Recently, in late March 2025, social media platforms are being bombarded with tons of animated pictures that are created with OpenAI’s image generator, powered by the new GPT-40. What makes it interesting is that it all has the same unique style from the most popular studio in Japan, Ghibli. With its soft coloring, adorable drawings, and appealing style, Ghibli’s aesthetics have captivated the hearts of society for so long. Since the classic animated movies like “Spirited Away”—which won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2003—or “My Neighbor Totoro,” the unique animated style of the legendary Hayao Miyazaki has been a trademark even long before artificial intelligence (AI) was established. This trend is then called ‘Ghiblification’ because it personalized pictures to be Ghibli-styled. It sparked various reactions and discourse in the society as people were concerned about copyrights and ethical usage of the style.
There are two sides of coins in reflecting the uproar: the pessimists and the opportunists. The pessimists tend to debate the irony in using AI tools to create art, which intersects with ethical and philosophical discussion. Meanwhile, the opportunists believe that this tool can bring a greater platform for infestations or the growth of the creative industry. There is no black and white in decision-making about which is right because there are no legal laws that regulate this field. So, is this trend truly a nightmare or just a storm in a teacup?. This essay will then argue that the Ghiblification trend, powered by generative AI, represents a form of cultural and technological colonialism that erodes artistic values and how it exacerbates global economic inequalities.
Market Impact
Responding to the surging popularity of Ghiblification, the digital market rippled quite heavily with the Solana-based meme coin named ‘GHIBLI’ skyrocketing to a $28.3 million market cap (Gladwin, 2025). Solana itself is a blockchain platform, while meme coin is a pretty popular trend in cryptocurrencies. At least 20 other Ghibli-related tokens have emerged, and one on Solana recorded a 52.54% jump, reaching a $23 million market cap (Aziz, 2025). Many investors and traders are keeping an eye on this particular coin because of the trend. Which creates a more nuanced platform and new opportunities to invest in.
While it sounds fun for the crypto fanatics, this positive turmoil didn’t have the same impact on the creative industry. Market holders will keep an eye on the value of coins but not on the art itself. And this is where the ‘market’ met at a crossroads. For whom does the market benefit: the business or the creative industry worker?
Who owns the benefits?
It’s actually simple to see who benefits from this Ghiblification trend; Studio Ghibli itself didn’t get even a single penny of profit. All generated images that are exploited from OpenAI will only profit the company because they have their defense. There is neither copyright license nor regulation that prohibits it. According to an intellectual property lawyer, Evan Brown, these tools exist in the “legal gray area,” which means that “style is not explicitly protected by copyright,” thus it technically didn’t violate the copyright law. True, but OpenAI works on a vast dataset of images that came from the Ghibli characteristics. It is being trained to follow a range of images and make it into their system. Which actually means at the same time they “steal” the former art as a muse and then program it for the sake of entertainment. In a 2024 article, ‘AI Art is Theft: Labor, Extraction, and Exploitation: Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks,’ the author, Goetze, argued there are three conceptions of art theft that are mainly used by protestors: heist, plagiarism, and labor theft. Using John Locke’s account of creative labor, Goetze argued that AI image generators involved a large-scale and morally objectionable form of theft, rooted in the appropriation of vast numbers of existing artworks. Simply, ‘theft’ means taking the products of labor (art) without offering any compensation at all to the workers. It eroded the rights of Ghibli artists to receive what they deserve as a reward. AI produces distributive injustice of both material resources and the bases of self-respect and exacerbates the excesses of colonialism and capitalism.
Not only did the tech company steal the profit, but they also stole the appreciation by developing the ‘great’ newest AI tools. Leave alone the money; this is the biggest insult for art workers because they get a lack of appreciation and recognition for their own art. Because even if the majority of society loved the style, they will raise the demand to create more ‘art’ to the AI itself, not to any of the Ghibli staff. In the end, the cycle of profit will keep on circling to the tech company, and it didn’t sit well with some segments of the society who recognize art workers’ rights.
AI Colonialism?
Knowing who bagged the profit from the Ghiblification trend, now let’s see the bigger and more nuanced picture of the upcoming future. The immense resources and financial barriers that are required to enter the market made the AI industry shift into a broligarchy (where the government is ruled by a coterie of extremely wealthy men in tech companies and also known as a tech oligarchy). There are only a few industry leaders that are climbing ladders of AI growth, i.e., the famous ones like Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, etc. It is impossible to establish your own AI company without merging or getting any help from the big ones because of the high barrier of entry and market competition. Not only companies, but countries are also in line within races of AI development. According to Stanford HAI’s Global Vibrancy Tool, the top ten global AI leaders in 2024 are mostly from the Global North, with the U.S. leading at number one, followed by China and the United Kingdom—India was the only Global South country on the list. This centralization of development will potentially risk an erosion of the diversity of global cultural identities. With only a few industry leaders, there is a potential exacerbation of the digital divide and reshaping of societal norms and cultural values to favor their perspective (Dobrin, 2024). Which will lead into technological colonialism, or specifically AI colonialism.
Thus, how could this be linear to the Ghiblification trend? When there is neither regulation, prohibition, nor limitation of who and how generative AI could be used, all hell breaks loose. Let’s take an example of this X post of user IDF, or Israel Defense Forces:
Everything may seem normal, but the problem is the misled value and the cultural appropriation behind it. User @/GoodVibePolitik on X quoted the post above, saying, “Hayao Miyazaki didn’t come to the United States in 2003 to accept his Oscar for Spirited Away because of his opposition to the Iraq War, so I have to imagine he’d be nothing short of furious to see a genocidal occupational military using Ghibli art style to advertise themselves.” It shows that the creator of the style itself is against the atrocities committed by warfare. When his style is used to promote ‘cute’ pictures of evil soldiers, it is where we draw the line. There are layers of cultural meanings and emotional depth in a single Ghibli drawing; if it is used to generate any images possible, it will diminish those values and couldn’t be called ‘art.’ Generating pictures with AI does not require empathy for their subject or deeper understanding of context; it will simply identify an aesthetic and then produce it as an empty signifier. AI is bastardizing the value and meaning of art and cultural context that Studio Ghibli represented. It is a form of colonialism.
Technology contributes to a de-aestheticization of artwork in modernity (Benjamin, 1935). The technological reproduction of Ghibli’s work through art has detached itself from the sphere of tradition. The reproduced soulless and meaningless pictures that are called ‘art’ have become the new modern aesthetic tied to AI algorithms. When it only serves the interest of a few big AI industries that aim for bigger infestations and income. Uncaring about the massive blow for the creative industry nor any cultural representation behind a single drawing. It colonizes the value, the meaning, the context, and even the history of Studio Ghibli as a whole, reducing it into a less-than-one-minute AI-generating image tool. The X post by IDF is just one of the most recent examples; we can only predict a bigger nightmare for creative industries in the future because AI keeps rapidly evolving, and there is no stopping it.
Conclusion [1]
For the general public, this trend may be just a funny and fleeting event. But what most of us are missing are the potential harms it might spill in the upcoming future. There is a mistake in understanding the context if people don’t see Ghiblification as a problematic issue. If this continues and develops without being regulated, what is lost is not only the preservation of the value of a work but also the loss of appreciation for the position of workers in the creative industry. It’s like how collective ideas will create new norms and behaviors in society. When the world starts to normalize the trend of Ghiblification, the next thing will be ‘AI art.’
The trend in the crypto market has paved the way for broligarchy to utilize this opportunity for more generative image exploitation in the future. Allowing data colonialism to internalize more authentic styles into generated images is promoting art theft and is extremely worrying for the future. It threatens to erode the artistic values and theft of labor as believed by the Lockean argument. The AI developer has no right to scrap artworks from the web and use these products of human creative labor in AI development (Goetze, 2024).
When it comes to debating AI, the pendulum always swings around ethics and regulation. Society has been walking on a tightrope in finding the ‘right footing.’ There have been no clear ratified international regulations nor ethical limitations to prohibit people from using generative AI. But one thing for sure is that only big companies and the AI industry will benefit from all this while unconsciously eroding the global creative industry slowly. If the world keeps on going like this, the storm will really spill out of the teacup.
