The latest version of ChatGPT now has new image generation capabilities, including the ability to mimic the art of animation legend Hayao Miyazki
he latest version of OpenAI’s image generator called GPT-4o has a new party trick that’s currently trending on social media. A quick scan of social media feeds and one might see a flood of anime-style images of people. These images that are generated using GPT-4o via ChatGPT have the signature visual style of Studio Ghibli, a renowned Japanese animation studio co-founded by legendary filmmaker, animator and artist Hayao Miyazaki.
Studio Ghibli films and shows are beloved by fans worldwide with characters that are fondly remembered by anyone who has watched Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, Ponyo and other modern classics of anime.
OpenAI has said that GPT-4o’s image generation excels at “accurately rendering text, precisely following prompts—including transforming uploaded images or using them as visual inspiration.” The AI-generated photos speak for themselves. GPT-4o has the uncanny ability to create images from existing photos that unmistakably look like the work of Studio Ghibli artists.
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So popular is the feature that OpenAI’s Sam Altman posted on X that “it’s super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt. but our GPUs are melting,” adding that ChatGPT would impose temporary limits on image generation.
What it takes to make a Studio Ghibli movie
In a typical Studio Ghibli production, around 50 to 70 animators work on one movie. Ghibli artists use traditional animation techniques which include drawing each frame of the movie by hand. Every second of a movie requires an average of 24 drawings. It’s a long process that involves several stages such as storyboarding, drawing key poses, filling the frames between key poses, and painting the background art. Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuko was quoted as saying that it took them one month to make one minute of animation with a team of 60 animators. For Miyazaki’s film How Do You Live?, it took 12 months to create 12 minutes of the movie.
To create a Ghibli-style image, all the user has to do is open ChatGPT, upload an image, create a prompt that describes the style of the image, wait a few minutes, then download, and share the output. Other AI art generators such as Stable Diffusion, Deep Dream Generator, and Runway ML can be used as well to create a similar effect. Questions of copyright and intellectual property aside, creating these artworks totally removes humans from the creative process.
What Hayao Miyazaki has said about AI
Hayao Miyazaki has yet to issue a direct statement with regards to GPT-4o’s recent artistic abilities but he has previously spoken on AI-generated animation. In the 2016 NHK documentary movie The Never-ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki he expressed strong opinions about AI-generated art and animation. After an entertainment executive showed him a reel of a procedurally animated headless body, he commented (in translation) that it reminded him of his friend who has a muscular disability and implied that the animation was insensitive and lacked empathy towards people with his condition. He said, “I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is or whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”