ChatGPT's Ghibli magic hits Singapore

The Republic has been spirited away into anime legend Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli world, judging by the images that have flooded social media platforms in the past week since ChatGPT allowed users to turn their pictures into the distinctive cartoon characters.

Many Singapore residents have been busy transforming photographs of themselves into characters that would fit right in the Japanese animation studio's extensive and award-winning film catalogue, which includes Spirited Away, The Boy And The Heron and My Neighbour Totoro.

Visitors to Singapore have also shared Ghibli-style images of tourist attractions, like the Singapore Flyer and ArtScience Museum.

Meme site SGAG reimagined some of Singapore's news stories in recent years as scenes from a Studio Ghibli film. These include then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong drinking from a "magic cup" during breaks while giving speeches in different languages, a patriotic local man weeping profusely at the 2022 National Day Parade when the audience sang the National Anthem, and a woman who refused to wear a mask at Marina Bay Sands during the pandemic.

With Singapore's general election around the corner, some local politicians have also been given the Ghibli treatment.

What is the appeal of becoming a Ghibli character? One looks better as a Miyazaki protagonist, said caricature artist Kent Lau.

"Hayao Miyazaki 'friendly-fies' faces, I uglify," he wrote on Facebook in a post accompanied by different images of him and a friend that demonstrated his point.

On March 26, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, launched the AI-driven image generation tool that allows users to convert images of themselves into Ghibli-style pictures, which are characterised by clean lines and warm pastel colours.

The Ghibli pictures trend has gone viral globally, with even the White House in the US posting on X an anime image of a weeping alleged felon being handcuffed by an immigration officer before her deportation.

Its impact is such that, even without watching any of the Studio Ghibli films, many can now link the images with the studio founded by the auteur Miyazaki.

Before the Ghibli trend, image generators had previously been used to turn images into Pixar and Disney characters resembling those from the studios' movies such as Toy Story, Up and Frozen.

Not everyone is pleased with generative AI's mass plagiarism of the Ghibli style.

As if seeking an insight into the thoughts of Miyazaki, social media users have been circulating a 2016 clip of the film-maker disparaging the idea of using AI in his work.

"I am utterly disgusted. You can make horrible things if you want. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. It's an awful insult to life itself..." he said in a documentary after being shown an early AI art generator.

The ease with which users can generate these images is in stark contrast to the painstaking work Ghibli artists put into the films.

One X post being circulated conveys how animator Eiji Yamamori spent more than a year to complete a four-second scene from scratch, a move ChatGPT may take just seconds to replicate.

For now, the high traffic on the ChatGPT-4o image generation tool has led to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman asking users to ease up on its usage.

"Can yall please chill on generating images this is insane our team needs sleep," he wrote on X on March 30.

While daily numbers on users in Singapore were not immediately available, Singaporeans have been among the highest per capita users of ChatGPT globally, OpenAI previously said in October 2024.

Mr Altman added on April 1 that the number of ChatGPT users globally have been increasing at an unprecedented rate.