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On March 25, 2025, OpenAI — the leading American artificial intelligence (AI) research organisation — added the capability of generating images from text-based prompts to GPT-4o, the current version of its large language model (LLM). Soon after, social media — particularly X (formerly Twitter) — was flooded with user-generated images inspired by Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio known for its distinctive hand-drawn and hand-coloured films. GPT-4o users used the LLM's ability to recreate images in a specific artist's style to Ghibli-fy their own wide-eyed selfies and travel photographs as well as iconic film scenes, memes, and historical photographs. Suddenly, it seemed like we had collectively passed through a portal and entered the spectacularly animated magic realist world of Studio Ghibli.
And I mean, who wouldn’t be excited by AI being able to achieve in seconds what ordinarily takes months and years? Well, apparently: Hayao Miyazaki himself. An artists' artist doggedly committed to his craft, Miyazaki said he was “utterly disgusted” when he was shown an early AI-animated clip in 2016. “If you really want to make creepy stuff you can go ahead and do it," he said, "I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”
What initially might have seemed like an innocent bit of light-hearted fun this week, realistically points to the possibility that, for homegrown creators across all walks of life, we are fast approaching the point of no return.
We’ve covered AI art a fair amount as a publication and in the early days, we even entertained the idea that the benefits of it could far outweigh the potential harm. All of that goodwill however has been eroded by Big Tech’s refusal to put up any guardrails to protect creators like Miyazaki against what is the blatant theft of their intellectual property on an unprecedented scale.
Artists and creators big and small spend decades honing their crafts; perfecting the intricate skills it takes to bring their visions to life; promoting their work and building an audience; persevering through everything from rejection to ignorance to sheer apathy, only to then find out that their life’s work is now part of a soulless algorithm and that some talentless hack tech/finance bro named Kyle a thousand miles away in SoCal can recreate it near-perfectly in seconds while staring longingly at a framed portrait of Elon Musk doing a 'Roman' salute.
It’s time for all homegrown creators to collectively draw a line in the sand; to refuse to stand by and watch real art become just another cog in a machine. We have to stop pretending it’s okay that brands and labels that rely on creators for so much of their content, music, design language, and curated aesthetic fail to even for a second think about the underlying impact of posting an AI-generated image, song, or caption for engagement.
All of this also points to a larger societal malaise where we’re unable to critically evaluate what and why we post — it’s what I like to call the ‘Ooo, Shiny!’ phenomenon. It’s where people see something new, trendy, and exciting and immediately rush to post it without truly thinking about what it even means, whether it’s a song, a meme, a music video, a work of art, an NFT (haha remember those) or breaking news.
The Ghibli Travesty we’re seeing is essentially this phenomenon in motion: millions of people deciding we just can’t go another second without pretending we live in the Ghibliverse. Whether it’s music, design, art, or anything else, we’re all just looking for instant gratification. We don’t care about the whys, the hows and the whats.
Most creators, do not have that luxury. Without consent or compensation, AI can take everything we’ve worked for and morph it into an abomination of approximation; think millions of artistic ‘skinwalkers’ that are bereft of any of the soul or the beauty that is an inextricable part of the human condition.
Supporters of generative AI believe and argue that AI is a tool like any other and it 'democratises' art by allowing users to overcome their limitations. But this line of thought belies a lack of understanding of how generative AI works, and how artists work. Essentially, LLMs like GPT-4o go through vast amounts of publicly available (but not necessarily public domain) data on the internet to condense a specific style of literature or visual art to its common minimum characteristics; and they do so at a great environmental cost to the world, often without consent and without fairly compensating original creators for their work.
It's important to remember that Studio Ghibli films do not resonate with you simply because they are aesthetically pleasing — they resonate with you because they use that same pleasing aesthetic to examine deeper truths about the human experience.
Grave of the Fireflies (1988) explores war trauma; Spirited Away (2001) deals with the anxiety of growing older; Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) has strong anti-war themes and graphic depictions of the brutality of modern warfare. In contrast, the Trump White House used GPT-4o to generate Ghibli-esque images of crying immigrants as they were detained, and Indian Right-wing accounts used it to Ghibli-fy photographs of the Babri Masjid demolition.
"Without consent, AI models trained on artists' work can dilute artistic identity, devalue labor, but also strip it from its authenticity — making the ‘heart’ of the creative redundant. Generative AI’s ability to replicate well-known artistic styles raises concerns about intellectual property and the economic impact on artists who deserve all the recognition, compensation, and more. AI can be a powerful tool, and it is imperative that we move forward as technology progresses. When used ethically it has the potential to enhance creativity. However, when accessed by non-creatives we run into the issue of ease of use, which diminishes the value of a creative's effort, discipline, and expertise."
Nidhi Iyer, Design + Art Director, Homegrown
Here’s the thing: despite how alarming some of this is, no one who isn’t also a creator is likely to give a shit about anything we're saying. Kyle is probably guffawing into his White Claw as we speak.
It sucks that we’re ostensibly on our own when it comes to protecting our own art but if we don’t stand up for ourselves now, we’re condemning ourselves to a world where we don’t own anything we make; where any revolutionary idea or art form is instantly rendered generic by virtue of its immediate replication. We’re looking at a future where our art exists as nothing more than glorified data entries. By not pushing back and saying an emphatic “fuck this”, we’re serving ourselves up for dinner to a beast that will never be satiated.
We’re not too far gone just yet, but we have to fight back. Say no to all forms of AI until Big Tech gives us assurances on Intellectual Property and fair compensation. Educate the people around you about how this far more insidious than they can ever even imagine. Add a ‘No AI’ disclaimer to every piece of art you create — just do something.
To everyone who's still on the fence: if you want to make art, pick up a pencil or a paintbrush; make something, practice, and appreciate the pleasure of the process. Even if it turns out terrible, it will have more worth than the fleeting fifteen second dopamine high of an AI-generated anything.
This isn’t just about AI. AI is just one part of the behemoth; the evil empire that thinks it can subsume or eradicate all the things it can’t understand — whether it’s beauty, imperfection, kindness, compassion, what a bidet is, empathy, and yes, even art. This is about homegrown creators but it’s also about so much more. It’s about all of us and the future we want to live in. Rage against the dying of the light.
