When Joy Meets Theft - On the Ghibli AI trend, and the future of art & education in the age of algorithms
A gentle nostalgia has swept across the internet. Images of familiar faces and moments—rendered in the soft, magical hues of Studio Ghibli—are being shared with affection, humour, joy and love. But is it all gentle?
There are wide-eyed characters standing under dreamy skies, people’s baby photos turned into gorgeous comic book characters, lovers proposing on dreamlike yachts, old homes and old friends, wrapped in pastel tones that feel—somehow—more romantic than the memories themselves. Even I uploaded a picture of myself, and within minutes, there I was, in Ghibli. A never-seen-before version of me. Helping me imagine what I might be like as a character in a lovable animated film or comic book. It was deeply personal, playful, and honestly, immensely joyful.
The Ghibli trend, as it’s being called, has become a cultural artifact in real time. Propelled by recent upgrades in ChatGPT’s image interpretation technologies, it has allowed millions to reimagine their everyday lives as cinematic, story-worthy, and quietly magical.
But, as with anything that goes viral, not everyone is enchanted—and some of the criticism deserves our attention.
One Instagram post reads:
“The Ghibli trend is everywhere. But let’s be honest—we’re not honouring the legacy. We’re flattening it. We’re trading brushstrokes for algorithms, emotion for efficiency… Art was never meant to be instant. It’s supposed to take time. It’s supposed to cost something—effort, intent, vulnerability.”
This line of thinking—that art must be slow, take a lot of effort, and be exclusive in order to be real—has been around for a while. And I understand where it’s coming from. Ghibli’s aesthetic didn’t fall out of the sky. Artists laboured, refined, and poured their inner lives into every frame. To see that style replicated with a few prompts and clicks might feel… disrespectful. Lifeless. Hollow.
But honestly? I’m not convinced by this line of argument. I’m not claiming to be an animator. I’m not selling the image. I’m not replacing Miyazaki. I’m just… imagining myself in a world he shaped.
And yet, there’s a deeper layer to this conversation that can’t be ignored—one that isn’t about personal joy, but about the ethics of access. The real problem, as I see it, lies in the tool that is enabling this imagination. That’s where the Ghibli trend moves from cultural debate to legal and ethical terrain.
Was the aesthetic of Ghibli ever ours to remix so freely?
AI image generators are trained on massive datasets scraped from the internet. If hundreds of Ghibli frames were part of that training material, without the studio’s permission, we have to ask: what are we celebrating here? A democratization of beauty, or a repackaging of someone else’s soul?
This is where the cultural critique gains sharpness—not in saying users shouldn’t participate in joy, but in asking who profits from that joy.
Right now, users pay a fee to access image-generation tools via platforms like ChatGPT Plus. That means OpenAI earns from Ghibli-inspired aesthetics without ever formally compensating or collaborating with Studio Ghibli. No revenue-sharing. No attribution.
That brings us to the core problem of ethical AI training: creators are being absorbed—their labour liquefied into a dataset, and monetized by a third party.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said that the Ghibli trend is a net win for society as it enables people to share their ideas freely. And in this case, OpenAI might argue: can you copyright a visual style?
Copyright law protects characters, specific scenes, or music—but not style. That’s why AI-generated images “in the style of” Ghibli might not be illegal, even if they’re ethically unsound. The long-term risk is that if AI companies can freely monetise aesthetic styles of creators under the guise of training, it could fundamentally shift the creative economy away from artists and towards owners of the means of generation.
So yes—while users are playing joyfully with the aesthetic, platforms like ChatGPT Plus are quietly owning that play. But this doesn’t mean the joy is invalid. In fact, that’s what makes this moment so complex—two coexisting truths:
The first—that people are experiencing something real, personal, and joyful through these AI images.
The second—that this joy is built on the backs of uncompensated artistic labour.
Holding both these truths together is how we can come to terms with AI tools and the delight they bring, while questioning and refining the technological infrastructure that delivers them. It brings to mind a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” With the complexities of the world we are entering into we must all be able to hold nuance, complexity, and contradiction as valid lenses for understanding the world.
This is where I believe our collective responsibility comes in—across culture, technology, policy and especially, education systems. The Ghibli trend isn’t only a story about art. It’s a mirror. It reveals how people want to see themselves: tender, whimsical, lovable, and larger than life—even if just for a moment.
So the real question becomes—how do we honour that emotional hunger for beauty and belonging, without exploiting the very artists whose work made it possible in the first place?
The answer isn’t censorship, or withdrawal, but design. Platforms must design for fairness—not just for users, but for creators. And it’s been done before. For example, YouTube’s or Instagram’s copyright system, imperfect as it is, showed us that original creators could be credited and compensated even when their work was remixed, memed, or repurposed. That ecosystem didn’t kill creativity. It helped it flourish.
We need similar imagination now—not just in the AI tools we build, but in the ethics we embed within them. Because AI tools aren’t just technological marvels; they’re cultural actors. And guiding their impact won’t just be the job of tech engineers, but of educators, parents, artists, policy-makers—anyone who cares about what we pass on to the next generation.
After all, people aren’t trying to replace Miyazaki. They’re trying to meet him halfway. To say: your worlds touched us. Let us touch them back. And maybe that’s the most sincere form of tribute. In an age of instant remixing, maybe the question isn’t whether beauty should be shared—but how to share it justly.
(Associate Director)
This article got translated & published in Janpath on the Future of Art & Education in the age of AI(6th page). Click here to download it.