It’s been a rough week for Studio Ghibli fans. Last week, OpenAI released their GPT-4o update, which includes a new feature that lets users convert images into a mock-Ghibli aesthetic, resulting in a torrent of Ghiblified slop.
Over on OpenAISea.com they underline that this isn’t an “official collaboration between OpenAI and Studio Ghibli” (duh) but that the model has been “trained on an extensive dataset of artistic styles, enabling it to remarkably recreate the Studio Ghibli aesthetic”. I.e., they stole it.
Studio Ghibli and its resident animation legend Hayao Miyazaki have spent decades painstakingly creating animated features with themes of environmentalism, empathic humanism, and a general sense of wonder for the natural world. Now that has been poured into the AI grinder and reduced to a filter that generates soulless images.
Fans were left nauseated after The White House posted their own Ghibli-style image showing a woman being arrested by ICE Agents, and now the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has tried to join in. But it’s safe to say, it hasn’t worked out like they expected. Their original post was met by comments like “AI art, co-opted by fascists, being used by a fascist force to aestheticize their war crimes“, “miyazaki would be throwing up if he saw this“, and “The people committing a genocide not understanding the value of human creation? Who’s surprised“
Then a 2000lb bomb dropped in the form of a truly brutal ratio from user @saccharinegreen, which has received 209k likes, leaving the IDF’s 16k likes in the dust:
studio ghibli already made a movie where children starve and die because an imperialist power wanted to go to war so there was no need for the ai. https://t.co/0LvwacgY7J pic.twitter.com/WH6K3lGbtV
— rhys(@saccharinegreen) March 30, 2025
Oof. The movie in question is Isao Takahata’s 1988 Grave of the Fireflies, which chronicles two war orphans desperately trying to survive the final months of World War II. Considered one of the greatest animated movies of all time (in 2018, USA Today ranked it the best animated film ever made) and a regular entry on all-time tearjerker movies of any genre.
With thousands of children already killed and aid blocked from entering Gaza, the events of Grave of the Fireflies are currently playing out for Palestinian children. It’s too much to hope that anyone ordering these atrocities will have any moral quandaries or feel guilty about what they’re doing, but perhaps just a few people will have an “are we the baddies?” moment on seeing this.
Others underline that Ghibli’s art style being appropriated by murderous warmongers is the exact opposite of Miyazaki’s beliefs:
at this point they know what they're doing by taking the likeness of an anti-imperialist, anti-war, environmentalist artist to create propaganda for their genocide. they're playing in our faces and it's sick.
— rhys
Perhaps the best we can hope is that the Ghibli filter fad burns out as quickly as it began and we can stop seeing the Literal Worst People in the World crowing over the exploitation of artists who’ve poured their souls into decades of work.
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