Why Social Media Is Suddenly Flooded With Studio Ghibli-Style Art

OpenAI's latest image-generation update has triggered a Ghibli art fest on social media. From watercolour-like landscapes to hand-drawn character portraits with expressive eyes, the internet seems to have transformed into a scene from Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle.

How Did The Trend Start?

Launched on Tuesday as part of GPT-4o, OpenAI's newest tool has stunned users with its ability to recreate the signature Ghibli aesthetic. While the model was designed to generate highly accurate and stylised visuals, its unexpected talent for replicating Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's legendary art style has turned it into a viral sensation.

Hours after OpenAI's update went live, users began experimenting with the image generator, giving it prompts to test its capabilities. It didn't take long for people to realise that the AI was particularly good at creating Studio Ghibli-inspired art.

Soon, social media was flooded with Ghibli-style renditions of people's selfies, pets, fictional characters, and even everyday objects like coffee cups and bicycles.

The trend spread rapidly across X, Instagram, and Reddit, with users sharing their AI-generated artwork under hashtags like #GhibliStyle and #AIGhibli. Some even used the technology to reimagine iconic pop culture moments - turning celebrities, historical figures, and internet memes into Ghibli-style characters.

It's been 24 hours since OpenAI unexpectedly shook the AI image world with 4o image generation.

Here are the 14 most mindblowing examples so far (100% AI-generated):

1. Studio ghibli style memespic.twitter.com/E38mBnPnQh

— Barsee ???? (@heyBarsee) March 26, 2025

Snoop Dogg drawn in Studio Ghibli style.

[????️ Robert Bradshaw / Cursed AI] pic.twitter.com/ej8NKP0tZc

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 21, 2025

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumped on to the trend. On Wednesday, he joked on X, "Be me. Grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever, mostly no one cares for the first 7.5 years, and then for 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything. Wake up one day to hundreds of messages: 'look I made you into a twink Ghibli style haha.'"

>be me
>grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever
>mostly no one cares for first 7.5 years, then for 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything
>wake up one day to hundreds of messages: "look i made you into a twink ghibli style haha"

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 26, 2025

Mr Altman even changed his profile picture to an AI-generated Ghibli-style version of himself.

ChatGPT 4o Image Generation

OpenAI's latest update to ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4o, now allows users to generate images directly within the chatbot. This new feature, called "Images in ChatGPT," is available for all users, though free-tier users face some limitations due to high demand. 

The rollout hasn't been entirely smooth. OpenAI had to delay access for free users and fix a bug where the AI would generate images of "sexy men" but not "sexy women." 

Despite these issues, the new model significantly improves image accuracy, text rendering, and object relationships. Instead of generating images all at once like DALL-E, GPT-4o creates them piece by piece.