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A couple of hours after OpenAI released their ChatGPT update allowing anyone to generate images in Hayao Miyazaki's distinctive style, my phone buzzed with a text: "Have you seen this?" The text was followed with an AI-generated Ghibli-style image of the Babri Masjid demolition. Comments ranged from "majestic" to "dreamy destruction”.

Studio Ghibli-inspired AI art has been popular for many years now, but Sam Altman’s latest offering is perhaps the most realistic iteration of the famed filmmaker Miyazaki.

Over the last week, the internet almost broke OpenAI trying to turn images into a facsimile of Miyazaki's meticulously crafted animation style—work that typically takes artists years to create — in mere seconds. 

And everyone, from your cousin to the BJP's Instagram account — jumped on the trend. 

I'm not immune to the aesthetic appeal. The soft colors, the whimsy, the nostalgia—I get it. But something about it made me uncomfortable enough to reach out to friends who are actual Miyazaki fans.

"It's just disrespectful," one friend told me. He pointed me to a documentary where developers showed Miyazaki a crude AI animation of a zombie. His response?

Miyazaki, you see, was thinking of his friend with a disability who struggles just to give a high five. What I took from that short clip is that art comes from a place of emotions. Artifical Intelligence, in Miyazaki, or many artists’ views cannot replicate that emotion. Ever. 

Meanwhile, the White House used the tool on an image of a woman crying after being arrested by ICE (because nothing says "sensitive government communication" like turning human suffering into kawaii). Some Americans created renderings of 9/11 and George Floyd's murder. If you thought we were heading toward a dystopia, congratulations—we've arrived and it's wearing a Totoro costume.

So here we are, in 2025, watching OpenAI gleefully ride roughshod over Miyazaki’s ethos. Because here’s the thing.

I am going to take the help of a LinkedIn post of Prerna Subramanian, an assistant professor at OP Jindal Global University, to explain this better. She described using the AI filter on a photo of herself and her mother. The result? Her mother—”a brown, full-bodied, older woman”—was returned as “grotesquely bloated”, while she herself looked like “an exotic tomato.” The AI had "corrected" them, optimised them, translated them into something more digestible for its dataset.

“These aren’t just aesthetic choices,” Subramanian wrote. “They are datafied norms. Eugenics in pastel.”

I asked a friend who's an artist how she feels about the trend. She even queried ChatGPT if it felt bad about copying Miyazaki's style. (Spoiler: AI can't feel bad, which was rather Miyazaki's point.) ChatGPT responded with some PR spin about "celebrating and reinterpreting that aesthetic in new contexts" but taking a stand against replication for commercial purposes. Meanwhile, there are already Instagram accounts charging $10 for customised Ghibli-style AI images.

A colleague, a longtime Miyazaki fan, refused to share an AI-generated Ghibli version of a group photo. “It takes so long to create these images. It is delicate. And now people are doing it in seconds? It’s an insult to the artist.”

As Brian Merchant puts it, "For the most adamant of AI advocates, 'Ghiblification' is just more proof that they've won; that tech has conquered art, and that they can use and commodify it as they please. Who gives a shit how the artists feel about it?"

I see the appeal of the AI filter. I really do. It’s fun! But let’s not pretend this is harmless play. The AI-generated Ghibli trend is a microcosm of everything messy about the AI art boom. And it’s worth thinking about while admiring or creating AI art.

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