Metaphorically speaking, AI tools like DALLE-E (and ChatGPT) make people feel ‘almost like God’. “All someone has to do is to state a prompt,” This was what Dr Eduardo Navas, who researched AI models at the Pennsylvania State University in the US said, back in 2023. Fast forward to 2025, and AI is more powerful than ever.
The latest ChatGPT update enables users to convert any of their photos to specific art styles—most notably in the style of the legendary animation studio based in Japan, Studio Ghibli.
Following its release this week, Ghibli-style AI ‘art’ flooded the internet. Popular memes, personal photos, anything people could get their hands on—all converted to their ‘Ghibli-fied’ versions.
However, artists and creatives all over are raising alarm over the ethical and legal ramifications of such AI-generated posts.
Studio Ghibli is famous for its distinct art and animation, shaped by an illustrious set of art directors in Japan, including Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Kitarō Kōsaka and many more, over the years.
My Neighbor Totoro. Spirited Away. Princess Mononoke. The Wind Rises. Kiki’s Delivery Service. Howl’s Moving Castle. Grave of the Fireflies. These are just a fraction of the critically acclaimed animated film catalogue from Studio Ghibli.
And now OpenAI, the founding company of ChatGPT, openly encourages these new experiments in ‘Ghibli-fication’. Its CEO Sam Altman even changed his profile picture on X to a Ghibli-style ‘portrait’. Official posts from the White House, and even from myGovIndia featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi, followed.
In the release notes of the latest iteration of ChatGPT, the company states that the artificial intelligence model would take a ‘conservative approach’ to how it mimics different art styles. However, that simply does not reflect the reality.
All one has to do is go online and be greeted by ‘images’ flooding social media, distinctively copying the art style by sampling a lot of original material from Studio Ghibli movies and stills.
And since Sam Altman wants the US government to conveniently move around ‘fair use’ guidelines to train AI to ‘learn’ from copyrighted material, we can all assume how little regard he has for intellectual property rights.
People from the art community that THE WEEK spoke to have a unified take on the issue: The difference between creating your own art—even art inspired by other artists—and an AI ‘generated’ image created by a machine copying from a library of artists is not a fine line, it is a deep chasm—where true creativity goes to die. Simply put, AI ‘generated’ images are not art, says animators and artists alike.
Artist Jugal Chudasama from Mumbai calls out the ethical violation in this process. “These AI models are trained without the intellectual property (IP) owner’s consent,” Chudasama says. Moreover, these models would not exist if humans did not create the art in the first place.
“It's not just Ghibli art, they have trained these models on countless individual artists as well—who cannot afford to take this to court” adds the founder of Studio Joog.
There is, of course, mounting opposition from AI ‘evangelists’ who toe the same line as Altman—that they need AI to ‘train’ on original content made by artists to ‘grow the technology’.
“New tech has always had a rough start. Take digital cameras, for example. Traditional photographers thought this would make photography too easy and therefore less meaningful. But even digital photographers have to get up and physically go to locations, experience life, to take those photos,” explains the artist, “Even after they click the photos, there's a process to make them look good.”
“Take a charcoal and pencil, for example. The invention of the pencil did not completely eradicate the process of writing or drawing. You still needed the same skills, only now, you have cleaner hands—that was the USP,” said Chudasama.
In fact, the same is applicable to the latest wave of digital art. It still relies on the human skill to draw and sketch. However, AI tools simply take in a text prompt, and a photo, and use the data it scraped from art created by other artists to ‘generate’ an image.
“They steal from our work by sampling images we created after years of practice,” says another artist who did not wish to be named.
Chennai-based filmmaker Ashwath Nair is vocal about his take on the latest Ghibli trend. “Ethically, I think it spits on the face of what the studio (Studio Ghibli) is doing,” says Nair, “There are countless artists, who toiled for years, even to make classics like Princess Mononoke.”
“Before the CGI era, each Ghibli film took at least four years to make,” he explains, “That kind of effort, now boiled down to what is essentially AI slop is disrespectful to the people who contributed to building one of the stalwarts of anime, to begin with.”
Nair, who is also a content creator at Yoshimura Anime Corner, is also confident that Studio Ghibli would put out an official statement. If anyone at Studio Ghibli might respond to the latest controversy surrounding the ethics and legality of AI-generated images, it would most probably be the former president and founder of the animation studio itself, Toshio Suzuki, he adds.
Book blogger Noirita Das did not mince her words when calling out the trend online. “Did y’all notice how it’s mostly the corporate people using the Studio Ghibli filter?” Das posted on Threads, referring to the proverbial David-vs-Goliath battle that exists between large corporations and ‘the little guy’.
“It’s almost like the engineering degree or the MBA degree has completely desensitized them. It’s almost like they have no appreciation for the arts, whereas, statistically they are in a position to afford it,” Das added, doubling down on how the latest AI models were being used for art rather than mechanical tasks that would replace management professionals, not the ones in the creative space.
To add to the images that artists label as plagiarism, a fake cease-and-desist order seemingly from Studio Ghibli, also made its rounds on social media. As AI evangelists criticised the order as ‘limiting the freedom of expression’, some artists called out the irony of it all: “They need a fake legal notice to validate their victim complex after sharing plagiarised images!”
‘A fight worth taking up’, lawyers tell artists
bro is manufacturing martyrdom before the art theft app is even out https://t.co/5cQF7LmIgk
— jugal (@joogasama) March 28, 2025
Copyright law in India has always been a point of contention, as far as the rights of artists are concerned.
“The legal history of copyright will tell you that artists’ rights have always been a matter of contestation. Studio Ghibli, of course, is a huge production studio and probably can sue for infringement,” explains Advocate Govind Manoharan, founder of Delhi-based Godiyal & Manoharan Chambers.
“Artists have gained, over years of countless litigation, recognition of their rights. This fight, though, is a new arena for artists and traditional production houses alike—how successful it is going to be in the present state of the law on copyright is something to be seen, but it’s a fight worth taking up,” says Manoharan, who has represented artists in infringement cases in Delhi courts.
“If not, it risks the hard fought gains of decades,” adds the lawyer, stating that such a precedent would disproportionately affect smaller artists, as “is often the case”.
Despite the noise and the ethical debate surrounding it, the artist community is confident that Studio Ghibli will simply let this one slide. The animation studio even has a page dedicated on their official website only to list the copyright details for their works all the way from 1984.
Studio Ghibli is not just a huge name—they are widely revered in the art community. Moreover, they are artists. They are good at what they do. And they are Japanese. Maybe, this is the time of reckoning for ChatGPT, and other AI ‘theft’ algorithms like it—a huge, globally acclaimed art studio going against them and their ‘AI slop’ filling the internet to its brim.
