Chat GPT's “Ghibli Magic” is the opposite of what Studio Ghibli stands for.

About 15 hours ago, the official White House account on X posted a tasteless image: an ICE officer, the federal agency responsible for immigration in the USA and recently involved in deporting and arresting individuals who don't align with the political views of the American establishment, handcuffing a crying woman. The arrest was real: the woman is named Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, she was charged with illegal fentanyl trafficking, and the arrest took place ten days ago during an attempt to re-enter the USA. Beyond the evident self-satisfaction with which the page managers chose to address such a serious issue, the image presents a disturbing dissonance: the scene, as one might imagine, is dramatic, but the drawing style resembles that of Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary Studio Ghibli. The image was created using Chat GPT, with a new feature called "Ghibli Magic", capable of Ghibli-izing any photo in just a few seconds, which, after being presented yesterday, went viral. However, among the users who use it out of curiosity or for more or less sentimental purposes (the NY Times tells the story of an American woman who was moved seeing her wedding photos "transformed"), the majority of the internet has decided to use this feature for something else. The White House account is the most unpleasant example, but there have been others who have Ghibli-ized photos of 9/11, the murder of George Floyd, the argument between Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office, and Elon Musk playing with his cutlery at an official dinner. But Miyazaki is one of the most quoted authors in the world, and practically everyone remembered the scene from a documentary where the director, after seeing a demo presentation for using AI in animation back in 2016, said: «I am absolutely disgusted. I would never incorporate this technology into my work. I believe this is an insult to life itself».

Miyazaki is a great artist, who has worked on his art his whole life. Seeing the name of his studio and his art not only turned into a trivial game for posting a photo and, even worse, used to create content for more or less hidden political propaganda, as well as to depict some of the darkest moments of recent history, is worse than a trivialization: it’s a perversion. The Ghibli studio style, in fact, is not simply a package of aesthetic codes, but comes from a completely artisanal approach to the work of animation, with a level of attention to detail, a degree of imagination, and a use of colors so subtle and delicate that it cannot be separated from it. Those who appreciate the art of Studio Ghibli know very well that none of its magic would be possible, or even imaginable, without the absolute rigor and, as often expressed by Miyazaki himself, the creative torment with which its creators approach it. And the trivialization of this style due to AI, which essentially makes it another example of synthetic slop, could have retroactive effects: as graphic motion editor Fredrik B. pointed out on X: «The Ghibli style is going to become oversaturated and associated with lazy and boring content - I can’t wait for kids to grow up thinking Ghibli movies are generated by AI when they’re actually created by excellent artists». Evidently, there is also a potential copyright issue: it doesn’t seem right (and we don’t know whether it’s legal or not) to name the new feature after the production studio that invented the style, which is now being copied to recreate memes and produce extreme-right political humor. The only thing we know is that, in the face of the viral wave online, there are few objections that hold up.

Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT and another controversial billionaire from Silicon Valley, joked about it, essentially saying that he worked on super-intelligence for a decade «to cure cancer and things like that», making half the world hate him just for «waking up one day with hundreds of messages: 'Look, I turned you into a Ghibli twink haha'». But there’s another quote, attributed to Altman but actually found in a recent policy proposal on technology regulation in the USA, that says: «If Chinese developers have unlimited access to data, and American companies are left without access to fair use, the AI race is essentially over. America loses, as does the success of democratic AI». As Futurism explains, OpenAI argues that the USA risks losing the AI race if it can no longer gather data from copyrighted materials, thus leaving China in the lead. According to Ars Technica, also quoted by the magazine, Sam Altman’s company is pressuring Donald Trump to introduce federal regulations that redefine the concept of "fair use", a central point in the lawsuits filed against OpenAI by the New York Times and other publishing companies when they discovered that the AI model is trained using their copyrighted materials, as well as the works of numerous artists - Miyazaki included, but also the creators of South Park.

The argument is indeed not to let Chinese AIs like DeepSeek, cheaper and faster, win “the AI race”. But this presents a huge moral dilemma since AI models often generate responses that border on direct copyright violation. Altman’s proposed solution is to rework the "fair use" doctrine, making it a matter of "national security", even though it's hard not to notice the double standards used by Altman, who, through OpenAI, accused DeepSeek of using its data without permission—a detail that is deliberately not mentioned in the proposal for reasons we can imagine. The dilemma is heightened by the fact that, in many ways, AI technology represents a valid help and support for many areas of work, science, and technology. However, the “Faustian pact” that AI offers essentially consists of allowing this powerful and often useful technology to cannibalize the works of hundreds of thousands of artists by automating their skills, reducing creativity to a piece of code. The way the public uses these more “creative” AI features perhaps has the merit of bringing art closer to everyone, but at the same time, it transforms it into a filter to try as a pastime, a temporary and occasional product, created without effort or skill, made to produce completely banal and derivative creativity. Artistically speaking, it’s a postmodern hell. Paraphrasing the famous meme, we might say that the ideal world is one where humans can paint and write poems while AI handles the mundane tasks of daily life—whereas a much more dystopian future would be one where humans must do these jobs while a computer paints and writes poems.