This may look like the warm palettes and soft, detailed linework synonymous with the renowned Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, but the troubling image is the work of the US Government armed with GPT-4o.
In response to Google last week, OpenAI launched native image generation in ChatGPT finally unlocking the ‘omni’ feature that was first demonstrated last year. In the launch stream, Sam Altman and team showed how the model could re-style a photo in an anime aesthetic. This quickly went viral with numerous examples flooding social media timelines. No use was off-limits with the White House getting in on the act and generating this Ghibli style image of a sobbing ICE detainee.
Essentially the work of a beloved creative studio is now being reproduced and remixed at scale, on demand, for any purpose, and without consent. Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki is well known for his past views on AI-generated art, calling it an “insult to art itself”. Miyazaki’s animation style, once the product of thousands of hours of hand-drawn effort, can now be applied in seconds. The textures, composition rules, and narrative signals of his work can be reproduced in any context.
To many artists and studios, this new wave of AI mimicry will feel more like appropriation. Not the recreation of specific copyrighted material so much as the exploitation of creative identity. Unlike traditional fan art, where homage is filtered through the hand of a human, these AI-generated images operate as high-fidelity impersonations. Google and OpenAI’s model outputs are not reinterpretations, they are stylistic clones. Apart from the legal one, the cultural question that arises is should ‘style’ be protected in the same way a ‘work’ might be such as a text or film? Do we owe something to the creators who spent decades evolving a visual language? And what happens when every house style, Ghibli, Aardman, Pixar, Laika, is copied, commercialised, or memed without attribution, and for political and manipulative ends.
The Ghibli moment highlights how generative AI collapses the boundary between inspiration and imitation. It also raises the stakes for platforms and AI companies: in amplifying this kind of mimicry, they’re not just distributing tools, they’re shaping cultural norms.
Takeaways: Widely available native image generation enables deep mimicry that will be commercially and socially impactful. As these tools grow in use, the question of what counts as creative ownership will need to move beyond copyright law. For creators, this may be the beginning of a world where their influence is everywhere, but their control is nowhere.