Last night until this morning, X and other social media platforms suddenly saw a surge of various memes extremely similar to the style of Hayao Miyazaki's film works, such as the following "super universal" meme that remains popular on the internet, which gained a new charm and vitality under the rendering of the "Ghibli style".
Of course, some classic old animations and iconic scenes also appeared in this "remake feast", transformed into dark humor jokes like Thanos thanking and planes hitting towers......
Meanwhile, the meme coin named $Ghibli started a rapid surge on the chain, rising continuously since its launch at 6 PM yesterday, with its market value skyrocketing under various parties' hype, reaching over $24 million at the time of writing, with a 24-hour increase of over 10,824%.
What Happened? What is Ghibli?
Of course, all of this is thanks to the newly launched GPT-4o feature.
On Tuesday, OpenAI launched the built-in image generator of GPT-4o, which was officially described as "the most advanced image generator so far" with the ability of "precise, accurate, and realistic output of local multi-models". People discovered that this image generator is especially skilled at replicating the anime style of Hayao Miyazaki's Ghibli Studio.
In a tweet on Wednesday, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman initiated this "Ghibli virus spread", even changing his avatar to a Ghibli-style image.
Subsequently, many Twitter celebrities began to imitate, uploading their own Ghibli-style rendered images. Even Musk, the founder of OpenAI's rival Grok AI, wrote in his image tweet: This is today's theme.
Although ChatGPT previously allowed users to create images from text prompts, it was done by routing to another separate OpenAI model, DALL-E 3.
The GPT-4o model is named "O" precisely because it is an "Omni" model. This means OpenAI has trained it not only on text and code but also on image code and even audio and video, enabling it to understand all these media forms and their similarities, and generate specified media based on user prompts without connecting to any external model.
Recently, AI giants have been engaged in fierce competition over image creation models. Google has also recently updated the experimental image creation model of Gemini 2.0 Flash. Clearly, making AI your personal painter and creating a picture that completely understands your intention is becoming very simple.
Hayao Miyazaki himself, the co-founder of Ghibli Studio, had previously expressed strong opposition to AI-generated animation. In a conference in 2016, Miyazaki said about AI animation: "I feel completely disgusted. If you really want to make something creepy, you can continue. I never want to incorporate this technology into my work", and added that it was an "insult to life itself".
How to Generate Your Own Ghibli Style?
First, navigate to chat.com or chatgpt.com, and ensure you are using a GPT Plus, Pro, or Team account, with the AI model selector showing "GPT-4o".
Use the "+" button in the lower left corner of the text input box to upload an image, then you can tell the new GPT-4o with image creation model to "redraw this picture in Ghibli animation style". You can also upload multiple images and combine them into one picture through the Ghibli style. In short, try more, and 4o will bring you many surprises.
Of course, the related meme token $Ghibli is merely narratively combining the artistic aesthetics of Ghibli Studio with the trend of AI-generated content, and the attention is the reason for its rapid popularity on Twitter. However, the team information behind the token is currently unclear, and investors should be cautious about the corresponding risks.
