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A new version of image generation technology was launched by OpenAI recently, and netizens are using it to recreate studio Ghibli-style memes. For the unversed, this studio is responsible for Japanese movies like Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, The Wind Rises, and Howl's Moving Castle.
The AI company has called this new image generation technology their "most advanced image generator yet into GPT‑4o. The result—image generation that is not only beautiful, but useful."
As of now, this feature on OpenAI is available only to the users who have a plus, pro or team subscription plan. The rollout to the free users has been delayed, as confirmed by Sam Altman in a tweet.
The introduction to this new version on Tuesday, March 25, 2025, led to a series of memes on social media. While some posted recreated images of political events in Ghibli style, others posted similar versions of their pets.
From popular memes and Interstellar to Ben Affleck and Trump's last month's meetup with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, netizens have covered it all in the aforementioned style. Here are some popular memes recreated in the Japanese studio's style:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk joined in the trend of sharing Ghibli-style photos using AI
It is not just the netizens who are flooding the social media platforms with memes with Ghibli styled images in them. Several popular figures like Sam Altman and Elon Musk have joined in on the meme fest as well.
In a post uploaded on Wednesday, March 26, Altman indicated that he, too, got photos of himself in the Japanese studio's style. The post read:
"> be me / > grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever / > mostly no one cares for first 7.5 years, then for 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything / > wake up one day to hundreds of messages: ‘look i made you into a twink ghibli style haha."
Meanwhile, his profile photo on X is also an image that seemed to be generated in the same style. On Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk chimed in on the trend. He shared a photo with a caption that read: "Theme of the day."
In the photo that Musk shared, he was depicted as a monkey carrying the DOGE mascot in the air.
Along with posting memes, many netizens shared the prompts they had used to generate the photos. According to The Economic Times, some of those are "Can you Ghiblize my photo?" and "Transforms photos into Studio Ghibli-inspired characters, with a focus on detail and whimsy."
While memes showing AI-generated images in the Japanese studio's style had been going viral all across the internet, co-founder of Studio Ghibli Hayao Miyazaki previously criticized AI-generated animation.
As per reports by Variety, back in 2016, Miyazaki was showed an AI image generation demo which made him describe it to be "disgusting."
Miyazaki further stated that he would never want to incorporate AI in his work and expressed that he felt this was an "insult to life" itself. The Japanese studio has not responded to the latest meme fest as of now.
