Whats Behind All The Studio Ghibli AI Images?

Studio Ghibli vs AI

Most anime fans have seen that one viral clip of Studio Ghibli's iconic creator, Hayao Miyazaki, absolutely tearing into one of his employees for suggesting they use AI to draw their animation. His exact words were:

"I can't watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you want to make this creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorperate it into my work at all. I strongly feel that it is an insult to life itself."

Wow, Hayao--Shots fired! But seriously, if there's any one cultural figure who can make sweeping generalizations about art that hold water, it's Miyazaki. His wealth of films have garnered him a legendary, almost mythic status as a creative.

So, if Hiyao Miyazaki engages in AI shaming, AI companies should really think more deeply about his opinion and if there are ways to make technologies that don't crush the human spirit.

Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and more have cemented the Studio Ghibli style as its own genre of anime art, one that is accessible to people all around the world. This is in part why AI imitations of Studio Ghibli art have swept social media like wildfire.

It's a phenomenon that is at the very least ironic and at worst, a little sad, to see Miyazaki's art fail to repel the forces he loathed would overtake creativity.

Why So Much Love For Anime in AI?

Studio Ghibli's art style aside, anime has always been the cartoon of choice for Gen-z and younger, as well as many nerds that wind up working in tech. Anime tends to be more psychological, philosophical, and elevated of an art form compared to American cartoons, comics, and drawing.

AI is also a global phenomenon, and across the world, people have come to a consensus around their love of anime be it Pokemon, Dragonball Z, Studio Ghilbi, or more cult-favorite series.

You can scour the shelves at your local arts and crafts store and see numerous manuels on how to draw Ghibli style, helping you develop the difficult talent to make hand drawn anime characters.

Now though, you don't need talent. You simply need a powerful enough AI generator, and now that ChatGPT 4o is completely changing what we thought was possible in image generation, everyone will want to test the waters of AI image creation.

What's Behind All The Studio Ghilbi AI Images?

So, what exactly kickstarted this phenomenon of everyone running images through ChatGPT 4o to make new profile pictures with Ghilbi style images of Japanese animation?

Ghilbi's coziness and worldwide accessibility is only part of the equation. You see, when OpenAI released their latest image generator, it came equipped with a Studio Ghibli filter. Many AI systems feature filters like this such as Stable Diffusion, Dream by Wombo, or Midjourney.

So, the easy to access filter made it the go-to experiment for people using AI art and wanting fun animated images they could identify with. People with little to no knowledge of anime still recognize Ghibli style images, but beyond that, they identify with the values of those films and their creator.

That's partially why it's a little sad to see this philosophical conflict play out in real time. Miyazaki's loathing of AI was in part a reflection of his love for human complexity and nature and understanding that there is purpose in struggle.

Yet, in the AI age, people seem to only get more and more disconnected from those values, making these filters a sort of statement of longing for a more natural way of life.

Art always reflects the times in which it is created. The Studio Ghilbi phenomenon is indicative of humans becoming walking contradictions in the new technological age, foreign flesh in a plastic/metal world, sharing one artist's vision and identifying with his emotional state in a method he was utterly disgusted by.