Introduction

Ghibli became a trend. We also hopped on! And now we’re kinda sorry… 

Miyazaki spent decades of passion and hard work to create a legendary style, and now he witnessed how everyone is copying that with one prompt and one click. 

On all social media, there are his warm, hand-painted skies, kind faces with big eyes, forests that breathe, creatures that are equal parts strange and tender, quiet characters with big emotions…. The wind moves through the grass like it has a soul, and even the background feels alive. And that’s the Ghibli aesthetic. 

“I would like to make a film to tell children “it’s good to be alive”.

― Hayao Miyazaki

It’s not just a style—it’s a feeling. A very specific kind of wonder. And it didn’t just appear out of nowhere. But many people don’t know that … 

The moment it blew up, we rushed to try it too—within the first 24 hours, to be precise, and with no hesitation. We typed in “our team photo in Studio Ghibli style” and hit generate. 

The result? Adorable. 

Soft lights, cozy scenery, the whole team turned into wide-eyed characters with windswept hair and gentle smiles. We were there. In his world! We felt magical, posted it on social. We got likes. We laughed. We were excited. We were happy. We even printed it and stuck it on the office wall. 

But now we’re sitting with it. And something doesn’t feel right.

Let’s back up.

What is art?

Art. Ever heard of it? 

It is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

And then, there’s digital art. Also art, but a different way of working!

According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:

“In order to be a true digital artist, you must learn the same types of skills to perform digital artwork that you would for traditional artwork”.

And then we have AI.
A prompt. A click. Done.

Can everyone be an artist without dedication, knowledge, passion, and skills? No.
Can everyone use AI and become “one”? Yes. 

So…will we lose the point of art in the process of all AI-Generated? 

Let’s talk about Hayao Miyazaki.

If you’ve ever watched Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, or Princess Mononoke, you know the magic of Studio Ghibli. But do you know the man behind it?

Hayao Miyazaki isn’t just an animator—he’s a legend. He spent decades perfecting his craft, hand-drawing frames, obsessing over details, and pouring his soul into stories that feel alive. His style—whimsical, deeply human, and full of quiet emotion—isn’t something you can just replicate. It’s the result of a lifetime of passion, struggle, and relentless dedication.

And now? The whole world is copying it with one AI prompt.
That’s not just ironic—it’s heartbreaking. 

Who Is Hayao Miyazaki? (and why should you care?)

Before we talk about AI or ethics or trends, we need to talk more about Hayao Miyazaki.

He’s not just the co-founder of Studio Ghibli. He’s a living legend. A man who spent decades—yes, decades—drawing, animating, writing, revising, obsessing over details, and building entire worlds from scratch. Every leaf, every creature, every tiny movement in his films was carefully considered. His style is instantly recognizable, not just for the look of it, but for the soul it carries.

Miyazaki was born in 1941, and like many great artists, he didn’t just wake up one day with a studio at his feet. He worked his way up through the animation industry in Japan, starting in the 1960s. He directed his first film, The Castle of Cagliostro, in 1979, and in 1985 he co-founded Studio Ghibli —because he wanted to tell stories his way, no compromises. Every film was a battle—funding issues, production delays, his own perfectionism.

Alongside his longtime collaborator Isao Takahata, Miyazaki created films that didn’t just entertain—they moved people. They taught us to slow down, to care about nature, to be kind to strangers, to sit with our emotions.

And he didn’t do it with shortcuts. There were no cheat codes. Just pure, stubborn dedication to his craft.

Miyazaki didn’t just make animated movies—he redefined them.
And the worst part? Most people using AI to “make Ghibli art” don’t even know who he is. 

AI doesn’t “create” Ghibli-style art. It steals it.

A few weeks ago, a trend exploded: “Turn your photos into Studio Ghibli scenes with AI!”

Cute, right?
Well… no.

Because here’s the thing: AI doesn’t “create” Ghibli-style art. It steals it.

It doesn’t dream up original concepts, sketch for hours, or feel anything at all. What it does is scrape. It scours the internet for thousands of real Ghibli frames—hand-drawn by actual humans, over years of dedication—and mashes them together into something that looks convincing but isn’t real. It doesn’t understand the meaning behind the brushstrokes. It just imitates the surface.

It doesn’t know that Hayao Miyazaki draws food with such care because he believes meals are sacred moments. It doesn’t know that his characters often say nothing because silence, in his world, is powerful. AI doesn’t feel the heartbreak in “Grave of the Fireflies” or the childlike wonder in “My Neighbor Totoro.” It can’t. It’s not a storyteller—it’s a mimic.

It’s a cheap imitation—a digital cut-and-paste job of something that took a genius five decades to build.

And the biggest insult?

Miyazaki himself has been vocal about his disdain for AI-generated art. In a 2016 interview, after being shown an AI-generated animation of a grotesque creature moving in unnatural, jerky patterns, he responded with something that should make all of us pause:

“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

He wasn’t being dramatic. For Miyazaki, animation is life. It’s soul. It’s human.

So to see his life’s work reassembled by an algorithm—one click, no soul, no sweat, no reverence—yeah, it’s heartbreaking.

AI Art: Cool tool or creative theft?

Here’s a quick timeline to show how it all started:

Early Beginnings

• 1973: The first AI art system, AARON, was developed by Harold Cohen. It used symbolic AI to create black-and-white drawings, marking the beginning of AI-generated art.

The Modern Era

• 2014: This was the beginning. A research paper introduced something called GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks). The idea? Pit two AIs against each other—one tries to create an image, the other critiques it. Eventually, the “artist” AI learns how to make better and better images. Early results? Weird. Blurry. Creepy. But still—kind of amazing.
• 2015–2019: Researchers kept playing. AI started generating better faces, landscapes, and patterns. Tools like DeepArt and Prisma let you turn selfies into “paintings” using the style of famous artists like Van Gogh or Picasso. Not that great yet.

AI Art Boom

• 2021: Boom. Things got serious. OpenAI launched DALL·E, the first AI that could generate truly interesting images from text prompts. Like: “a cat in a spacesuit, riding a bicycle on the moon.” The results? Surprisingly good.
• 2022: The floodgates opened. MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL·E 2 all launched. Now, anyone could type a sentence and get a beautiful, detailed, sometimes downright jaw-dropping image in seconds. Suddenly, making “art” was as easy as typing “moody cyberpunk city, dusk lighting, anime style.”

Recent Developments

• 2023: Large software vendors entered the AI art market. Adobe introduced Firefly, integrating AI into its popular editing tools like Photoshop. This year also saw significant advancements in AI technology, including the integration of AI into search engines and the release of new AI models.
• 2024: The Japanese film generAIdoscope was released, featuring AI-generated video, audio, and music. Additionally, AI-assisted anime productions began to emerge.
• 2025: The Japanese anime series Twins Hinahima was produced with AI assistance, further integrating AI into mainstream media. The debate over AI art’s impact on creativity and traditional art forms continues to grow, with discussions on copyright and the future of art
• 2025: OpenAI rolled out GPT-4o’s new image generation feature, letting users create photorealistic visuals directly in ChatGPT—sparking excitement for creatives, but also deeper concerns about originality, style theft, and the future of visual art.

Cool? Totally.
Powerful? Absolutely.
But also… kinda messy.

So, how does AI for generating images actually work?

Let’s walk through what really happens when you type a prompt into an AI image generator:

It starts with training on massive datasets
Before these tools can generate anything, they need to be trained. That means feeding them millions—sometimes billions—of labeled images. These are scraped from public websites: online portfolios, stock photo libraries, social media, news articles, fan art pages, and yes, even copyrighted works like Studio Ghibli frames.

Each image is paired with text—captions, file names, descriptions—so the AI learns to associate certain words with certain visual patterns. This is how it understands what a “blue sky” or a “hand-drawn character” might look like.

The model learns patterns—not meaning
The AI doesn’t “understand” art. It doesn’t know what makes a scene emotional or what a visual style represents. What it does learn are statistical patterns. It picks up on color schemes, shapes, outlines, light, texture, and common structures across thousands of examples.

When it sees thousands of Ghibli-style images, it starts to learn:

• Characters tend to have large, expressive eyes
  
• Backgrounds are often detailed, warm, and nature-filled
  
• Lighting is soft and dreamlike. It’s not interpreting meaning—it’s recognizing repetition.

The generation process uses a diffusion model
When you enter your prompt, the AI begins with a field of visual “noise”—a static-filled image with no structure. Then it uses a process called denoising diffusion.

This means it gradually removes the noise, step by step, and replaces it with structure, based on the patterns it learned during training. Every step adjusts the image closer to something that matches your prompt.

This happens across dozens or even hundreds of steps, refining the image until it forms something recognizable and aligned with your description.

Output: a new image, based on existing styles
The end result is an image that looks original, but is entirely based on previously seen content. It isn’t copied pixel-for-pixel, but it’s built from the visual DNA of countless real artworks.

If you ask for “Studio Ghibli style,” you’ll get skies, characters, and lighting that resemble Miyazaki’s work—because the model has analyzed thousands of examples of it, without consent, and built a template of what “Ghibli” visually means.

The result looks new, but it’s not truly original
AI image generators don’t create—they approximate. They don’t imagine—they reconstruct. And they do it based on the work of real artists who spent years building those styles.

This is why the ethical question hits so hard. Because the tech works impressively well—but it works by using other people’s labor, style, and creativity without recognition or permission.

Is AI fair to artists?

Imagine:

You spend years learning to draw.
You develop a unique style.
Then an AI copies it—and people use it instead of hiring you.

That’s not just unfair—it’s dangerous.

AI companies scrape art without permission, profit from it, and leave artists with no credit, no pay, no say.

Some say: “But AI is just a tool!”
Sure. But a hammer is also a tool—you can build a house or smash a window. How we use it matters.

Conclusion

Take a moment to understand the roots before jumping on every trend—just because something looks cute doesn’t mean it’s harmless. This isn’t inspiration, it’s imitation. And when it comes to something as original and heartfelt as Ghibli, copying it without context or credit feels like a slap in the face to the people who actually built it. They deserve better. Much better!

So… do better. (Seriously!)

Here’s the deal for any future trend that may appear: 

1. Research before you trend-hop.
2. Support real artists—buy their work, watch their films, pay for their skills.
3. Ask yourself: “Is this trend disrespectful to someone’s life work?”

And one last thing: No, we don’t have to join every trend! 

Some things are sacred. Hayao Miyazaki’s art is one of them.

Let’s keep it that way.

Interested to learn more about AI? Read our previous blogs!