Generative AI Is Straight Out Of A Dystopian Novel. The Ghibli Trends Proves It

In January 2023 ChatGPT first emerged in the cultural consciousness. On 25th March 2025, OpenAI introduced image generation into the tool and on 26th March 2025, the first AI “Ghibli” Photo was posted. This formed an internet wide trend  of people feeding the AI tool with personal pictures and prompting it to “Ghibli-fy” them. 

Now contrary to what one might believe by reading the title of my article, I was quite happy the first few days of this trend. Not because I liked the trend itself, or took any part in it whatsoever- No, I’m an artist and a writer. I have been a longstanding hater of Generative AI from the very beginning.  I have never even used it -no ChatGPT, no Gemini, no MetaAI, no nothing. My staunch refusal to engage with the technology has been quite a source of annoyance, hearing my friends proudly boast about how much of their English Literature project was written by ChatGPT or being recommended AI tools to help in finding sources for research papers or my brother asking me what prompt i think he should feed into it for his essay. My own mother has quite frequently accused me of being stuck in my ways and to accept that our AI lords and saviours are here to make sure we never have to think about anything again, ever, in our lives.

No, the reason I was happy at the genesis of this trend was quite simple: All my friends are artists, the ones who aren’t artists are weebs, and no weeb would ever stand for the disrespect of the real Lord and Saviour Hayao Miyazaki. Finally they understood how soulless and off putting AI is!

The vindication I felt to see all my peers stand against AI and join me in thinking ‘this whole thing is a techbro scam the likes of crypto and NFTs’ is quite possibly the closest one can get to the feeling of euphoria in this current socio political climate.

This was however a short lived victory - hating AI still sadly remains a hot take, so much so that I personally became victim to having people I know in real life Ghibli-fy themselves and me. 

The first time I was subjected to a poor soul offering themselves up to ChatGPT to use as training data so that it can make it kinda look like they were in the style of a movie they’d never seen - It was my therapist. I haven’t been to therapy since but that’s probably unrelated.

The second was my Dad, who jump-scared me by dropping a handful of “Ghibli” Pictures of my family onto the family group chat, without warning, on a random Tuesday afternoon. 

To say it felt nauseating would be an understatement. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Honestly, I deleted them immediately but every time I even think about it I feel my skin begin to crawl, I get an actual lump in my throat. Not to be hyperbolic, but it felt almost violating. It felt unsettling and dysmorphic- this amalgamation of other artist’s work curated to resemble me. I have never been conscious about my weight- the AI picture made me do so. It feels like an attack on who I am as a person, to have that image exist, somewhere out there in the world. 

I am someone who holds strong in my beliefs- especially my belief that art and creativity are the most important facets of the human experience. Perhaps it is stubborn of me to so vehemently despise this new revolutionary technology, but quite frankly the popularity of AI baffles me. 

What’s the point of having an image of yourself AI generated to like Ghibli? What makes someone want to do that? If I were to commission an artist to draw me as a Ghibli character, It would be because I loved Ghibli and wanted to have something that commemorated that. But these people don’t love Ghibli, they can’t - not only are they disrespecting its creator (I’m sure we’ve all heard Miyazaki’s stance on AI by now) but the very movies themselves.

Studio Ghibli films are about love, life, humanity and nature. AI doesn’t have the first three and is actively destroying the fourth one. So why? Why do it? Why Ghibli, why not some other franchise that instead promotes creative bankruptcy and how art is meaningless anyway?

Oh, it’s because there is no media that believes this, in fact art being devalued in society is a common trope only in the genre of dystopian fiction.

I am  a firm believer of the fact that art is a conversation - it is a medium of communication between its creator and its beholder, you needn’t even look to a Picasso or a Van Gogh. It is a fundamental truth of creativity.

Recently, for my best friends birthday I made her a drawing of her old OC (original character) from when we were kids- I did it because I found it funny to remind her of a “cringy” thing from her past, It was also a testament to our shared history (I had also partaken in cringe OC making- and I’d even drawn this character for her before! For her birthday!). Each colour I choose, each stroke I made- they had these intents baked into them.

If I had asked AI to make that same drawing, it very well could’ve done it. In fact the piece would almost definitely be better, since the AI is stealing from artists who are much more talented than I am. But then comes the question- Why?

Why did the AI draw that character? Because I told it to.

Why did it pose the character like that? Because I told it to.

Why did it make the background that colour? Because I told it to.

The AI doesn’t know the reason behind these specifications, doesn’t know the history behind the character, it doesn’t know that I’m trying to reference the anatomically inaccurate poses I used to draw back then, it doesn’t know that pink is my friend's favourite colour- but when we first met it was orange and in my head I still think of orange when I think of her.

It can’t know that and can’t understand that because generative AI is nothing but a monkey on a typewriter, except that this monkey is a little bit smarter than the others- so instead of mashing keys of random  it copies what humans typed instead.

The popularisation of generative AI is distressing. I think there is nothing scarier than the future it promises, a future where humans do not think, or create or discover, they simply work and consume. Maybe it is stubborn of me to refuse to engage with the future, but I simply can not accept these conveniences when they come at the cost of creativity and freedom. All I can ask is that we all practice a bit of caution, and deliberate on the real value that these things actually add to one's life and not just use them in chase of a fad.

Written by Tista Sengupta