OpenAI shook the world on Wednesday with the release of its native image creation feature. Since then, users on social media have realised that the new feature is also very good at imitating different art styles, and have used it to convert their images into Studio Ghibli-style images and enter the realm of the Japanese animation studio.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman soon joined the trend as well, changing his profile picture on X to a Studio Ghibli-style image and asking social media users if they would be willing to create a better one for him via ChatGPT.
But what exactly is Studio Ghibli art and who can use ChatGPT’s new feature to create them? Let’s take a closer look.
What is Studio Ghibli art?
Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation film studio founded in 1985 by Miyazaki Hayao, Takahata Isao and Suzuki Toshio. The company is known for its high quality filmmaking with hand-drawn animation and rich storytelling.
Some of the company’s most notable animated films include Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke.
While Studio Ghibli is yet to comment on ChatGPT’s continued use of its art style, Miyazaki Hayao had called AI-generated animation an “insult to life itself” in a 2016 interview.
“I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is 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. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Hayao said in that interview.
Who can use ChatGPT’s native image generation feature?
OpenAI said on Wednesday that ChaGPT’s new native image generation feature was rolling out to Plus, Pro, Team and Free users of the chatbot on Wednesday. However, in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday, Sam Altman confirmed that the rollout of this feature for Free users would be “delayed for a while”.
Meanwhile, the company added that it will be rolling it out to Enterprise and Edu users via its API ‘soon’.
How to create Ghibhli potraits , if you don’t have a premium account?
Unfortunately, if you don’t have a paid ChatGPT account, there is no way to create Ghibli portraits for free. I have tried to use the native image generation capabilities in the Gemini model via Google AI Studio, but the results are nowhere near as good.
If you have an active ChatGPT subscription, just ask the chatbot to change your image into Studio Ghibli art form and that should be enough. Some users have even shared screenshots of them asking ChatGPT to “Ghiblify” their images and it seem to have worked. Since we don’t have access to an active ChatGPT subscription, it’s hard to predict if this exact prompt will work for all users.
