Ghibli-styled images took social media by storm with everyone turning their family photos, travel shots, selfies into dreamy anime scenes. While the trend has slowed down, its charm still lingers around across digital platforms.
ChatGPT's latest update allowed users to 'ghiblify' images with just a simple prompt and a single click.
The trend was a convenient alternative to the otherwise time-consuming and expensive option of creating or commissioning an aesthetic, cartoon portrait of oneself. For the masses, it was a fun and nostalgic trend. For the corporations, it was a cheap marketing tactic.
However, for artists who spent invested their heart and many hours bringing the animations to life, the ghiblified images were soulless patchworks of plagiarised art.
Studio Ghibli’s hand-drawn animations have long been cherished for its attention to visual detail and emotional depth - each frame is infused with meditative quality reflecting the philosophy of Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki sees art as an extension of human emotions and the artist’s personal touch.
Unfortunately, many are incapable of distinguishing Studio Ghibli frames from the infamous AI-generated replicas that lack the intent and narrative Miyazaki heartfully defined in his animations.
In a 2016 documentary, Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki, a group of developers presented Miyazaki with an AI-generated image of a zombie-like creature that could be used for a video game.
Miyazaki denounced the use of technology in art stating, “I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.” Miyazaki’s art is settled deep in empathy and understanding. He saw the use of technology as a betrayal of what makes art meaningful - the human touch.
"I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is,” he said. “I am utterly disgusted," he added, before concluding, "I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
Cut to the present day, Miyazaki’s biggest fear is a reality. With a few prompts, anyone can generate a scene reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away, almost erasing the line between original human creativity and machine-generated visuals.
Artists across the world put forward a bigger question - Is art being preserved or it has been reduced to a soulless mass-produced aesthetic?
“AI-generated art isn’t progress at all. It shows that today, people no longer value the pain and hours of creativity that are put behind a single artwork. When we take away the human touch from art, what remains? Just a machine producing algorithmic images. That is an image without a soul. Call it everything, but Art,” said a Kolkata-based animator and digital artist.
Ethical concerns
The rise of AI-generated art raises serious questions about attribution and ownership. AI does not create from scratch - the models are trained on existing visuals which are then used to generate new visuals. This, in a sense, can imply that AI is stealing from artists without their consent.
Addressing copyright concerns, an intellectual property lawyer, Even Brown, told TechCrunch that the style is not explicitly protected. He added that OpenAI is not technically ‘violating’ any laws.
“I think this raises the same question that we’ve been asking ourselves for a couple years now. What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?” Brown asked.
According to the Associated Press, OpenAI will be taking a “conservative approach” while replicating the aesthetics of individual artists. “We added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist,” the statement said.
When AI tools are producing artwork resembling the Ghibli aesthetic, they are essentially repurposing the work and technique of the animators who have spent a considerable amount of time perfecting their craft. The end product is often based on a carefully curated art style without providing any credit or compensation to the original creators.
When an art style, worked on for a considerable time, gets reduced to merely a filter for a profile picture, the appreciation for the value of art is lost.
Miyazaki’s art extends far beyond its visual appeal - it is a way of expressing emotions, struggles, and the intangible aspects of life. He views art as a deeply personal and labour-intensive process.
Consumers of the AI-generated Ghibli trend often devalue these aspects that go into traditional artistry. This can just be the beginning of a long-term implication - the demand for human-made art diminishing as convenient and cheaper AI-based alternatives become more prevalent.
Additionally, the lack of transparency of how AI models are trained and the lack of regulation on what data can be used for what purpose, makes it difficult to ensure that creators are being credited for their influence on the global bandwagon. And consumers giving in to the trend, further undermines the intellectual property rights of artists.
Commercialisation of Ghibli art
The trend of plagiarising and profiting from distinct art styles and aesthetics is not a new thing.
Before ChatGPT sensationalised ghiblified images, corporations have often exploited the aesthetics of Ghibli for profit, without compensating or crediting the creators. From home decor to fashion brands, Ghibli-like visuals have become a marketable trend reducing the art and efforts behind it to a mass-produced commodity.
Luxury fashion brand LOEWE, in a high-end collaboration with Studio Ghibli in 2021, launched merchandise featuring Totoro, captivating the nostalgic and whimsical appeal of the film. However, this official collaboration has since paved the way for countless unofficial brands to profit heavily off Ghibli-inspired aesthetics. Websites like Redbubble and Etsy offer a huge variety of Ghibli-like visuals printed on their merchandise - everything from clothing to mugs to phone cases.
With the rise of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), AI-generated Ghibli-style digital assets have been sold for profit. These NFTs use AI tools to replicate Ghibli’s hand-painted looks and commodify the aesthetics to a collectible trend, detached from its essence. These NFTs often put the tag - “inspired by Ghibli” - misleading consumers and stripping the artistic integrity.
While Ghibli's art is deeply rooted in emotion, storytelling, and craftsmanship, commercialisation devalues the efforts of artists who dedicated years to honing their craft and now are competing with mass-produced AI designs that are cheaper and faster to create.
How artists feel about the recent ‘trend’
Artist, particularly animators and digital artists, are deeply frustrated by the replication of what many consider their inspiration. For those who spend years perfecting their craft, watching AI-generated images with no human touch, no storytelling or depth is disheartening.
However, most still believe that this is just a technological shift which is true for any industry and the effort of human creativity is still worth to those who value art in its true sense.
“I do not think AI-generated artworks of any style can reduce the value of the actual human-created ones. One is created. One is generated. Of course the value of creation is far more. AI may be able to replicate the lines and colours, but to bring soul into those very lines, you need human emotions into it. You cannot generate life into a piece of art,” highlighted Aishik, a 3D artist.
For him, AI is just another tool for his life that is supposed to assist in one’s work and not totally produce it for them. “The fad that people are jumping into with AI, they are mindlessly trying to replace ‘create’ with ‘generate’. There is a reason why a four-second animation scene takes almost a year to create and why we see the emotions, why we feel it. And people need to know how to value it.”
Kaustav, another passionate digital artist has similar views on AI being used to mass-produce so-called art.
“AI should just be treated as a helping hand. If it is copying your work, how is it not ethically stealing? How can anyone be motivated to produce art in this way? Even Canva and Photoshop use AI-infused features, but they are trained with copyrighted material. Is that the case with the current trend? Hardly requires any answer!”
If the world shifts towards mass-produced AI art becoming the new normal, traditional artists could struggle to maintain visibility and fair compensation. However, Radhika, an advocate and a passionate traditional artist, believes the other way around. The rise of artificial art could reinforce the importance of human creativity. As more people realise the soulless nature of AI images, they might develop a deeper appreciation for flaws, textures, and emotional depth behind human creativity.
“People today often believe in the phrase ‘smart work, not hard work’; but I am certain that art does not work that way. Art in itself is an exception to the regular norms of the society. It believes in skill, effort, creativity, hard work and dedication. These elements add up to how artists think and create meaningful and exquisite art,” she highlighted adding, “AI can never replace an artist’s passion for art or the creativity that they hold. AI does not generate art based on its intellect. It copies from different sources that it is trained on. It can never create, it can only replicate.”
The future
The future that most people look at is one where AI is a collaborator, not a substitute. People, in different industries, look to AI to boost productivity, replicate, and enhance based on pre-acquired knowledge, not to take over the creative process and critical thinking.
AI does not have the capacity for empathy, love, pain and experience. Yet in the artistic world, people are looking beyond AI for assisting - it is being used for replacing. Unlike photography, music production and writing where AI tools serve as aids, art generated by AI erases the artist’s role altogether. Neither does it understand the weight behind a brushstroke nor draw from personal experience. It stitches together an image through lines of coding and a few words as prompts.
In a world where speed and mass production are taking over human expression, convenience and algorithmic beauty are preferred over artistic efforts and authenticity, traditional artistry is somewhere caught between preservation and obsolescence.
The future of art depends on AI remaining a supporting tool, rather than a replacing one, that thrives on the potential to enhance creativity rather than diminish it. We are at a crossroads where a crucial question must be asked - Are we reducing creativity to a fleeting trend and letting profit-driven motives dictate art’s future or do we make the choice ourselves and value not just the beauty but the irreplaceable depth?