Spirited Away-I: The Ethics of AI-Generated Art

By Maurice Burbridge | April 28th, 2025

In the past month, the most popular social media trend in art hasn’t been a specific style of painting or sculpture, but rather, the use of AI to render pre-existing photos into the style of a specific artist, prompting questions about the ethics of doing such, and possibly cheapening the idea of art. On March 25, OpenAI released an update to their primary product, ChatGPT, adding native image generation. In the livestream demonstration, CEO Sam Altman took a photo with two others, and asked ChatGPT to turn it into an “anime” frame.

By the next day, Bollywood movies, family photos, memes of Ben Affleck and the Olympian pistol shooter Yusuf Dikec, all went viral on X (formerly known as Twitter) in the same animation aesthetic.

X user @Zeneca posted multiple AI generated images in this style on March 26, encaptioned “Today is a great internet day.” The post was seen 11 million times. One user asked him how he made them.

“Just ask ChatGPT to create an image in Studio Ghibli style,” said Zeneca.

Studio Ghibli is the Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “Princess Mononoke,” which coincidentally had a theatrical re-release in the United States on March 26. The studio was co-founded by animator Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, who directed those films for the studio, among others.

“I don't think people love Miyazaki because of how an individual frame looks. I think they like it because of how it moves. I think they like it because it's mysterious and weird and different, none of which any of these images are. These are just photos with a filter on them,” said Eli Boonin-Vail, a film historian and head of the University at Albany’s Film Studies minor.

Ghibliotheque releases books, hosts podcasts, and events dedicated to the exploration of Studio Ghibli. They did not respond to a request for comment.

Michael Leader, one of the co-owners of Ghibliotheque, tweeted “Why would you even want to engage with art that isn’t made by humans? Without expression, communication, craft, emotion, a point of view… What’s the point?”

David Church, a film studies professor, who is a fan of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki’s work, said “It would be fun to see what some of my own photos might look like rendered in his style.” He added that he hasn’t participated in the trend yet but has seen it a lot online and imagines that most people, like himself, were attracted to the novelty value.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable necessarily sharing those images on social media,” he said. “In part, because the ethical concerns raised are a little bit problematic.”

Tanushri Shanmuga Sundaram was introduced to the trend through X, and noticed some friends using it on Instagram. When she fed a picture of her dog into ChatGPT and asked it to make him “Studio Ghibli style” she was impressed by the results.

Later, she posted multiple family pictures on Instagram, captioned “I have now learned that the official studio does not support the AI Ghibli trend, however, I made these prior to that knowledge.”

As a photographer and musician, Sundaram believes the most important concept behind AI art is consent.

“Personally, I think I’d be okay with my work being used to train the models with the understanding that there would be compensation,” she said. “However, I don’t know that I’d like for my style to be reproduced in the same way Studio Ghibli’s was. I’d prefer that my work be one amongst many.”

An Albany-based artist who works with paints, oils, acrylics, and charcoal, Tiffany Salazar believes the virality of the Studio Ghibli AI trend “minimizes the traditional artists work and work ethic.”

“It feels like a cheat to all the labor that goes into the animation process that artists endure,” Salazar said.

“A lot of people have rushed to look at what Miyazaki said earlier, about AI as a kind of abomination,” Boonin-Vail said. “I don't think he was really talking about AI. I think he was looking at a particular representation that he found offensive.”

Both are referring to a recently resurfaced eight-year-old video in which Miyazaki is shown an animation demo, that involves the use of automation technology to contort the animated body in uncanny, horrific ways. The animators also tell Miyazaki they’d like to make a machine that can draw like people.

Miyazaki expresses pure disgust for what he’s shown, and calls it an insult to life itself, saying he has no interest in using AI in his work, and that “we humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

Regardless, Boonin-Vail doesn’t think Miyazaki’s opinion should be the sole reason for why one does or doesn’t support AI, or this specific trend.

Church shares a similar view, questioning “Where does the original creator’s legal and moral right to control the destiny of their creation end?” Furthermore, when are fans allowed to take the creation and do whatever they please?

“I think in a world where we've had Archive of Our Own, and a million fan-art repositories for decades now, if somebody drew, by hand, a Ghibli tribute and it looked almost identical to what these AI images generate… people have been doing that for forever,” said Boonin-Vail.

Anne Rice, writer of the 1976 novel “Interview with the Vampire,” was known for hating fan-fiction of her books and characters, describing herself as “possessive” over them, and willing to pursue legal action against those who used them without her permission.

Nonetheless, fan-interpretations of her writings never ceased. Boonin-Vail doesn’t believe AI is going away anytime soon either, however he does think AI companies purposefully make art and text generating the most public-facing sides of AI.

“It's harder to show [the public] how AI is useful for coding infrastructures or non-creative ventures. I had a neighbor, she was a human rights lawyer, who was self-employed, and so had to read an insane number of cases, thousands and thousands of pages, and she really claimed that AI was extremely useful for that,” he said.

On March 27, the Trump administration posted an AI generated image in the Studio Ghibli style of an immigrant weeping after being detained for illegally re-entering the country, after a fentanyl trafficking conviction resulted in her deportation.

The US government has, for decades, used AI as a surveillance and identification tool, including in facial recognition technologies. However the uptick in the popularity and progression of AI has highlighted concerns that have existed for years.

One of Trump’s first actions during his second term was repealing the Biden administration’s 2023 Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.

Section 2 stated “It is necessary to hold those developing and deploying AI accountable to standards that protect against unlawful discrimination and abuse, including in the justice system and the Federal Government. Only then can Americans trust AI to advance civil rights, civil liberties, equity, and justice for all.”

Earlier in March, Homeland Security announced that in the first 50 days of the current Trump administration, over 32,000 enforcement arrests have been made. Multiple human rights violations have happened during these arrests, with no apology from Trump himself.

According to Church, Studio Ghibli films don’t have a lot of violence, and when they do, it’s usually “to drive home the point of humans making terrible choices.” He believes that in this way, the trend is not only disrespecting the studio’s ownership and style, but also the political and social implications that reoccur in their films.

“It seems like they're openly embracing the nastiness of prisons, that now we're entering an era where there are enough people who don't want correction,” adds Boonin-Vail, who has researched the connection between film and the prison complex. “They purely want punishment.”

Generative AI has also been used by anti-establishment activists. The viral #AllEyesonRafah trend involves the resharing of an AI-generated photo to indicate support for the Palestinian cause, and awareness of the genocidal onslaught of violence against Rafah, a town located in the Gaza Strip.

“I question that use in the same way that I question the use of social media platforms in general for activism. You are just giving your data, your beliefs, and your creative output to corporations that are deeply embedded in the existing power system, which your activism is supposedly challenging,” said Boonin-Vail.

Arts history professor Daniel Gremmler questions how much generation is actually involved in generative AI, though he does imagine it could be useful with fragmented art and quickly comparing numerous artifacts from various mythologies.

“You gotta give it the one and the one, and it'll give me a two, but I still have to give it the one and the one. So, is that generative, or is that just like logic,” Gremmler said.

Salazar can foresee herself using generative AI for reference photos, as she doesn’t have access to a private model to pose. However, she firmly believes that AI companies should not have any right to copyright any generated output, which “pulls ideas and works from various artists.”

“I think nowadays, original (traditional) artists should take the precaution to copyright their images when uploading their works anywhere online. Because unfortunately, they’re at risk for their work to be stolen by AI,” said Salazar.