If you’ve been on social media in the last few days, you might have noticed a ton of memes and pictures being shared that look shockingly like Studio Ghibli art. That’s because they were created with OpenAI’s new GPT‑4o image generator, a native tool in ChatGPT that allows users to upload photos, input a simple prompt like, “Turn this image into a Studio Ghibli-style animated portrait,” and then have their picture recreated in the style of the famed Japanese animation studio. The trend has sparked a lot of backlash from fans about the use of AI, especially after The White House got in on the action by sharing its own controversial image.
Known for creating such classics as Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle, Studio Ghibli was founded in part by Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary animator, filmmaker, and manga artist whose own past comments about the use of AI are once more being brought up in the wake of the recent social media trend. What was at first a fun experiment quickly snowballed into controversy yesterday when The White House’s official X account shared its own Ghibli-inspired image of a woman being taken into custody by ICE.
More to come…
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
