OpenAI released its latest AI image tool, o4 image generation, this Tuesday, and just a few hours after its launch, social media platforms were filled with the new trend: photographs transformed into a Ghibli-style—the popular Japanese animation studio—using ChatGPT.
Studio Ghibli-style images created with ChatGPT went viral after OpenAI launched its new o4 image generation tool. Social media users shared AI-generated portraits and memes that mimic iconic Japanese animation. The trend raised new copyright concerns, as experts question how closely AI tools mimic copyrighted styles and content.
— Grant Slatton (@GrantSlatton) March 25, 2025 Users shared everything from memes to family portraits, and the AI tool generated remarkable images with a stunning resemblance to the professional animations created by the Japanese studio, known for movies such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro.
— PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) March 26, 2025 According to TechCrunch, the latest viral trends regarding the use of AI, including the recent watermark removal trend, spark concerns over the way AI models are trained, suggesting that most of them use copyrighted works without consent. Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Neal & McDevitt, told TechCrunch that style is not protected by copyright. However, to recreate these high-quality images, with the likeness they have, it is possible that OpenAI used millions of frames from Ghibli films to train the new o4 image generation. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, changed this profile picture to a Ghibli style version someone made of him. Altman also acknowledged the success of the new tool. “Images in chatGPT are way more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations),” he wrote in a post. “Rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for a while.”
rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for awhile. — Sam Altman (@sama) March 26, 2025 Other users have complained about artists’ protection and studios’ legacies. “Miyazaki spent his entire life building one of the most expansive and imaginative bodies of work, all so you could rip it off and use it as a filter for your vacation photos,” wrote one user. “Not just Miyazaki, all the artists and animators who’s ever worked for Nippon Animation, Studio Ghibli, Studio Ponoc over the years,” added another. The debate over copyright and the use of new artificial intelligence tools is a hot topic with regulatory challenges. A few days ago, a U.S. federal judge ruled in favor of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in response to a copyright lawsuit filed by several music producers.
