Studio Ghibli going viral
Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio famous for their lovingly handcrafted movies and distinct watercolour style, are currently going viral on social media. You may be familiar with them from movies such as My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, but many people are hearing of Studio Ghibli for the first time due to a viral trend of applying a ‘Ghibli’ style filter to images using OpenAI. The Google Trends data below gives a picture of the recent spike in interest.
Twitter is now awash with posts attempting to emulate Studio Ghibli’s style in a massive variety of images. This ranges from simple selfies to the White House tweeting a controversial picture of a person being arrested by immigration officers.
This trend raises some interesting questions, which I’ll broadly group into three categories:
- The integrity of art
- The intentions of the artist
- Stolen images for training data
The integrity of art
Studio Ghibli is famous for painstaking attention to detail and love of their craft; all frames are hand-drawn and painted with watercolour. Four seconds from The Wind Rises, a frame of which is shown below, took Studio Ghibli 13 months to animate (Hayao Miyazaki: 10 Years With the Master). At 24 fps, 4 seconds corresponds to 96 watercolour images handpainted just for one scene. Compare that to the mere minutes it takes to get AI to produce ‘Ghibli-style’ images – how can artists compete against this?
However, the studio Ghibli style is not actually what is being recreated. Just like how a tomato and an apple may look similar side-by-side at a squint, closer inspection would quickly reveal differences between the two. Similarly, this filter is perhaps what someone who is unfamiliar with Ghibli might consider to be Ghibli style. As Sindu argues on her substack post AI filters don’t replace art any more than instant ramen replaces food:
“We’re seeing cultural flattening where “Studio Ghibli style” has become a catch-all term for any anime-adjacent art with soft colours or watercolour effects. This surface-level imitation… reminds me of what happened with Van Gogh’s style—people often reduce his work to swirly strokes without acknowledging how those techniques expressed his unique vision of the world and his emotional state.”
While at a glance these images may pass as ‘Ghibli’ like, there are subtleties to Ghibli art being missed by these AI models averaging out features across millions of training images. Somewhere along the way the intricacies of Ghibli’s art are lost and we are left with an empty imitation.
The intentions of the artist
Hayao Miyazaki, the head artist of Studio Ghibli, has vocalised his dislike for the use of AI in art.
In a 2016 video when asked about his thoughts on AI, he stated “I would never want to incorporate this technology into my work at all … I strongly feel it is an insult to life itself.”
I find it hard to believe many artists would appreciate their style being used in this way by AI image models. As with anything on the internet, people have been quick to take things to the extreme and have created ‘Ghibli’ images of events such as the assassination of John F Kennedy. This, I imagine, is not what the artists at Ghibli would want their name associated with.
Stolen images for training data
To train these models, vast amounts of art are scraped off the web. Much of this training data will be art that the artists did not consent to be used for this purpose. This has big implications for copyright, as now anyone can use AI to try and emulate the style of artists who have skilful honed their craft over a career, undercutting them with AI which stole their work.
Ben Zhao, author of the paper from our last blog post, said he’s disappointed to see OpenAI take advantage of Studio Ghibli’s beloved style to promote its products. He co-created the tool Glaze, which helps artists protect their work from being used as training data in these AI models.
