Singapore – Republic is encouraged by the world of anime legend Miyazaki Hayao’s studio Ghibli. Since ChatGPT allowed users to turn into distinctive cartoon characters, it has been judged from images that have flooded social media platforms.
Many Singaporean residents are busy turning their own photos into characters that are perfect for the vast and award-winning film catalogue of Japanese animation studios, including Spirited Away, The Boy and the Heron and My Neighbor Totoro.
Visitors to Singapore also share images of Ghibli Styles from attractions like the Singapore Flyer and the Artscience Museum.
Meme site SGAG has rethinked some of its Singapore news articles in recent years as scenes from Studio Ghibli films. These include Prime Minister Lee Husien Lun, who drinks from a “magic cup” during a break while giving speeches in various languages, a patriotic local man crying in large quantities at the 2022 National Day Parade when audiences sang the national anthem, and a woman who refused to wear a mask at Marina Bay Sand during the Covid Pandemie.
As Singapore’s general elections are turning the corner, some local politicians are also being given Ghibli treatment.
What is the appeal of becoming a Ghibli character? He looks great for Miyazaki’s main character, said caricature artist Kent Lau.
“Miyazaki Hayo ‘Friendly-fies” face, I gli,” he wrote on Facebook in a post accompanied by various images of him and his friends who showed his points.
On March 26th, Openai, the company behind ChatGpt, launched an AI-driven image generation tool that allows users to convert their own images into Ghibli-style photos.
The trends in Ghibli paintings have become a virus worldwide, with even the White House in the US posting animated images of the suspected crying cry handcuffed by immigrant officers before deportation.
The impact would be like many people would be able to link images to studios founded by Auther Miyazaki, even if they were not watching Studio Ghibli films.
Before the Ghibli trends, image generators were previously used to transform images into Pixar and Disney characters. It looked similar to characters from studio films such as Toy Story, Up, and Frozen.
Not everyone is happy with the mass plagiarism of Ghibli-style generative AI.
As if seeking insight into Miyazaki’s ideas, social media users have cycled the filmmaker’s 2016 clips of lightly paring the idea of using AI in his work.
“I’m totally tired. You can make something terrifying if you want. I don’t want to incorporate this technology into my work at all. It’s a terrible insult to life itself…” he told the documentary after being shown an early AI art generator.
The ability for users to generate these images is in stark contrast to the painstaking work that Ghibli artists put into the film.
One of the X-Posts distributed tells us how animator Yamamori can spend more than a year completing a four-second scene from scratch. MoveChatGpt can take just a few seconds to replicate.
For now, due to the high traffic of the CHATGPT-4O image generation tool, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is asking users to make it easier to use.
“Cool by generating images,” he wrote to X on March 30, adding, “This is insane,” and “Our team needs sleep.”
Although daily numbers for users in Singapore were not readily available, Singaporeans previously said in October 2024 that they are the highest per capita user of ChatGpt worldwide.
Altman added on April 1 that the number of ChatGPT users worldwide is rising at an unprecedented rate.
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