghibli-style image generation feature has triggered a surge in user-generated content, with users uploading personal images to be transformed by the tool. Cybersecurity experts caution that while such tools may seem harmless, their terms of service are often vague, raising concerns about how user data -- especially images containing metadata such as location coordinates, timestamps, and device details -- is stored and used. OpenAI's privacy policy states that it may use user-submitted data to train its models unless users explicitly opt out. However, many users remain unaware of this clause as they eagerly participate in viral trends like Ghibli-fication. Record surge in users OpenAI reported that the platform gained one million users within an hour of launching the Ghibli-style image generation feature -- a moment Altman described as one of the "craziest viral moments" he has seen. The company said ChatGPT has since crossed 130 million users, largely fuelled by the new image-generation tool. According to OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, users have created over 700 million images since 27 March. ET recently reported that Indian users have spent $8 million on ChatGPT subscriptions via in-app payments since 2023 -- excluding web-based transactions. In contrast, US users have spent around $330 million during the same period.

Sam Altman Jokes About OpenAI's Viral AI Tool - 'I Worked 10 Years On Superintelligence, And People Just Turn Themselves Into Ghibli Characters'

Enter your email to get Benzinga's ultimate morning update: The PreMarket Activity Newsletter Scrolling through social media lately feels like stepping into a Studio Ghibli film. Thanks to OpenAI's latest ChatGPT update, people are transforming their selfies into whimsical, hand-drawn portraits inspired by the famed Japanese animation studio. The trend, dubbed "Ghiblification," has taken over timelines as users share AI-generated versions of themselves, their pets, and even popular internet memes. Don't Miss: 'Scrolling To UBI' -- Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. You can invest today for just $0.26/share with a $1000 minimum. The $1.3 billion startup investment boom: How this company's explosive growth is opening doors for everyday investors with a new $500 minimum Ghiblification takes over social media Social media feeds are overflowing with these AI-generated images. From X to Instagram, people are reimagining themselves in the dreamy, soft-colored worlds that define Ghibli's visual style. Germany-based entrepreneur and founder of FeatherFlow, Janu Lingeswaran, shared his excitement after using the tool to turn a photo of his 3-year-old ragdoll cat, Mali, into a Ghibli-esque character. "I really fell in love with the result. We're thinking of printing it out and hanging it on the wall," he said, according to The Associated Press. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman got in on the trend, updating his profile picture to a Ghibli-style portrait. His reaction on X? A mix of humor and irony: >be me > Grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever > Mostly no one cares for first 7.5 years, then for 2.5 years, everyone hates you for everything > wake up one day to hundreds of messages: "Look, I made you into a Twink Ghibli style haha" -- Sam Altman (@sama) March 26, 2025 Trending: Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm -- invest pre-IPO from $0.55 per share now. While the trend has been fun for many, it's also sparked a storm of debate over copyright and artistic integrity. Not everyone is thrilled about AI recreating iconic artistic styles. Mumbai-based artist and founder of Studio Joog, Jugal Chudasama, told The Week, "These AI models are trained without the intellectual property owner's consent." Critics argue that mimicking a studio's visual language without permission or compensation raises serious ethical concerns. Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki has long opposed AI art. In the 2016 NHK documentary "Hayao Miyazaki: The One Who Never Ends," Miyazaki called AI art "an insult to life itself." Legal experts say AI-generated images exist in a gray area of copyright law. The Center of Art Law says AI-generated outputs lack meaningful human creative input, and the necessary authorship required for protection under the Copyright Act. See Also: This platform is reshaping how you invest in private companies -- and you can be a part of it for $0.18 per share While specific works are protected, broader artistic styles aren't -- making it challenging for companies like Ghibli to take legal action. This gap leaves independent artists vulnerable to having their unique styles replicated without consent. The art community remains divided. According to Interesting Engineering, artist Karla Ortiz called OpenAI's use of Ghibli branding "an insult" and "exploitation." Others, especially in tech, argue that AI-generated art democratizes creativity by allowing people without formal training to produce visually striking work. This isn't the first time AI-generated content has sparked backlash. A fan-made AI-generated trailer for a hypothetical live-action version of the animated "Princess Mononoke" film went viral. That led to outrage from fans and animators who said it undermined the original film's artistic vision. However, the trailer is not an official project, and there are no plans for a live-action adaptation. Read Next: Invest in the Future of Digital Engagement. Own a Piece of the $100 Billion Metaverse Today for Just $500. Inspired by Uber and Airbnb - Deloitte's fastest-growing software company is transforming 7 billion smartphones into income-generating assets - with $1,000 you can invest at just $0.26/share! Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

11% surge in ChatGPT downloads as new AI art feature captivates users

Altman posted on X, 'We added one million users in the last hour,' a stark contrast to the five days it took to reach that milestone at ChatGPT's launch. OpenAI's ChatGPT reached an all‐time high with over 150 million weekly active users, marking a 5 percent increase from the previous week. The milestone followed a surge in demand for the platform's new image‐generation tool that allowed users to create art in a style reminiscent of Studio Ghibli. The GPT‐4o model update unlocked image‐generation capabilities that spurred creativity around the world. "We added one million users in the last hour," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. He noted that it took five days to reach a similar number during ChatGPT's initial launch. "Working as fast we can to really get stuff humming; if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call," Altman added. The trend for generating Studio Ghibli-style AI art drove users to share images on social media that imitated the hand‐drawn style of Studio Ghibli, known for films such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. Global app downloads increased by 11 percent while in‐app subscription revenue rose by 6 percent compared to the previous week. The surge in demand pushed the platform's infrastructure to its limits. Heavy use of the image‐generation feature led to server strain, intermittent service disruptions, occasional glitches, and temporary limitations on the feature. "We are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from OpenAI to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges," said Greg Brockman, co‐founder of OpenAI. The creative output using the AI tool sparked a debate over copyright and artistic integrity. Its use to produce images that imitated Studio Ghibli's style raised questions about potential copyright infringements, as legal experts pointed out that copyright law protected specific expressions rather than general artistic styles. "The legal landscape of AI‐generated images that imitate Studio Ghibli's distinctive style remains uncertain. Copyright law generally protects specific expressions rather than artistic styles themselves," said Evan Brown, partner at Neal & McDevitt. "I am utterly disgusted," said Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli co‐founder, after viewing an early render of an AI‐generated image. He added, "I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all." The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.

Hayao Miyazaki voices concern as Ghibli-style AI images go viral

The internet has been abuzz recently with a new trend that transforms ordinary photographs into enchanting illustrations reminiscent of Studio Ghibli's iconic animation style. Celebrities, politicians, and everyday users worldwide are embracing the viral phenomenon, sharing AI-generated images that bring a touch of whimsical nostalgia to their social media feeds. However, the surge in popularity of these Ghibli-style images has ignited a heated debate over the ethics and legality of using artificial intelligence to replicate distinct artistic styles. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined the trend by sharing AI-generated Ghibli illustrations via the MyGovIndia account, depicting him in diplomatic meetings and cultural moments. The MyGovIndia post featuring Modi was captioned, "Main character? No. He's the whole storyline. Experience through New India in Studio Ghibli strokes." Cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar also participated, posting Ghibli-style illustrations of his iconic 2011 World Cup victory. "AI-sa kuch trend ho raha hai, maine suna. Toh socha, what if Ghibli made cricket?" Tendulkar wrote. Celebrities such as Brazilian duo Maiara and Maraisa, soccer legend Ronaldinho Gaúcho, and TV host Ana Maria Braga shared animated versions of themselves, amplifying the trend's reach across social media platforms. Athletes from around the world are also joining in, with Olympiacos player Rodinei publishing a Ghibli-style image of his recent celebration in front of Panathinaikos player Fotis Ioannidis after Olympiacos's 4-2 victory. The trend was propelled by the recent release of a new image generator integrated into ChatGPT, allowing users to transform their photos into Ghibli-style illustrations within seconds. OpenAI made the AI-powered image generation feature free for all ChatGPT users in response to the viral popularity of the Ghibli-style trend. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced that ChatGPT's image generation feature is now open to all users, even those using the free version, reflecting on the viral moment similar to ChatGPT's initial launch. "It's great to see how much people are enjoying creating images in ChatGPT," he wrote. However, the rapid spread of the trend caught OpenAI off guard, pushing its servers to the brink. Altman acknowledged the chaos caused by the trend's popularity, which overwhelmed GPUs critical for image processing, but assured users that fixes were underway. "Our GPUs are melting," he humorously noted, adding that non-subscribers would face rate limits due to server hiccups caused by the deluge of images. As the Ghibli-style images flooded social media, concerns began to surface regarding the ethical and legal implications of using artificial intelligence to replicate iconic artistic styles. Several fans of Studio Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, as well as those who regard the profession of animation, have raised concerns regarding the ethics and morality of users attempting to create art through AI. Many artists argue that AI-generated art undermines their work and could lead to legal challenges, despite some users claiming it celebrates a visual tradition. In a widely circulated excerpt from a 2016 documentary, Miyazaki is seen watching a demonstration of animation created with artificial intelligence and reacting with visible discomfort, calling it "an insult to life itself." Miyazaki has expressed his concern about the use of artificial intelligence in animation, drawing attention to the long-standing debate over AI's impact on traditional artistry. OpenAI maintains that ChatGPT's image generation is meant to assist, not replace, human creativity, yet concerns over originality and artistic integrity persist. The company insists on "creative freedom" in its image generation while emphasizing a balance between creative freedom and responsibility, allowing broad studio styles while avoiding mimicking living artists' individual works. "We aim to maximize creative freedom," OpenAI stated, stressing that the generated images are inspired creations, not exact replicas. The trend has also taken an eerie twist, as many users have noticed mysterious figures appearing in their AI-generated images -- figures that were not in the original photos. Makeup artist Barkha Dahra had an unsettling experience when she used AI to transform a picture of herself and her husband into a Ghibli-style artwork. When the Ghibli-inspired image was created, a third person appeared in the frame. The unusual edits left viewers baffled, with some wondering if it's just a glitch or something more mysterious. Despite the excitement caused by the new capabilities of OpenAI's model, many have expressed their dissatisfaction with how these images are produced. The trend raises ethical and legal questions about artificial intelligence replicating iconic artistic styles. Artists have long expressed concerns about how art is produced using AI, particularly regarding the use of copyrighted material in training datasets. Most AI models are trained on vast datasets sourced from the internet, including artworks from real illustrators, often without their consent or knowledge. Stay updated with the latest news! Subscribe to The Jerusalem Post Newsletter Subscribe Now The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.

The Miyazaki Maelstrom: OpenAI's Ghibli Craze Signals Troubling Future for Hollywood

With 'October 8' and 'No Other Land,' the Middle East Conflict Is Playing Out at the Box Office At the start of Hayao Miyazaki's modern classic Spirited Away, the young heroine Chihiro and her parents are exploring a seemingly abandoned theme park when a boy named Haku greets her with a warning: Chihiro must cross back over a dry riverbed and head home before sunset while she still can. She fails to do so, and soon finds the river swollen and her parents turned into pigs, stranded in a new world she doesn't understand. Fans of the animation giant will find the parable a little extra relevant these days. As you likely heard, OpenAI released a tool on March 25 that allows any photo to be redone in the style of (among others) Miyazaki and his famed Studio Ghibli. Soon millions of people were doing just that, prodded on by OpenAI's brash leader Sam Altman, who turned his own grainy X profile picture into a dreamy, slightly lost child who himself might have wandered through Howl's Moving Castle. OpenAI had come up with an update to 4o, one of the "GPTs" it released last year, to enable the high-end image generation. Paying subscribers ate it up, flooding social media with the uncanny results. As Altman crowed on Monday, "the chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i'd ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. [With this] we added one million users in the last hour." And why not? Miyazaki's creations reflect a bespoke, unique aesthetic, arrived at from thousands of hours of human labor and good old-fashioned dreaming. The idea of merging that with photos from our last family trip to Disneyland -- using nothing more than a few keystrokes -- can prove too enjoyable to resist. A certain irony abided in a machine generating images to honor someone who so meticulously drew them with his own fingers. Miyazaki himself has decried AI's use in art -- "I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself," he said in 2016, non-gently, a point that when juxtaposed with so many people unleashing the tool in homage to his work turned their act hilarious and a little cringe. If Altman has observed this asymmetry, he hasn't said. This is all happening even as a federal judge has greenlit The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI for training ChatGPT on scores of its articles without permission, underscoring the copyright issues at play. Technically OpenAI, aware at least optically of infringement concerns, programmed the image tool not to allow the imitation of a specific artist. But it enacted no such rule for a studio, and so our feeds were soon overrun by a Ghibli aesthetic. This also is happening as studios have begun to talk with OpenAI, either seeing the added revenue now as outweighing lost profits later -- or, more likely, seeing that in the absence of any real ability to fight back, they might as well pocket some added pennies than spend them on a lawsuit. (Although, aside from Lionsgate, no major studio has announced a deal that would allow OpenAI's models to train on its IP -- yet.) And pennies is the apt noun: Dotdash Meredith, publisher of behemoths like People and Travel + Leisure, revealed that its OpenAI deal netted a grand total of $16 million last year, hardly any sort of savior for a company with nearly half a billion dollars in publishing revenue. OpenAI's Ghibli conquest was met with some Hollywood creatives' resistance. Alex Hirsch, the creator of the 2010's-era Disney Channel hit Gravity Falls, sarcastically responded to Altman "Wow, congrats! Using Ghibli's work to train your model and Ghibli's name to promote it really helped you generate huge revenue! And the fact that you're planning on paying a big royalty check to Ghibli proves you're a great guy, too!" GKIDS, Ghibli's U.S. distributor, offered slightly lower-key shade when, upon announcing a new Imax restoration of Miyazaki's 1997 historical fantasy Princess Mononoke, the company's distribution vice-president Chance Huskey dryly noted that "In a time when technology tries to replicate humanity, we are thrilled that audiences value a theatrical experience that respects and celebrates Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's masterpiece in all its cinematic hand-drawn glory." And Reid Southen, the concept illustrator who has emerged as one of Hollywood's biggest critics of the AI image-generation wave, retorted to Altman, "Keep posting about how many users you're gaining after the Ghibli stunt, it only strengthens their case against you, genius." This line of argument has many adherents -- some 25,000 people liked Hirsch's post. Unfortunately, probably none of them run Hollywood studios. At the heart of the Ghibli craze is something good -- people's desire to connect to a fiercely loved artist, the images a testament to the depth and scope of Miyazaki's influence. But at the root is also something very fraught, a willingness to see all art as both interchangeable and purchase-able. The frantic rush to turn our memories into a personalized Miyazaki greeting card is, through one lens, a testament to our love for the artist, but it is even more pointedly a testament to our love for ourselves, and seemingly no copyright concern nor sanctity-of-art instinct can stop us from fulfilling it. In a way, GhiblAI is the end point, or at least the latest distant point, of a trend that has been emerging for a while now. If cinema for more than 100 years was about the portal to a faraway world (who represents that better than Miyazaki?) and social media for the last two decades about putting ourselves at the center of the drama, OpenAI's new tool brings them into perfect convergence. No longer do we have to see Ponyo's relationship with his savior Sosuke, or Ashitaka's princely journey to confront the Forest Spirit, or Mahito's search with a speaking heron to find his mother during the Pacific War, as the stuff of ancient history and magical lands. It's right here, right now, unfolding at December's sixth-floor office Christmas party. Where this goes from here, nobody knows. But of course we do know, the move from MySpace to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok, and their many filters and enhancements along the way, provide all the signposts we need. The next step in our self-possession culture is not just dropping ourselves into the story but painting it in the hues of the great artists who came before. It's turning a vast cinematic history into just another show-offy wristband we wear hanging out at the digital mall. We could see this road ahead even without sensing the desperation of Hollywood studios, who after years of trying to ransack memories via reboots and sequels are now finding their efforts yielding diminishing returns. At the companies that once created, and protected, these memories, many executives are likely to think the only commercial path is to turn images and eventually audio and video into the kind of customization suggested by OpenAI's latest move -- to digitize the Miyazaki no matter the cognitive dissonances, to tap into a collective machine unconscious no matter their job as foremen of the Dream Factory. Sure, some studios might stay holdouts, and some may even win a few legal victories. But the tide appears with the customized and the automated, toward the machines that will crank and away from the creative minds that only grind. This latest wave shows how OpenAI could massively destabilize the entertainment industry as we know it. On March 31, the company raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. It's already becoming a bigger entity than some of the once-mighty studios that ran Hollywood. As Spirited Away unfolds, an all-powerful taskmaster torments her workers in this new strange world, changing their names so they forget who they are. Haku arrives with another warning: Don't forget your name or you'll cease to exist, he tells Chihiro. She looks down at herself barely remembering her lifelong moniker, trying mightily to remember her identity before it's gone forever.

The OpenAI Studio Ghibli controversy will be a test for art copyright in the AI era

You've probably seen by now that OpenAI's latest AI image generator in GPT-4o can apply a Studio-Ghibli look to anything from common online memes to images from the news. Even brands like McDonald's have jumped on the viral trend of 'Ghiblifying' anything and everything. People have been using GTP-4o to generate Ghibli-style memes, landscapes, portraits and even events from history and current affairs. While it may seem frivolous, it could be remembered as a turning point for attitudes to AI imagery, and as a key test for copyright. OpenAI is already facing lawsuits from artists as well as The New York Times, which claims that the company broke the law by training its AI chatbot on copyright material. But the company seems entirely unworried about any potential legal repercussions from the AI Ghibli trend. Unlike with some previous AI controversies, the Microsoft-backed company is not promising to add new controls to stop its generator from ripping off an artistic style or to stop people from using controversial subjects. If anything, it's actively encouraging the trend, which has renewed public interest in AI image generators. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's only concern seems to be the stress it's putting on the company's GPUs as the number of weekly active users rose by 11 per cent. "It's super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT... But our GPUs are melting," he wrote. He's even switched his profile picture on X to an AI-generated 'Ghiblified' image. Like some other companies, OpenAI applied restrictions in previous iterations of its AI image generators to prevent imitations of the styles of living artists or the likenesses of real people. but GPT-4o's ability to clearly pastiche the Ghibli style would appear to suggest OpenAI has cast such precautions aside. "That's just straight up heist of intellectual property - they no longer even bother to pretend its not," one person commented on our initial story. In a technical paper, OpenAI claims that it's still taking a "conservative approach" to image rights by including a refusal that triggers "when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist". But it seems it's now only applying that to individual artists, not studios. So while GPT-4o should, in theory, refuse to generate an image if the prompt asks for the style of Hiyao Mayazaki, it will accept a prompt that asks for the style of Studio Ghibli. Some users have reported that until the update, the older free version of the AI bot refused to generate images in the style of Studio Ghibli "because it is a copyrighted animation studio, and its artistic style is protected." The change is curious given that companies can also own copyright, and they're more likely to have the resources to be able to take legal action. It may be that OpenAI believes that it would be more difficult for a studio to prove ownership over a style. Many legal experts argue that in the broadest sense a "style" cannot be copyrighted, so the question will be if the images produced by GPT-4o include specific elements of existing works of art. So far there has been no official response from Studio Ghibli. OpenAI now has licence arrangements with some companies to allow it to use their content to train its AI models. There has been no statement from either OpenAI or Studio Ghibli about whether this is the case. If there is no agreement, the question that Studio Ghibli will surely want answers to is whether OpenAI trained its model on Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli's work without permision. A video has resurfaced in which the great animator and Studio Ghibli co-founded Hayao Miyazaki describes generative AI as an "insult to life itself". Ironically, his work is now prompting the mass mainstream adoption of AI image generators.

Experts Warn on Data Risks in ChatGPT Ghibli Image Tool

Disclaimer: This content generated by AI & may have errors or hallucinations. Edit before use. Read our Terms of use OpenAI Chief Operating Officer (COO) Brad Lightcap revealed yesterday that over 130 million users had used ChatGPT to generate more than 700 million images since March 25, with India being the AI chatbot's fastest-growing market. The tech company debuted a new image generation feature in ChatGPT last week, based on GPT-4o, its most advanced Large Language Model (LLM) yet. Users soon discovered that the feature was able to convert their photographs into portraits resembling the work of Studio Ghibli, a famous Japanese animation studio. Social media has since been inundated with people sharing "Ghiblified" versions of themselves, a likely contributing factor in the recent surge in ChatGPT users. Even world leaders and government institutions jumped onto the trend, with some using it to demonstrate close diplomatic relations. While others have used it to demonstrate their immigration policies. Not everyone is happy with this trend, however, as some experts warn of potential privacy risks that come with following the trend. Arjun D'Souza, Senior Legal Counsel at SFLC.in, a digital rights organisation pointed out that users were essentially handing over their personal information to OpenAI. The tech company's privacy policy allowed it to use personal information (like photographs) to train its AI models in the future. "Much relating to AI outputs remains a black box. Several privacy harms may arise, for instance, the creation of deepfakes. Further, it is notoriously difficult to remove specific personal data from the training datasets that AI models run on. Even if you utilised the Studio Ghibli feature once, your biometric information may be processed for unknown uses and shared with third-parties, diluting any control you have over such deeply personal data," said D'Souza. He also warned that given the exponential rate at which AI technology was developing, it might be entirely possible for people to reverse "Ghiblified" images to produce something closely resembling the original image. "This may be done using manual methods or through AI-based models. Therefore, users must exercise caution in providing their biometrics to AI models," D'Souza added. Copyright was another problem that many users pointed out with the Studio Ghibli trend. OpenAI is currently facing a number of lawsuits from creators and publishers, who allege that OpenAI's data scraping practices violate their copyright. This includes lawsuits by the New York Times in the USA and by ANI in India. Such plaintiffs have also alleged that ChatGPT is capable of reproducing their content verbatim, again infringing on their copyrighted works. In fact, Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli, had once called AI animation "an insult to life itself." So, the fact that ChatGPT can create such close reproductions of Studio Ghibli's content is a massive violation of copyright law? Turns out, not exactly. Japan has one of the most liberal copyright regimes in the world when it comes to AI. The country allows AI developers to train their models on copyrighted content, even for commercial purposes. In fact, a 2024 white paper published by the government was actually titled "Toward the world's most AI-friendly country." Furthermore, an explanatory document published by the Japan Copyright Office (JCO) stated that AI-generated material which applies the "creator's style" of a preexisting copyrighted work does not infringe copyright if the style merely encompasses an idea. This means that as long as ChatGPT does not recreate a scene from a Studio Ghibli film, they aren't doing anything illegal.