Ghibli, AI and the future of art

If you’ve been anywhere near social media in the past few weeks, you’ve probably been swarmed by images of your friends, family and even celebrities as “Ghibli characters.”

This is all thanks to OpenAI’s latest “4o image generation” feature, which can turn real-life images into various art forms – a feature so popular that it made the company’s weekly user count cross the 150 million mark, with over 700 million pictures generated just last week.

Despite “Ghibli-style” images of celebrities, iconic scenes from films and television, famous historical moments, and famous memes taking the internet by storm, multiple ethical dilemmas and legal controversies have arisen with the tide of this trend. 

An insult to life

Studio Ghibli has combined amazing storylines, riveting musical scores, and a masterfully expressive and alive art style to create some of the most mesmerizing animated films of the last four decades.

With classics like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Grave of the Fireflies and others capturing the hearts of multiple generations, it is understandable why millions jumped on the bandwagon to try and make moments from their lives into a part of the magical universe. 

However, clips have resurfaced of Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary artist, filmmaker, and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, commenting on the use of AI in creating art, calling it an “insult to life itself.” He remarked that he would never wish to incorporate the technology into his art. 

With the revered artist’s expressed disdain in mind, artists and appreciators of art are now expressing disdain of their own toward the attempted imitation of the maestro’s art style, opining that it disrespects the years of hard work that goes into each of the studio’s hand-drawn scenes and that it takes away the soul and meaning of the carefully crafted style. 

Beyond Miyazaki and the art community’s disdain, the fact that OpenAI can even replicate the art style has led many to question how the technology is trained, and the answers are not pretty.

Blatant theft of art

OpenAI is facing allegations of training its model using copyrighted material without permission or compensation, which is a complicated way of saying that the company is stealing art, literature, and music for better replication.

The company faces multiple lawsuits from American media houses and authors, and lawyers point out that Studio Ghibli also has enough grounds to pursue its legal action. 

Several OpenAI employees have anonymously expressed concern about their company’s methods. Suchir Balaji, an OpenAI employee who came out as a whistleblower and a key witness in a lawsuit against his employers in October of 2024, was found dead in his apartment a month later, the official claims of suicide contested by private investigators. 

The effects of plagiarism are not limited simply to a lack of credit, permission, or compensation; they concern the future of human creativity itself. 

Future  

In an ideal world, artificial intelligence is supposed to assist and complement human creativity instead of replacing it. However, in our profit-oriented world, artists fear the upcoming replacement of human artists by AI, AI, for animation, which takes away the whole point of animated films and cartoons. 

Art isn’t supposed to be visually beautiful. It is believed to have meanings, messages, and feelings. The art pieces, cartoons, comics, anime, and animated films that we all love are as unique as they are due to the human aspects of thought, passion, individuality, and care that are put into them. (This stands especially true for Hayao Miyazaki’s works, as he is adamantly against using even CGI animation in his films.)

Without human touch, animation created by machines feeding off already-existing art has little more value than the content infants watch as their parents try to feed them. 

As the cyber world gets filled with images made with Studio Ghibli’s style but none of its true essence, artists remember Hayao Miyazaki’s remark on the use of artificial intelligence for the very human trait of creating art,  

“I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

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