Everything’s Ghibli!
The internet goes gaga for Ghibli.
Sam Altman’s OpenAI had only just released its latest image generation technology as part of Chat-GPT4o when everything in Elon Musk’s pain palace suddenly turned to animated dust. Animated Trump, animated Nixon, animated 9/11. Altman’s conversion tool, quickly mimicked by Grok and other AI agents, allows users to convert photographic images and videos into the immersive anime style of Studio Ghibli, the production house of the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki.
Social media users couldn’t get enough. Everywhere you looked there was another cartoon figure, animated in the style of Studio Ghibli, racing across social media. By midday, a memecoin called “Ghiblification” had ballooned to a value of greater than $20 million market cap. Before the sun set in America, even Musk himself had posted a Ghiblified image spoofing the Lion King that showed the Tesla titan as a monkey hoisting up the DOGE mascot from the meme-driven cryptocurrency Dogecoin. It was all very 2025.
It was the middle of the night in Japan when the first Ghibli memes went viral on 𝕏. I couldn’t help but think of Miyazaki. The creator of Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, and a dozen other animated classics, Miyazaki was not only a deft storyteller, but a visionary who took great pride in the craftsmanship of the artisans he employed. The 84-year-old director left no doubt about his displeasure with artificial intelligence advancements when presented with a baseline model in 2017.
“I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself,” Miyazaki told disheartened engineers who had just shown the aging filmmaker their latest mutant AI creations. “I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.” The youthful engineers were then asked to explain why they were working on such a project. “We would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do.” Miyazaki’s eyes couldn’t hide his pain and disenchantment with the technological breakthroughs knocking at his front door.
In response to 𝕏 being flooded with Ghibli memes this week, a video of Miyazaki’s painstaking animation process went viral on the platform Wednesday afternoon. In the video, Miyazaki views rushes from his upcoming film to check the completed shots with his own eyes. “Drawing a crowd takes time and effort, so animators usually avoid it,” says the narrator. “But not Miyazaki.” One scene in particular features a crowd of people, hundreds of figures, moving past each other on a busy street. The four-second clip took animators more than a year to create. When one of the key animators states that the scene is “so short” despite the intensive work required to create it, Miyazaki replies simply: “But it was worth it.”
By Thursday morning, an animated version of the trailer for the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship in the style of Studio Ghibli was going viral on 𝕏. Its creator said he “spent $250 and 9 hours” of work to reproduce the trailer shot by shot. What would’ve once taken weeks or months to develop with dozens of artists could now be replicated in someone’s basement with little to no money. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar was also ghiblified, receiving more than 22,000 likes on the 𝕏 platform. The editor wrote simply: “made using chatgpt + @morphic.”
Morphic, the AI agent that helped transform still images from ChatGPT into moving images, shared simple instructions explaining how users could create their own sequences. Attached below the instructions, Morphic simply wrote: “What will you animate?”
In only a couple years, AI imaging technology has gone from struggling to animate fingers and butchering human anatomy to being capable of mimicking the most talented artists of our age. “The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend,” wrote Robert Jordan in his 1990 fantasy novel, The Eye of the World. “Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”
Hollywood isn’t taking the beating lying down. More than 400 names, including A-listers such as Ben Stiller and Mark Ruffalo, sent a letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy this month urging the Trump team to consider the ramifications of such new technological advancements in respect to copyright law.
“AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music and voices used to train AI models at the core of multibillion-dollar corporate valuations,” reads the letter which argues that AI companies are exploiting America’s creative and knowledge industries without proper remuneration. “There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish.”
Similar copyright concerns were at the front of many minds as Ghibli memes continued to proliferate the 𝕏 community on Thursday. Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Neal & McDevitt, argued that Chat-GPT4o is currently operating in a legal gray area with respect to its imaging technology.
“I think this raises the same question that we’ve been asking ourselves for a couple years now,” Brown told TechCrunch. “What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?”
Brown says that although style is protected under current copyright law, it’s not implausible that OpenAI sourced millions of frames from Studio Ghibli’s work to train its technology. Whether it’s illegal to train an AI machine on copyright work is currently being contested in the courts, meaning that, for the time being, Altman, OpenAI, and ChatGPT are likely in the clear legally.
For the first time in possibly ever, OpenAI chief Sam Altman was being celebrated. Writing to 𝕏 on Wednesday, the tech mogul, whose AI client has been much maligned by right wing critics who question its censorship protocols, said his inbox had been flooded with congratulatory texts and Ghibli memes poking fun at his creation. By Thursday, Altman admitted that the company’s “GPUs are melting”—an admission that ChatGPT was experiencing its breakthrough moment. After years of struggling to gain a foothold in the new tech space, ChatGPT had blasted through the front door with humor.
Watching the memes spread like wildfire on 𝕏 this week, I couldn’t help but think of President Trump sitting in a Tesla on the White House lawn earlier this month. “Everything’s computer!” roared the 47th. Yes, Mr. President, for better or worse, everything is now a computer. What’s left now is what we do with them, or worrying yet, what they do with us.
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