All You Need To Know About OpenAI's Ghibli Trend

Ghibli, or not Ghibli?

If your feed was recently flooded with dreamy, pastel-toned scenes straight out of a Studio Ghibli film, you’re not alone. These viral images, often created with a single ChatGPT prompt, showcase the power of OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-4o with image generation, and they’ve also reignited a fierce debate about the future of creativity.

Here’s what’s going on:

• OpenAI just rolled out GPT-4o with native image generation: This new multimodal model allows users to generate images directly inside ChatGPT, using natural language. This time it’s really different. The results are stylistically consistent, emotionally rich, and often eerily close to iconic animation styles, including Studio Ghibli’s.
• Ghibli-inspired prompts went viral, fast: Starting from an example image from OpenAI’s team, users began asking ChatGPT to generate images in the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s films. You can now see kids riding bicycles through sakura-filled streets, cozy ramen shops glowing at dusk, exploding on platforms like X and Reddit.
• The backlash was swift: While many were amazed by the results, others saw this as an offense to the original artists and the styles they spent decades developing.

A resurfaced video of Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki criticizing an early AI-generated zombie character, calling it “an insult to life itself,” went viral once again. That clip was from eight years ago, long before AI art went mainstream. Still, few believe Miyazaki would react any differently today.

Reflecting on the flood of AI-generated images inspired by Hayao Miyazaki, Anthony Slumbers, a member of Lead with AI community and the author of Trillion Dollar Hashtag, pointed out a key distinction:

Unlike here, where everyone has taken one man’s creativity and riffed on the same spark ad infinitum, true creativity would involve taking the underlying capability of the AI — to represent X in the style of Y — and use it to generate something new.

It’s a timely reminder: AI’s real power isn’t in mimicking what’s already been done, it’s in helping us reimagine what hasn’t been thought of yet.

Personally, I don’t think “create this image in Ghibli style” is the best way to use ChatGPT-4o’s latest update. If anything, it might be the fastest way for someone to test and get a sense of how advanced the tool has progressed. 

Once you get a grip on it, the possibilities for applying it meaningfully in your own work are endless.

Will GPT-4o image creation be Canva killer?

It’s not just smarter, it’s coming for tools like Canva. With a single prompt, you can now create an entire ad: visuals, copy, layout, all styled and on-brand. No templates, no fiddling with design tools.

• It can generate stylistically coherent images from abstract prompts like “a peaceful village in South Park style.”
• It allows for back-and-forth iteration within the same chat, refining details with conversational ease.
• It integrates text + image inputs, meaning users can point to a sketch or reference and say “more like this.”

The big question: Creative copyright in AI has always been a gray zone that now demands real answers. How far should we go in balancing exploration and experimentation with maintaining creative integrity and respect for original creators?

This moment is more than a meme. AI is now capable of mimicking emotional depth and artistic nuance, not just spitting out generic visuals. That’s powerful… and a bit unsettling.

How do we balance inspiration with imitation in the age of AI? And what’s your role as a leader to embrace, regulate, or resist?