That’s what a friend from the UK (UK) wrote to me on Instagram this week.
Sanjeev has loved drawing since we were kids. He was drawing a swan on the edge of my LKG notebook. Every time he comes to Bhubaneswar, he carries hand-drawn portraits of our childhood together.
Ironically, his father manages the marketing building of Openai, a company that arts his icons, which once spent months in a few months.
Today, new aesthetic trends are taking over social media: AI-generated Ghibli portraits.
Your selfies, family photos, snapshots of your pets, and your boyfriend are fed into filtered neural networks through the imitation of legendary Studio Ghibli-style algorithms, rethinking on pastels and whimsical, infused with soft watercolor backgrounds and blushing blushing blush.
With the courtesy of some keystrokes, clicks and the spooky magic of GPT-4.0, we all came to Master.
At first glance, it’s charming – like walking into energy or my neighbor Totoro.
However, in a thorough examination, something can be felt. Where is the nuance? detail? Artistic license? Beneath the surface level nostalgia is a deeper, more unstable question.
Do we trade artistic souls for synthetic spectacles? Is it art or plagiarism?
Shivakshi Dikshit, an XII student in the humanities class who just appeared in the board exams, said, “It’s not a compliment to steal his art in the name of a fleeting tendency. It’s theft. It’s aesthetic violence against his legacy.”
From theft to theft: When AI enters an artist’s studio
In 2016, Miyazaki Hayo, co-founder and auer of Studio Ghibli, famously dismissed the art generated by AI as “an insult to life itself.”
Ankita Mishra Science students with a strong interest in artificial intelligence will fully replenish this concept. “AI has managed to understand the superficial features of Ghibli, such as pastel mountainous backgrounds, soft features, and certain types of faces, but it is unable to capture the uniqueness of an individual’s face.
He didn’t talk about it out of fear or arrogance, but from a deep, laborious understanding of what art really means.
Hand-drawn flaws, silence between dialogues, patience that nature breathes – it is not a coincidence, not a magical coincidence of algorithms and software.
It is the result of human touch. For those who choose all the details, not for emotion, rather than efficiency.
It is not respectful to reduce that love labor to the virus’s tendency to drive the code – it is an aesthetic appropriation. It is decorated as a heritage that we have not acquired or understood.
Mysuru wrote R Jayapriya of the demonstration school:
Data is a new paint brush, what is a canvas?
AI does not create art in vacuum. It thrives with data – your data. Your search history, anime characters you engage in, your face, your friends’ face, the restaurants you Googled on Google yesterday.
All of it is preserved, studied and fed in a mass model of mass training to “learn” what is appealing to the human eye.
Ghibli AI trends, which feature tools such as ChatGpt image functions and open source art models, are the digital mirror products. Yes, it captures Miyazaki’s distinctive style – rounded face lines, calm backgrounds, and the charm of Fever Dream – but he fails to do what he does best.
Hyderabad is solely Fiona Devasmita from Narsal, “The Ghibli epidemic has only succeeded in compromising the artistic integrity of microtrends while opening a box of Pandora’s ethical and potential legal violations.”
This compromise has a voluntary nature. We ask to pass on portraits, expressions and memories that resemble faceless machines and tell stories. It should be allowed – should it be encouraged?
Problem Soul: What ai can’t (and should not) replace
Art is a human cry over time. A universal language that goes beyond language and one-sided language. It is protest, celebration, mourning, and all wonders at once, wrapped in brush strokes, strings, pixels and words.
Miyazaki’s works are a testament to this belief. He is famous for spending more than 18 months of animation on a single scene from Princess Mononoke. The truth was that. That’s what the art was like.
Barkha Jangir, Wadi Kabir from Indian school, said, “It was fine, but it looked empty. It was refined. I polished it like someone wiped my soul.”
These AI images are like mirrors reflecting heatless light despite their visual appeal. It’s superficial and unforgettable hollow, familiar but cold to some extent.
Art is not merely about similarity, it is about resonance. The Ghibli sky is more than just a sky. It is the ratio of freedom. Algorithms can replicate appearance, not life.
Digital Colonialism of Creativity: Who owns the Image?
When submitting photos to an AI art generator, you are not simply engaged in harmless fun. You often waive your likeness copyright to the Platform’s Terms of Service. Your face becomes training data. Your style, your voice, your essence – commercialized, archived and reused.
And that’s not just a privacy concern. It’s a creative ethical crisis.
Aman Tandon and Muscat of Indian schools are heartfelt and clear reflections of this.
The core of art work is trivial. This not only undermine decades of craftsmanship, it also sends the wrong message to the next generation of creators.
Generations in Crossroads: Do you build with that or can it be replaced?
Students today face an impossible paradox. We are said to be creative, innovative and empathetic, but are handed tools that simulate those extremely qualities without effort. We are caught between a sense of respect and anxiety.
Aditya Adhikari, architecture major at Odisha Technology and Research, said, “There is no real story or warmth. It’s just a surface level imitation. It reminds me that true creativity comes from human passions, not from algorithms.”
Perhaps it’s time for AI to reevaluate what they want to do for us. Should it mimic our passion? Or should we be free to explore them deeper?
In a world where AI can clean houses, drive buses, and calculate taxes, you have to ask:
Why is it used to write poems? How to design fashion? To dream of our dreams?
These were not jobs we helped. These were jobs we loved.
Conclusion: pleas, not controversy
Let’s be clear – I’m not against AI. I use it. I respect that. I am amazed at that too. I used it to summarise the inconsistent parts of the work you are currently reading.
But we are worried that it’s too fast and too little.
Ghibli trends may now look harmless – fleeting aesthetic joielides – but it is also a symbol of something bigger. If it’s not checked, this isn’t just about who draws your face. It’s about who owns your story.
Ultimately, what you need is readjustment, not AI rejection. It is a world where technology supports artists, and it does not replace them. Here, AI handles the weight of routines, not the joy of creation. Maybe it should carry with us long after the Ghibli trends faded.
“It’s heartbreaking. AI can copy styles, but never understand the small imperfections that make Ghibli’s work special,” said Anjana Sugasan, Muscat, an Indian school.
(Tarun Tapan Bhuyan is a student studying at SAI International School. His expressed opinion is his own.)
