A sudden wave of Studio Ghibli-style imagery has taken over social media following the rollout of OpenAI’s latest update to its GPT-4o model. From hand-drawn character portraits to soft watercolour landscapes, timelines on X, Instagram, and Reddit now resemble scenes straight out of Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle.
Photo: @Zenaca on X
The phenomenon kicked off , shortly after OpenAI launched a new image generation feature within ChatGPT. The tool, designed to produce high-quality, stylised visuals, surprised users with its uncanny ability to mimic the signature aesthetic of Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.
Within hours, users were testing the new feature by feeding it prompts to replicate Studio Ghibli’s soft, detailed animation style. The AI-generated results—featuring expressive eyes, whimsical backdrops, and character-like renditions of pets, selfies, and even bicycles—quickly went viral.
Photo: @Rainmaker1973 on X
Hashtags like #GhibliStyle and #AIGhibli began trending as people shared their creations. Some reimagined celebrities and historical figures in the Ghibli universe, while others transformed everyday moments into anime-inspired scenes. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined in, joking on X:
“Be me. Grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever... Wake up one day to hundreds of messages: ‘look I made you into a twink Ghibli style haha.’”
Photo: @Sama on X
The viral buzz centers around “Images in ChatGPT,” a new feature included in GPT-4o that allows users to generate visuals directly within a chat. While available to all users, access for those on the free tier is limited due to overwhelming demand.
Despite the enthusiasm, the rollout hasn't been without hiccups. OpenAI faced delays for free users and had to fix a bug that rendered only “sexy men” but not “sexy women” when prompted. Still, the new model marks a leap forward in AI visuals by building images gradually—piece by piece—unlike earlier models like DALL·E, which generated them all at once.
The Ghibli-style trend reflects not just the capabilities of GPT-4o, but also its unexpected cultural impact. What began as a technical update has now evolved into a full-blown art movement online—one brushstroke at a time.
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