For a few days in March, anime and manga broke the internet. Wide-eyed, cute-looking characters spread like wildfire across social media, drawn in so-called Studio Ghibli style — named for the creative brains behind My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle.
Unfortunately for Studio Ghibli, and Japan’s creative industry at large, this was not their project. The US company OpenAI was showing off its newest image-generation application. All users had to do was upload a photo or type out a description of what they wanted to see, and a picture would appear.
Ghiblification, as it became known, sparked accusations that AI was both undermining a uniquely distinctive art form and failing to compensate creators. Responding to criticism, OpenAI insisted that it did not allow image-generation in the style of “individual living artists”, but did permit “broader studio styles”.