Studio Ghibli in the age of A.I. reproduction

Fiat Ghibli slop--pereat mundus

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s newsletter is a long-ish disquisition on the “Mad Men Yourself” of 2025: The ChatGPT Studio Ghibli trend.

A reminder: This newsletter is the product of one (1) guy, i.e., me, who spends hours every reading and thinking and trying to figure out a way to write in an entertaining and clear fashion, a task that I succeed at roughly 60 percent of the time. I’m able to do this (spend my working days Studio Ghibli-fying photos of my friends) thanks to the people who read this newsletter and find enough value in it to support my work as paying subscribers. Because of the mechanics of this business and high rates of churn, every single subscriber helps fund my work, and paying subscribers both subsidize the free columns and get access to the paywalled weekly recommendations of little-seen and over-looked books, movies, and music. For one-fourth the cost of ChatGPT--roughly the price of a beer a month--you too can ensure that Read Max continues its mission of “communicating ambivalence at great length” and “making jokes that no one likes.”

Among the longstanding arguments of this newsletter is that the main or highest function of the current generation of generative-A.I. apps is entertainment, both in the sense that the chatbots themselves are best understood as a sort of entertainment, and also in the sense that the model outputs, which even at their most sophisticated come out in a strange suspended state of being simultaneously “astonishing” and “dogshit,” are best-suited for light entertainment--specifically, for memes, jokes, and shitposting. OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman may believe that he’s building “superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever,” but in practice he’s mostly building an extraordinarily sophisticated and energy-intensive imgflip for making low-effort memes.

It was unsurprising, therefore, to see the immediate response to OpenAI’s new version of its cutting-edge model. This update to ChatGPT-4o is designed to more consistently generate passable, coherent images--i.e., with non-gibberish text and the correct number of fingers per hand (5)--to strange or difficult prompts. The demonstrations have been impressive: It can create four-panel comics! Infographics! Full glasses of wine! But what it seems particularly good at, or, at least, what Twitter users have quickly picked up on, is its ability to mimic and the apply the style of legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.) to photos. What seems to have begun with a viral tweet about Ghibli-fying personal photos from former Amazon engineer Grant Slatton…

…turned fairly quickly into a memetic free-for-all,¹ as every gruesome news photo and recognizable-to-Twitter-addicts image was quickly rendered as a cel from a Studio Ghibli film:

Naturally, the meme has become a flashpoint in the ongoing A.I. culture wars, between--on the one side--A.I. enthusiasts tweeting stuff like “art just became accessible” and A.I. critics responding with versions of “Miyazaki Probably Hates This.”

I will admit that, personally, instinctively, I find it hard to exercised over something so obviously ephemeral--an annoying viral trend in the grand and embarrassing tradition of “Mad Men Yourself” does not seem like a hugely pressing threat to Miyazaki’s artistic integrity. Nor, on the other hand, does it seem like a particular marketing coup for OpenAI: These images may be inoffensively pleasant rather than strikingly weird, but they’re still slop, and it seems damning that an A.I. system OpenAI would like to be seen to be seen as an economy-transforming technology, just a few data centers away from super-intelligence, continues to find its most popular and visible use this side of “homework machine” as a $20/month photo-filter app.

Still, the battle over Ghibli slop seems symptomatic, and it’s worth explaining why Miyazaki in particular would become such a point of contention. ChatGPT can equally reproduce the styles of, say, Ren and Stimpy’s John K. or The Simpsons’ Matt Groenig, or even of other Japanese animation auteurs like Your Name.’s Makoto Shinkai, but none of those animators became--nor would they ever become--the subjects of viral trends, or the objects of heated defenses. (During the livestream announcement, researcher Prafula Dhariwal took a selfie and got the model to “turn it into an anime frame,” but it was Slatton specifying “Studio Ghibli-style” that really took off as a “trend.”) Part of the attraction of “Studio Ghibli-style” can be attributed to the formal qualities of Miyazaki’s style: “Convert this image to Studio Ghibli-style anime” turns out simple, clearly drawn figures against lush, painterly backgrounds; “convert this image to Dreamworks Animation-style computer animation” gives everyone a shit-eating smirk (or: so I would presume). Another part can be attributed to the studio’s thematically persistent body of work, which inheres the house style with a bouquet of evocative moods: Nostalgia, happiness, tranquility, grief, bittersweetness.

But as much as anything what gives Miyazaki’s style--and the reconstruction thereof--its particular emotional weight is his and Studio Ghibli’s reputation for artistic integrity and commitment to craft, all without sacrificing popularity or enjoyment.² It’s hard, 40 seasons and 10,000 bootleg t-shirts later, to be much moved by seeing yourself (or anyone else) “as a Simpsons character,” but it’s precisely the Ghibli movies’ closely guarded³ status as “art” (and relative, craft-driven scarcity!) that gives the idea of creating a Ghibli-style image its particular frisson.

And it’s that same tension that makes the Ghibli trend so enraging to A.I. critics. “The whole Studio Ghibli AI trend honestly gives me second-hand embarrassment knowing how hard Hayao Miyazaki has fought to retain the identity of his films,” one particularly viral response read, “and how many of you are this willing to make a farce out of decades of artistry because you don’t actually value it.” Miyazaki’s legend as an uncompromising craftsman and humanist has been burnished in particular in recent years thanks to a regularly shared video in which he castigates some technologists showing him an A.I.-animation demo, saying: “I am utterly disgusted. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” It’s not actually clear that he means any and all A.I.-generated animation so much as the specific, macabre demo he’s shown--a C.G.I. body writhing on the ground--but Miyazaki’s quote has become a kind of rallying cry for neo-luddites nonetheless.

I can understand the anger those people feel on Miyazaki’s behalf. And I can be sympathetic to the point made by the artist Reid Southern, speaking to Brian Merchant for Merchant’s essential newsletter Blood in the Machine:

I think one of the worst parts of it is that the styles that get aped the most inevitably end up being devalued and feeling cheap, at no fault of the originals. It's like how so much of the stuff out there rips off Pixar and DreamWorks stuff to the point where now my knee jerk reaction to seeing those styles is to associate it with slop. It's kind of an internal battle sometimes when just trying to view things, and it's extremely sad and worrying to me that the work of a beloved studio like Ghibli is now inextricably tied to slop due to this trend. At a cultural and subconscious level, AI is now eating away at part of what makes Studio Ghibli's work so special, and that's not helping art or animation, it's actively hurting it.

Southern here is distantly echoing the German writer Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which suggested that the development of techniques of “mechanical reproduction” served to diminish the “aura”--that is, the authority, the specificity, the authenticity--of particular works of art. A.I., one could argue, enacts on particular artistic styles what photography and lithography enacted on particular works of painting or sculpture, rendering those styles endlessly reproducible, de-aura-fied, no longer subject to the “criterion of authenticity” from which they previously derived value.

But (without necessarily wanting to endorse this argument re: A.I. and style) we might also note that Benjamin’s main point was not so much to endlessly bemoan the withering of aura but to explore the effects of mechanical reproduction on the “social function” of art.⁴ The toothpaste is kind of out of the tube on this one, in Benjamin’s time as in ours, and there are reasons to welcome the freeing of art from its “parasitic subservience to ritual.” When art can no longer automatically obtain significance from ritual--authenticity, tradition, or even ownership--its value must be found elsewhere. “Instead of being founded on ritual,” he writes, the social function of art “is based on a different practice: politics.” What matters with art isn’t its past (where and who it comes from), but its future: what it does.

And what are the politics of “A.I. art” in the sense of Studio Ghibli memes? The game has been given away on that point, thanks to a double whammy from the world’s biggest dumb-ass and the world’s most sinister social-media manager:

Has anyone ever been less adept at "reading a room" than Elon Musk?

That the Trump White House tweeted out an image of a “Ghiblified” deportation helps us answer the question. But even before they said the quiet part loud it was hard not to think of the final section of Benjamin’s essay when reading enthusiasts talking about how A.I. makes art “become accessible,” or “enables so much creativity”:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses--but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. […] "Fiat ars--pereat mundus [let there be art, though the world perish]," says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l'art. Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.

Benjamin, of course, is thinking of war-obsessed Italian Futurists, in a different time and a different context. Sam Altman is no Fillippo Marinetti, and Studio Ghibli slop is no Abstract Speed + Sound. But you have to admit: “Fiat ars--pereat mundus” would make a pretty good OpenAI slogan.

1. At the risk of being pedantic, it was hard not to notice that a certain number of the images being presented as “Studio Ghibli-fied” (e.g.) didn’t really resemble the particular Studio Ghibli style--with its painterly environments and ligne claire-influenced character stylings--so much as generic “anime” images.

2. It’s worth noting, too, that Miyazaki above maybe any other working artist in any medium is likely to be equally beloved by both A.I.-enthusiast and A.I.-critic demographics.

3. And, needless to say, expensively maintained via marketing and awards campaigns: At least in the U.S., Ghibli and Miyazaki’s legend is continuously polished by studio publicists and marketing campaigns focusing in particular on the commitment to craft, integrity, and artistry. Without wanting to suggest that Ghibli movies are somehow “overrated” (they’re not), there’s something to be said with respect to this meme about the particular class valence of Miyazaki’s movies in the U.S. versus, say, Makoto Shinkai’s, or even to Saturday-morning stuff like Dragonball Z, and, further, how that might relate to Miyazaki’s comparatively European style. But we’re reaching the outer limits of my anime knowledge and maybe it’s not that interesting.

4. Fair warning: I am not a Benjamin scholar; I’m just some dumbass on Substack. Do not cite me in front of people who know what they’re talking about.