That’s what a friend from the United Kingdom (UK) wrote to me via Instagram this week.
Sanjeev loved drawing since we were a child. He used to draw swans on the edges of my LKG notebook. Whenever he comes to Bhubaneswar, he carries with him hand-drawn portraits of our childhood together.
The irony is that today, his father manages the marketing wing of OpenAI, a company which capitalises on art his icons once spent months creating in seconds.
Today, a new aesthetic trend has taken over social media: AI-generated Ghibli portraits.
Your selfies, your family photos, your pet snapshots and your boyfriend — fed into a neural network, filtered through an algorithmic mimicry of the legendary Studio Ghibli style, and voilà — your life, reimagined in pastels and whimsy, with soft watercolor backdrops and blushing cheeks.
All courtesy of a few keystrokes, a click, and the eerie magic of GPT-4.0 sprinkled with some prompt mastery, which we’ve all come to master.
At first glance, it's charming — like stepping into Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro.
But on closer inspection, something feels…off. Where is the nuance? The detail? The artistic license? Beneath the surface-level nostalgia lies a deeper, more disquieting question:
Are we trading artistic soul for synthetic spectacle? Is it art or plagiarism?
Shivakshi Dixit, a Humanities Class XII student who just appeared her board exams, puts it with conviction, “To plagiarise his art in the name of a fleeting trend is not tribute — it is theft. It is aesthetic violence against his legacy.”
From tribute to theft: When AI walks into the artist’s studio
In 2016, Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli’s co-founder and auteur, famously dismissed AI-generated art as “an insult to life itself.”
Ankita Mishra a science student with a keen interest in Artificial Intelligence supplments this notion perfectly, “While AI succeeds in understanding the superficial features of Ghibli like pastel mountainous backdrops, soft features, and a particular type of face structure, it fails to capture the uniqueness of an individual’s face, and humorously, even adding an extra limb or an extra person in the generated images.”
He wasn’t speaking out of fear or arrogance — but out of a profound, painstaking understanding of what art truly means.
The hand-drawn imperfection, the silences between dialogue, the patience with which nature breathes — none of it is accidental, a magical coincidence of algorithm and software.
It is the consequence of human touch. Of someone choosing every detail not for efficiency, but for emotion.
To reduce that labour of love to a viral trend powered by code is not homage — it is aesthetic appropriation. It is dressing up as a legacy we have neither earned nor understood.
R Jayapriya from Demonstration School, Mysuru writes, “It is not okay to make someone’s years of hard work, experience, and grit feel like it could all be gone with a one-line prompt.”
Data is the new paintbrush, but what’s the canvas?
AI does not create art in a vacuum. It thrives on data — your data. Your search history, the anime characters you engage with, your face, your friends’ faces, the restaurant you Googled yesterday.
All of it is stored, studied, and fed into enormous training mass-models that “learn” what appeals to the human eye.
The Ghibli AI trend, powered by tools like ChatGPT’s image features and open-source art models, is a product of this digital mirror. Yes, it captures Miyazaki’s signature style — rounded facial lines, muted backgrounds and a fever-dream charm — but it fails to do what his work does best: make you feel something real.
As Fiona Debasmita Alone from NALSAR, Hyderabad, rightly warns, “The Ghibli fad succeeds only in compromising artistic integrity for micro-trends while opening a Pandora’s box of ethical, and potentially legal, violations.”
There is a voluntary nature to this compromise. We’re handing over our likeness, our expressions, our memories to a faceless machine and asking it to tell our stories. Should that be allowed — should it be encouraged?
The Soul of the Matter: What AI can’t (and shouldn’t) replace
Art is a human cry across time. A universal language that goes beyond language and unilateralism. It is protest, celebration, mourning, and wonder all at once — wrapped in brushstrokes, strings, pixels, and words.
Miyazaki’s work stands as a testament to this belief. He famously spent over 18 months animating a single scene in Princess Mononoke — not because he couldn’t have done it faster, but because perfection wasn’t the goal. The truth was. Art was.
Barkha Jangir from Indian School, Wadi Kabir reminisces looking at a GPT Ghibli portrait for the first time, “It looked alright, but felt empty. Polished. Like someone wiped it’s soul clean off.”
These AI images, despite their visual charm, are like mirrors that reflect light without heat. Superficial and hauntingly hollow, in a way that is familiar but cold.
Art is not merely about resemblance — it’s about resonance. A Ghibli sky is not just a sky; it is a metaphor for freedom. Algorithms can replicate the look, not the life.
Digital Colonialism of Creativity: Who owns the image?
When you submit your photo to an AI art generator, you’re not just engaging in harmless fun. You are often surrendering the copyright of your likeness to the platform’s terms of service. Your face becomes training data. Your style, your voice, your essence — commodified, archived, reused.
And it’s not just a privacy concern. It’s a creative ethics crisis.
Aman Tandon from The Indian School, Muscat, poignantly and articulately reflects on this: “The influx of AI-generated photos, while flattering in the sense that they attempt to mirror Studio Ghibli’s signature aesthetic, risks diluting the very essence that made his work special.”
The core of artistic labor is being trivialized. Not only does this undermine decades of craftsmanship, but it also sends the wrong message to the next generation of creators: that speed trumps soul, and quantity outweighs quality.
A Generation at Crossroads: Build with it, or be replaced by it?
Students today face an impossible paradox. We are told to be creative, innovative, and empathetic—but are handed tools that simulate those very qualities without effort. We are caught between awe and anxiety.
Aditya Adhikari, an Architecture major at the Odisha University of Technology and Research, says, “There’s no real story, no warmth — just a surface-level imitation. It’s a reminder that real creativity comes from human passion, not algorithms.”
Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate what we want AI to do for us. Should it mimic our passions? Or should it free us to explore them more deeply?
In a world where AI could be cleaning homes, driving buses, or calculating taxes, we must ask:
Why is it being used to write poetry? To design fashion? To draw our dreams?
These were never the jobs we needed help with. These were the jobs we loved.
Conclusion: A Plea, not a polemic
Let me be clear — I am not against AI. I use it. I respect it. I even marvel at it. I used it to summarize incoherent parts of the piece you’re reading right now.
But I fear we are giving away too much, too fast, for too little.
The Ghibli trend may seem harmless now — a fleeting aesthetic joyride — but it is also a symbol of something larger: the slow erosion of what makes us human. If left unchecked, this is not just about who draws your face. It’s about who owns your story.
In the end, what we need is not rejection of AI, but recalibration. A world where technology aids the artist, not replaces them. Where AI handles the weight of routine, not the joy of creation. Maybe that’s the thought we should carry with us, long after the Ghibli trend fades.
Anjana Sugathan from the Indian School, Muscat, wraps it up perfectly, “It’s heartbreaking. AI can copy the style, but it will never understand the personal touch, the feelings, or the little imperfections that make Ghibli’s work so special. The truth is, Ghibli’s magic comes from real people, not algorithms.”
(Tarun Tapan Bhuyan is a student studying in SAI International School. Views expressed are his own.)
