Studio Ghibli Explained Why It Ignored the AI Image Trend
Aleksandr Manin
Toshio Suzuki, the studio's board chairman and producer, explained why the flood of requests about AI-generated Ghibli-style fakes went completely unanswered at the time. He was confident the trend would fade on its own, and it didn't take long — interest in those images really did burn out fast.
The contrast here is telling. Other rights holders reacted to the wave of AI stylizations with outrage and threats of lawsuits, while the Japanese studio chose silence — and, in Suzuki's view, that turned out to be the right call.
AI can easily produce a certain kind of animation, but anyone with even a little knowledge can spot a fake right away. There's not much point to it, and not much interest either.
Hayao Miyazaki came up too. According to Suzuki, the studio's co-founder simply doesn't know what generative AI is, and his style can't be reproduced by neural networks or CGI. The director is 85 and hasn't made a public appearance since "The Boy and the Heron" came out in 2023, and is reportedly quietly working on a new feature film.
Suzuki ended on an unexpectedly sweeping note.
Ghibli will become a cultural phenomenon that shows what it means for a person to create art.
The wave in question rose at the start of last year: social media filled up with AI-generated versions of everything from "The Lord of the Rings" to memes, all reworked into the studio's recognizable watercolor style. The trend spread so far that stylizations even started showing up in advertising, then died down almost as fast as it had appeared.
Did the wave of "Ghibli-style" images amuse you more, or annoy you?
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