At the start of Hayao Miyazaki’s modern classic Spirited Away, the young heroine Chihiro and her parents are exploring a seemingly abandoned theme park when a boy named Haku greets her with a warning: Chihiro must cross back over a dry riverbed and head home before sunset while she still can. She fails to do so, and soon finds the river swollen and her parents turned into pigs, stranded in a new world she doesn’t understand.
Fans of the animation giant will find the parable a little extra relevant these days. As you likely heard, OpenAI released a tool on March 25 that allows any photo to be redone in the style of (among others) Miyazaki and his famed Studio Ghibli. Soon millions of people were doing just that, prodded on by OpenAI’s brash leader Sam Altman, who turned his own grainy X profile picture into a dreamy, slightly lost child who himself might have wandered through Howl’s Moving Castle.
OpenAI had come up with an update to 4o, one of the “GPTs” it released last year, to enable the high-end image generation. Paying subscribers ate it up, flooding social media with the uncanny results. As Altman crowed on Monday, “the chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. [With this] we added one million users in the last hour.”
And why not? Miyazaki’s creations reflect a bespoke, unique aesthetic, arrived at from thousands of hours of human labor and good old-fashioned dreaming. The idea of merging that with photos from our last family trip to Disneyland — using nothing more than a few keystrokes — can prove too enjoyable to resist.
A certain irony abided in a machine generating images to honor someone who so meticulously drew them with his own fingers. Miyazaki himself has decried AI’s use in art — “I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself,” he said in 2016, non-gently, a point that when juxtaposed with so many people unleashing the tool in homage to his work turned their act hilarious and a little cringe. If Altman has observed this asymmetry, he hasn’t said.
This is all happening even as a federal judge has greenlit The New York Times‘ lawsuit against OpenAI for training ChatGPT on scores of its articles without permission, underscoring the copyright issues at play. Technically OpenAI, aware at least optically of infringement concerns, programmed the image tool not to allow the imitation of a specific artist. But it enacted no such rule for a studio, and so our feeds were soon overrun by a Ghibli aesthetic.
This also is happening as studios have begun to talk with OpenAI, either seeing the added revenue now as outweighing lost profits later — or, more likely, seeing that in the absence of any real ability to fight back, they might as well pocket some added pennies than spend them on a lawsuit. (Although, aside from Lionsgate, no major studio has announced a deal that would allow OpenAI’s models to train on its IP — yet.) And pennies is the apt noun: Dotdash Meredith, publisher of behemoths like People and Travel + Leisure, revealed that its OpenAI deal netted a grand total of $16 million last year, hardly any sort of savior for a company with nearly half a billion dollars in publishing revenue.
OpenAI’s Ghibli conquest was met with some Hollywood creatives’ resistance. Alex Hirsch, the creator of the 2010’s-era Disney Channel hit Gravity Falls, sarcastically responded to Altman “Wow, congrats! Using Ghibli’s work to train your model and Ghibli’s name to promote it really helped you generate huge revenue! And the fact that you’re planning on paying a big royalty check to Ghibli proves you’re a great guy, too!”
GKIDS, Ghibli’s U.S. distributor, offered slightly lower-key shade when, upon announcing a new Imax restoration of Miyazaki’s 1997 historical fantasy Princess Mononoke, the company’s distribution vice-president Chance Huskey dryly noted that “In a time when technology tries to replicate humanity, we are thrilled that audiences value a theatrical experience that respects and celebrates Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s masterpiece in all its cinematic hand-drawn glory.”
And Reid Southen, the concept illustrator who has emerged as one of Hollywood’s biggest critics of the AI image-generation wave, retorted to Altman, “Keep posting about how many users you’re gaining after the Ghibli stunt, it only strengthens their case against you, genius.”
This line of argument has many adherents — some 25,000 people liked Hirsch’s post. Unfortunately, probably none of them run Hollywood studios.
At the heart of the Ghibli craze is something good — people’s desire to connect to a fiercely loved artist, the images a testament to the depth and scope of Miyazaki’s influence. But at the root is also something very fraught, a willingness to see all art as both interchangeable and purchase-able. The frantic rush to turn our memories into a personalized Miyazaki greeting card is, through one lens, a testament to our love for the artist, but it is even more pointedly a testament to our love for ourselves, and seemingly no copyright concern nor sanctity-of-art instinct can stop us from fulfilling it.
In a way, GhiblAI is the end point, or at least the latest distant point, of a trend that has been emerging for a while now. If cinema for more than 100 years was about the portal to a faraway world (who represents that better than Miyazaki?) and social media for the last two decades about putting ourselves at the center of the drama, OpenAI’s new tool brings them into perfect convergence.
No longer do we have to see Ponyo’s relationship with his savior Sosuke, or Ashitaka’s princely journey to confront the Forest Spirit, or Mahito’s search with a speaking heron to find his mother during the Pacific War, as the stuff of ancient history and magical lands. It’s right here, right now, unfolding at December’s sixth-floor office Christmas party.
Where this goes from here, nobody knows. But of course we do know, the move from MySpace to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok, and their many filters and enhancements along the way, provide all the signposts we need. The next step in our self-possession culture is not just dropping ourselves into the story but painting it in the hues of the great artists who came before. It’s turning a vast cinematic history into just another show-offy wristband we wear hanging out at the digital mall.
We could see this road ahead even without sensing the desperation of Hollywood studios, who after years of trying to ransack memories via reboots and sequels are now finding their efforts yielding diminishing returns. At the companies that once created, and protected, these memories, many executives are likely to think the only commercial path is to turn images and eventually audio and video into the kind of customization suggested by OpenAI’s latest move — to digitize the Miyazaki no matter the cognitive dissonances, to tap into a collective machine unconscious no matter their job as foremen of the Dream Factory.
Sure, some studios might stay holdouts, and some may even win a few legal victories. But the tide appears with the customized and the automated, toward the machines that will crank and away from the creative minds that only grind. This latest wave shows how OpenAI could massively destabilize the entertainment industry as we know it. On March 31, the company raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. It’s already becoming a bigger entity than some of the once-mighty studios that ran Hollywood.
As Spirited Away unfolds, an all-powerful taskmaster torments her workers in this new strange world, changing their names so they forget who they are. Haku arrives with another warning: Don’t forget your name or you’ll cease to exist, he tells Chihiro. She looks down at herself barely remembering her lifelong moniker, trying mightily to remember her identity before it’s gone forever.