Blitz Bureau
OpenAI’s GPT-4 has introduced a new native image creation feature in its GPT-4o model. This ‘4o Image Generation’ feature has sparked a viral trend of Ghibli-style portraits on social media, with people uploading pictures and asking the model to modify them into a distinct anime style.
What is Ghibli art?
Founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation studio. It is known for its hand-drawn animation with detailed backgrounds and emotionally engaging storytelling. The word ‘Ghibli’ is derived from the Libyan Arabic word for a hot desert wind.
A Ghibli art refers to the unique style images of Studio Ghibli which features pastel and muted colour palettes and intricate details. This visual style has remained popular among anime fans due to its creative depth and storytelling appeal.
The Ghibli art trend’s popularity can be attributed to the significant following of anime, particularly in the US, where approximately 72 per cent of people watch anime daily. OpenAI’s ability to replicate images into the Ghibli style has drawn the attention of users, further driving the trend.
Sam Altman joins the trend
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined the trend and changed his X profile picture to a Ghibli version of himself. On X, he wrote, “>be me >grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever >mostly no one cares for first 7.5 years, then for 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything >wake up one day to hundreds of messages: ‘look i made you into a twink ghibli style haha.’”
Ghibli art prompts
Users and ChatGPT have shared specific prompts to generate these images, guiding the AI in creating detailed, whimsical portraits. With the help of these prompts, users were able to customise their personalised animated portraits. Popular prompts included:
– “Transform photos into Studio Ghibli-inspired characters, with a focus on detail and whimsy.”
– “What would I look like as a Ghibli character?”
– “Can you Ghiblise my photo?”
“How would Ghibli sketch my features?”
– “Show me in Studio Ghibli style.”
Social media platforms were flooded with Ghibli-style images, with users experimenting with images of family members, friends and more. Brands also joined the trend to create Ghibli-style images for promotional purposes.
Many users flooded the social media platforms with their creation using the latest features.
How’s Ghibli different
Unlike previous picture-generating approaches that relied on external tools such as DALL-E, GPT-4o generates images from its own internal knowledge. “Creating and customising images is as simple as chatting using GPT-4o — just describe what you need, including any specifics like aspect ratio, exact colours using hex codes, or a transparent background,” OpenAI said.
It also said that as this model provides more detailed images, they take longer to render, sometimes up to a minute.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke about the toll the viral Ghibli-style image trend has taken on his company’s resources. Altman wrote in a post on X that OpenAI’s “GPUs are melting” and that the company is introducing some temporary speed limits on the native image generation feature.
“it’s super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT. But our GPUs are melting. We are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. Hopefully won’t be long! ChatGPT free tier will get 3 generations per day soon.” Altman wrote in his post.
“Also, we are refusing some generations that should be allowed; we are fixing these as fast we can.” the OpenAI CEO added.