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SHOULD WE BE DOING THIS?

Studio Ghibli Memes Take Over the Internet—Thanks to AI

The Studio Ghibli version of a Ben Affleck meme is a personal favorite.

Ben Affleck meme

via X (@venturetwins)

By Clare Donaldson

A Studio Ghibli version of Ben Affleck exasperated and smoking? Of Real Housewives? Of JD Vance?

OpenAI released a new version of their image generation technology, and people are using it to recreate memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind acclaimed films like Spirited Away, The Boy and The Heron, and The Wind Rises.

The artificial intelligence company launched the new model on Tuesday, describing it as “[their] most advanced image generator yet into GPT‑4o. The result—image generation that is not only beautiful, but useful.”

While turning memes into the animation style of Studio Ghibli isn’t what people would necessary call “useful,” it certainly captured the internet’s attention, with users churning out memes by the thousands in the past 24 hours.

Here are just some of the memes we saw on X today:

Others are posting AI generated Studio Ghibli images of real life events, like the assassination of JFK, the moment George W. Bush learned about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and when Elon Musk flashed his belly at a Trump rally.

There has officially been so many Studio Ghibli memes on people’s social media timelines that users are now posting memes about the OpenAI bot being “over” the whole trend.

It goes without saying that the AI’s capability of producing realistic Ghibli-style memes represents a frightening prospect for artists and creators alike, especially when considering how much time and energy animators put into their craft.

Back in 2016, Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, expressed his hatred for the technology after watching an AI generation demo, calling it “an insult to life itself.”

“I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all,” Miyazaki said.

Considering Miyazaki and the studio’s distaste for the technology, it seems unlikely they gave OpenAI permission to use their films to train the model.

If this is the case, we might be seeing another copyright lawsuit coming OpenAI’s way in the near future.

Clare Donaldson
Clare DonaldsonEditorial Intern

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