Hayao Miyazaki's AI Nightmare

The Atlantic

28-03-2025

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This week, OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o, one of the models powering ChatGPT, that allows the program to create high-quality images. I've been surprised by how effective the tool is: It follows directions precisely, renders people with the right number of fingers, and is even capable of replacing text in an image with different words.
Almost immediately—and with the direct encouragement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—people started using GPT-4o to transform photographs into illustrations that emulate the style of Hayao Miyazaki's animated films at Studio Ghibli. (Think Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away.) The program was excellent at this task, generating images of happy couples on the beach (cute) and lush illustrations of the Kennedy assassination (not cute).
Unsurprisingly, backlash soon followed: People raised concerns about OpenAI profiting off of another company's intellectual property, pointed to a documentary clip of Miyazaki calling AI an 'insult to life itself,' and mused about the technology's threats to human creativity. All of these conversations are valid, yet they didn't feel altogether satisfying—complaining about a (frankly, quite impressive!) thing doesn't make that thing go away, after all. I asked my colleague Ian Bogost, also the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, for his take.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Damon Beres: Let's start with the very basic question. Are the Studio Ghibli images evil?
Ian Bogost: I don't think they're evil. They might be stupid. You could construe them as ugly, although they're also beautiful. You could construe them as immoral or unseemly.
If they are evil, why are they evil? Where does that get us in our understanding of contemporary technology and culture? We have backed ourselves into this corner where fandom is so important and so celebrated, and has been for so long. Adopting the universe and aesthetics of popular culture—whether it's Studio Ghibli or Marvel or Harry Potter or Taylor Swift—that's not just permissible, but good and even righteous in contemporary culture.
Damon: So the idea is that fan art is okay, so long as a human hand literally drew it with markers. But if any person is able to type a very simple command into a chatbot and render what appears at first glance to be a professional-grade Studio Ghibli illustration, then that's a problem.
Ian: It's not different in nature to have a machine do a copy of a style of an artist than to have a person do a copy of a style of an artist. But there is a difference in scale: With AI, you can make them fast and you can make lots of them. That's changed people's feelings about the matter.
I read an article about copyright and style— you can't copyright a style, it argued—that made me realize that people conflate many different things in this conversation about AI art. People who otherwise might hate copyright seem to love it now: If they're posting their own fan art and get a takedown request, then they're like, Screw you, I'm just trying to spread the gospel of your creativity. But those same people might support a copyright claim against a generative-AI tool, even though it's doing the same thing.
Damon: As I've experimented with these tools, I've realized that the purpose isn't to make art at all; a Ghibli image coming out of ChatGPT is about as artistic as a photo with an Instagram filter on it. It feels more like a toy to me, or a video game. I'm putting a dumb thought into a program and seeing what comes out. There's a low-effort delight and playfulness.
But some people have made this point that it's insulting because it's violating Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki's beliefs about AI. Then there are these memes—the White House tweeted a Ghiblified image of an immigrant being detained, which is extremely distasteful. But the image is not distasteful because of the technology: It's distasteful because it's the White House tweeting a cruel meme about a person's life.
Ian: You brought up something important, this embrace of the intentional fallacy—the idea that a work's meaning is derived from what the creator of that work intended that meaning to be. These days, people express an almost total respect for the intentions of the artist. It's perfectly fine for Miyazaki to hate AI or anything else, of course, but the idea that his opinion would somehow influence what I think about making AI images in his visual style is fascinating to me.
Damon: Maybe some of the frustration that people are expressing is that it makes Studio Ghibli feel less special. Studio Ghibli movies are rare—there aren't that many of them, and they have a very high-touch execution. Even if we're not making movies, the aesthetic being everywhere and the aesthetic being cheap cuts against that.
Ian: That's a credible theory. But you're still in intentional-fallacy territory, right? Studio Ghibli has made a deliberate effort to tend and curate their output, and they don't just make a movie every year, and I want to respect that as someone influenced by that work. And that's weird to me.
Damon: What we haven't talked about is the Ghibli image as a kind of meme. They're not just spreading because they're Ghibli images: They're spreading because they're AI-generated Ghibli images.
Ian: This is a distinctive style of meme based less on the composition of the image itself or the text you put on it, but the application of an AI-generated style to a subject. I feel like this does represent some sort of evolutionary branch of internet meme. You need generative AI to make that happen, you need it to be widespread and good enough and fast enough and cheap enough. And you need X and Bluesky in a way as well.
Damon: You can't really imagine image generators in a paradigm where there's no social media.
Ian: What would you do with them, show them to your mom? These are things that are made to be posted, and that's where their life ends.
Damon: Maybe that's what people don't like, too—that it's nakedly transactional.
Ian: Exactly—you're engagement baiting. These days, that accusation is equivalent to selling out.
Damon: It's this generation's poser.
Ian: Engagement baiter.
Damon: Leave me with a concluding thought about how people should react to these images.
Ian: They ought to be more curious. This is deeply interesting, and if we refuse to give ourselves the opportunity to even start engaging with why, and instead jump to the most convenient or in-crowd conclusion, that's a real shame.