‘Studio Ghibli’ AI image trend overwhelms OpenAI’s new GPT-4o feature, delaying free tier

If you’ve been on the internet — or, at least, on the social network X — in the last day or so, you’ve likely come across colorful, smooth anime-style images of famous photographs rendered in the style of the Japanese studio, Studio Ghibli (the one that made Princess Mononoke, The Boy and the Crane, and My Neighbor Totoro, among many other classic animated films).

In fact, some users are complaining because their feeds seem to be filled with nearly exclusively these types of images.

Whether it’s current President Trump, the iconic image of the “Tank Man” during the 1989 pro-Democracy Tiananmen Square protests, Osama Bin Laden, Jeffrey Epstein, or even other pop culture moments and characters like Sam Rockwell’s iconic cameo on The White Lotus and many popular memes of yore, people have been making and sharing these images at a rapid clip.

Powered by the new GPT-4o model’s native image gen

Much of that is thanks to OpenAI’s new update to the GPT-4o model behind ChatGPT for Pro, Plus, and Team subscription tiers, which turns on “native image generation.”

While ChatGPT previously allowed users to create images from text prompts, it did so by routing them to another, separate OpenAI model, DALL-E 3.

But OpenAI’s GPT-4o model is so named with an “o” because it is an “omni” model — the company trained it not only on text and code, but also on imagery and presumably, video and audio as well, allowing it to be able to understand all these forms of media and their similarities and differences, conceive of ideas across them (an “apple” is not just a word, but also something that can be drawn as a red or yellow or green fruit), and accurately produce said media given text prompts by a user without connecting to any external models.

As a consequence, like rival Google AI Studio’s recent update to include a Gemini 2.0 Flash experimental image creation model, the new OpenAI GPT-4o can also accept image uploads of any pre-existing image in your camera roll or that you’ve screenshotted or saved off the web.

How to use ChatGPT to make Studio Ghibli-style images (and change or transfer any image into any style!)

First, navigate to Chat.com or ChatGPT.com and ensure you’re logged in with your ChatGPT Plus, Pro, or Team account and that the AI model selector (located in the left corner of the session window) is showing “GPT-4o” as the chosen model (you can click it to drop down and select the proper model between the available options).

Once you do that, you can upload an image to ChatGPT using the “+” button in the lower left hand corner of the prompt entry text box, you can now ask the new GPT-4o with image creation model to render your pre-existing image in a new style.

If you want, you can try it by uploading a photo of yourself and friends and typing “make all these people in the style of a Studio Ghibli animation.” And after a few seconds, it will do so with some pretty convincing and amusing results. It even supports attaching multiple images and combining them into a single piece.

ChatGPT free tier usage delayed

OpenAI initially said it would also enable this feature for free (non-paying users of ChatGPT), but unfortunately for them, co-founder and CEO Sam Altman today posted that the feature will be delayed due to the overwhelming demand by existing paying subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team tiers.

As he wrote on X:

“images in chatgpt are wayyyy more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations).

rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for awhile.“

Meanwhile, those who do have access will likely continue cranking out image edits in this and other recognizable or novel styles.

Of course, not everyone is a fan of OpenAI’s work here. In fact, Studio Ghibli creator Hayao Miyazaki himself appeared in a documentary back in 2016 — and one of the most memorable moments from it still referenced to this day is him reacting with overwhelming disgust and revulsion to an early example of AI-powered animation and physics by, you guessed it, an OpenAI model.

As with many generative AI products and services, OpenAI’s training data for this new image generation capability remains under wraps, but is widely speculated to contain copyrighted material — and while imitating a style is generally not considered copyright infringement in the U.S., it is rubbing some fans of the original animation the wrong way.

For now, those brands and enterprises looking to play with this style should do so with caution and after serious consideration, given the possible negative blowback among some users. But for those who are unabashedly pro-AI tools or with more forgiving and fun-loving fanbases, it’s clear that OpenAI has yet another hit on its hands.

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