‘An insult to life itself’: Studio Ghibli fans disgusted and horrified at ‘garbage’ AI filter

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Studio Ghibli icon Hayao Miyazaki – the animation titan behind Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and many more – has spent his career showing everyone why hand-made human creativity is important. In an interview, he explained, “whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul.”

Said philosophy was front-and-center in his Academy Award-winning 2023 hit The Boy and the Heron, which was painstakingly created through hand-drawn animation without any computer shortcuts. Yes, it’s time-consuming to do it by hand. Yes, it requires vision and commitment. And yes, producing visuals like this is beyond the realm of most, but the results speak for themselves.

So it’s all the more galling that OpenAI’s new GPT-4o update includes a new feature that lets users convert any image they choose into a mock-Ghibli style. Over on OpenAISea.com they underline that there’s “no official collaboration between OpenAI and Studio Ghibli” (no kidding…) but that the model has been “trained on an extensive dataset of artistic styles, enabling it to remarkably recreate the Studio Ghibli aesthetic”.

Or, to put it another way, “we fed one of the greatest modern artist’s life’s work to our garbage machine and now you can burn the planet by making mock Ghibli pictures of your cat”. It goes without saying that Studio Ghibli fans are depressed and horrified by this onslaught of mock-Ghibli trash, with many reposting this video of Miyazaki himself being clearly depressed by AI art:

Posts by other fans – who identify the existential horror of stealing the environmentally conscious Ghibli aesthetic and piping it through computers that consume “a staggering amount of electricity“. Ghibli being used to kill the planet? Welcome to hell:

This reply hits particular hard:

And this post probably sums up the weird sadness seeing all the AI slop caused in me:

Let’s wrap things up with another pointed quote from Miyazaki himself. He’s a notoriously gloomy person despite the uplifting stories he tells but, based on the evidence on social media over the last day, who wouldn’t be?

“I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire—all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.”

Sounds great! Bring on the deluge. We humans had our chance, and we blew it.



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