Trend archive · March to April 2025

The Studio Ghibli-style AI image trend of March 2025

Updated 2026-11-06 · Remake the Trend

On 25 March 2025 OpenAI added a new image generator to ChatGPT, and within two days people were turning family photos, memes and selfies into pictures that looked like frames from a Studio Ghibli film. The demand was big enough that Sam Altman said OpenAI's GPUs were "melting". This page is the history; it isn't something we make, and the trends below are the closest you can do here with your own photo.

In brief

When: From 25 March 2025, peaking over the following week.
Made with: GPT-4o image generation in ChatGPT.
Where: X, Instagram and TikTok.
Cost: Paid ChatGPT plans first; free users got it on 1 April 2025, with a daily limit.

What was the Ghibli AI trend?

Upload a photo to ChatGPT and ask for it "in the style of Studio Ghibli": soft watercolour skies, round faces, the look of Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro. The new model was much better than earlier ones at keeping who and what was in the photo while changing the drawing style, which is why the results were so easy to recognise and share.

A dated timeline

Date	What happened
25 Mar 2025	OpenAI launches image generation in GPT-4o inside ChatGPT.
27 Mar 2025	Sam Altman posts that "our GPUs are melting" and that OpenAI will add temporary rate limits.
31 Mar 2025	Altman says ChatGPT added one million users in the last hour (OpenAI's own claim; it didn't say how it counted).
1 Apr 2025	Image generation reaches free ChatGPT users.

Why did animators and fans object?

Studio Ghibli's look was built by hand over decades, largely by Hayao Miyazaki, and an old clip of him went round again: in a 2016 NHK documentary, shown an AI-driven animation demo, he called it "an insult to life itself". He was reacting to that demo, not to image generators, but many people read it as his view of the trend.

OpenAI's answer was that it blocks images in the style of individual living artists but permits "broader studio styles". Critics pointed out that the studio's style is in large part one living artist's. Whether Ghibli films were in the training data, OpenAI didn't say.

Is the Ghibli trend still going?

Its peak was the last week of March 2025, when the user and GPU numbers above were posted. Ghibli-style pictures are still made; we don't count them, so we can't say how many appear now.

What can I make here instead?

We don't copy any studio's style. The trends below turn your photo into a different kind of picture, as a video: clay, a cartoon duo, a painting that comes to life, a fairy.