Ghibli frenzy on internet at Miyazaki's expense

The Ghibli-fied portraits that found their way through OpenAI in the last 24 hours would be more than what Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli, sketched in his entire lifetime.

Image Generator is a new feature released by OpenAI ChatGPT 4o. People with access to premium accounts in OpenAI ChatGPT are spending day and night converting their photos to Ghibli art. The insane craze continues, leading to the application crashing yesterday. The same forced Open AI founder Sam Altman to deliver a message on X.

“can yall please chill on generating images This is insane our team needs sleep”, the CEO wrote on X.

Instagram and other platforms followed suit as more people started converting images and then posting them on other social media platforms. The trend went ubiquitous in no time.

It all started as fun, but at some point, things transgressed the norms. Photos of political leaders and actors were converted, leading to concerns of copyright infringement. Amidst this, discussion looms large about the introduction of Artificial intelligence being the death of creativity.

Ghibli-style images of Turkish pistol shooter Yusuf Dikek, Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump turned a hit while adult contents in Ghibli portraits are also on the rise.

Evan Brown, a lawyer at US-based law firm Neal & McDevitt, told TechCrunch that Open AI's Studio Ghibli trend does not technically appear to be breaking the law. However, he also pointed out that OpenAI is using the ingenious work of the celebrated Japanese studio. Some social media users say that Miyazaki, the founder and animator of Studio Ghibli Studios, is not happy man with Open AI’s latest introduction.

An old video of Miyazaki commenting on AI technology is also circulating on social media. In 2016, Miyazaki, when shown an AI image, said, " it is an insult to life."