OpenAI’s “GPUs are melting”, announced CEO Sam Altman last Thursday as he scrambled to avert a ChatGPT apocalypse. What triggered the sudden shutdown? Not a cyberattack, nor a Terminator-style takeover. Rather, it was legions of users transfiguring themselves into Studio Ghibli anime characters inspired by the Japanese studio behind Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke.
It all started last Tuesday when a relatively obscure tech entrepreneur, Grant Slatton, uploaded a seemingly ordinary family photo to ChatGPT-4o’s new image generator to “Ghiblify” it. Awash in pastel skies and gentle smiles, the image it spat out was the perfect encapsulation of the studio’s aesthetic.
The post went viral, amassing more than 43 million views in just a couple of days and prompting an eruption of Ghibli content. Suddenly no meme could escape Ghiblification. And backlash swiftly followed. Some critics took aim at the obvious intellectual property ambiguities. Others circulated clips of a 2016 documentary where Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki declared AI animation “an insult to life itself”.
However, this rapid onset Ghiblification foreshadows a much darker, and crucially stranger future than mere IP infringement and artistic degradation. In tech criticism, it is fashionable to contrast two dystopias: Beijing versus Las Vegas. The former is well-known. It foretells a 1984 Orwellian future of mass surveillance and thought control, turbocharged by AI-powered spyware. This is best characterised by Republican congressman Mike Gallagher’s warnings of a Chinese Communist Party-exported “Orwellian” AI surveillance dystopia.
In contrast, the Las Vegas dystopia envisions a future where we are distracted by entertainment as foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. This vision, proposed by Neil Postman in his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, presents the future where “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.” This is a future of limbic capitalism where we are inundated by the addictive soma of Las Vegas pleasures. Books don’t need to be banned, because everybody’s too busy scrolling, eating fast food, gambling, gaming, and watching porn.
Yet the rise of Ghiblification presents a third tech future, not from Beijing or Las Vegas — but from Tokyo. This is not a future of mere tech surveillance or opiate. Rather, it’s a vision of the world that fuses the pleasures machines of Vegas with the emotional worldbuilding of the Japanese otaku subculture — a niche consumer tribe known for their devotion to anime, manga, and video games. While long subjugated to their parent’s basements, weird corners of the Internet, and Tokyo’s Akihabara neighbourhood, otaku is now going mainstream.
In order to make sense of how this unique style of consumption is shaping our future, we must understand two macro shifts: one cultural, the other technological. The first is the mainstreaming of a postmodern otaku logic that prizes fiction over fact and vibes over shared mythologies. The second is the potent concoction of next generation multimodal AI and their capacity to create custom alternative realities with the touch of a button. Together, they herald a future not of a shared digital commons, but of hyper-personalised Matrixes-for-One.
To grasp the first shift requires digging out Japanese media theorist Hiroki Azuma’s 2001 cult media theory book, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Chronicling the rise of Japan’s otaku subculture, Azuma coined the term “database animals” to describe a new kind of postmodern consumer emerging from the worlds of manga and anime obsession. These consumers no longer follow grand narratives or cohesive story arcs. Instead, they graze from a vast database of aesthetic elements, characters, and tropes — selecting whatever fragments give them the most effective hit. They are “animals” not in a pejorative sense, but in that they prioritise instinctual pleasure over ideological coherence or shared meaning.
Azuma explains the rise of otaku subculture in the context of what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called the “decline of the grand narrative”. From the late-18th to the mid-20th century, overarching grand narratives were the cornerstones of modernity, providing order and meaning for citizens. Now, in a thoroughly postmodern world where traditional horizons of meaning have collapsed, “grand narratives” have given way to something very different.
Grand narratives, according to Azuma, function like a tree. The trunk is the big “worldview” — a shared mythos that structures culture. From this trunk grow the branches and twigs of “small narratives”, the everyday stories, rituals, and traditions that reinforce and transmit the deeper worldview. In essence, the “surface outer layer” of small stories, rituals, and acts of consumption connects consumers to the “deeper inner layer” of the grand narrative. In Britain, rituals like churchgoing, learning Shakespeare, or buying a royal-warranted Wedgwood teapot tethered citizens to the mythos of God, King, and country. Similarly in Japan, reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education, visiting shrines, conducting tea ceremonies bound citizens to a virtuous vision of Emperor, nation, and spiritual destiny.
Azuma argues that these grand narratives were disrupted by waves of turmoil. First came the Westernisation of the Meiji Restoration, then the Second World War. In their wake, citing Jean Baudrillard, Azuma describes an emergent postmodern world where the trunk-and-branch models of reality are replaced by a rhizomatic “hyper reality”. In this world, meaning becomes a tangled web where the lines between truth and fiction blur, and symbols become unmoored from the realities they once represented. Here, the grand narratives are “swallowed by the chaos of a sea of simulacra”, a world where there are “no originals and no copies”. All that survives is endlessly circulating fragmented content with no shared story — if only Baudrillard were alive to see our world inebriated by memes, trends, and vibes.
This post-modern hyperreality breeds ideological chaos. As the grand narratives collapsed — in Japan and globally — their absence was felt in various ways. Azuma argues that the otaku were the first to trailblaze a new mode of reality-making in a world stripped of unifying mythologies. Abandoning conventional “narrative consumption”, they pioneered what he calls “database consumption”: a logic that replaces the tree-and-branch structure with a database and hyper-individualised pick-and-mix consumer mindset. Stories are no longer linear journeys with moral arcs, they become modular fragments, plucked from a database of options and consumed as highly personalised forms of pleasure and identity-making.
Azuma observes that otakus — in contrast to regular fans — are almost entirely uninterested in official canon or coherent storytelling. Rather, they are obsessed with animalistically chasing an emotional rush — known as moe — triggered by modular elements of certain manga/anime characters. Different otakus chase different “moe-elements” (or moe-yoso). Some are visual: cat ears, knee-high socks, specific hairstyles, maid or sailor outfits, flaming swords. Others are more abstract: distinctive speech patterns, familiar plot beats, even particular curves or camera angles.
Otakus call the hunt for this affective sugar hit chara-moe. Many actively search for their preferred moe elements regardless of what franchise or series they come from. Further, otakus use search engines like TINAMI to filter the endless databases and feast on their moe of choice — whether it is styles of ships or spectacles, or just good old-fashioned bikinis.
For Azuma, what distinguishes the otaku is not their devotion to manga or anime per se, but their distinctive mode of database consumption. While the objects of their obsession — Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sylvanian Families — have had an obvious cultural spillover into the West, it’s this underlying logic of fragmented, non-narrative consumption that has truly gone mainstream. The seemingly endless and narratively incoherent Marvel Cinematic Universe and online culture wars demonstrate the hypnotic power of non-linear database consumption over linear grand, cohesive narratives. Our media landscape now resembles an endless database of familiar image templates, catchphrases, and decontextualised references — shared and reshuffled for the sheer thrill of recognition. To giggle at and share an AI Ghibli meme that hits right is to indulge in chara-moe. In essence: if database consumption is now the primary driver of demand, then it’s now suddenly met with a perfectly created and curated supply.
Which brings us to the macrotrend powering Ghiblification: the rise of next-generation multimodal AI. Last week’s ChatGPT-4o update offered a glimpse of what happens when ordinary users are handed tools to conjure images in any style they wish, instantly. While Ghibli aesthetics may have stolen the spotlight, the algorithm’s reach is far broader. From Lego to Pixar, South Park to The Simpsons, the internet has exploded with a surreal parade of fan-made transformations. Ghibli versions of The Office. Pixar versions of Severance. The possibilities are endless. Ghiblification is not really about Studio Ghibli, it’s about the turbocharging of hyperreality with AI.
This shift is being driven by a new frontier in generative AI: the rise of multimodal, or “omnimedia” large language models. Just a few months ago — the Dark Ages, in AI terms — most models were siloed by medium. To write or code you used ChatGPT or Perplexity. To create an image, DALL·E or Midjourney. To create a video, Runway or OpenAI’s Sora were your best bet. Yet with the latest update to ChatGP-4o (the “o” stands for omni), we have entered a stratospheric new era. Very soon, models will no longer be confined to one input or output. Instead, they are being stitched together across modalities — capable of inhaling and exhaling text, image, video, audio, and more. In this new “anything-to-anything” paradigm, you can turn a photo into a cartoon, a game, a song — even a 3D-printed statue. With just a single, frictionless prompt each of us becomes the world-builder of our own private universe.
“With just a single, frictionless prompt each of us becomes the world-builder of our own private universe.”
It’s only going to get faster. The primary barrier to fully automated Ghiblification is no longer AI developer genius or human creativity, but computing power. Today, it takes 30 seconds to generate a near-perfect detailed image. Soon it will be instant. In 2024 alone, tech firms poured more than $100 billion into AI processing infrastructure to speed things up. By 2028, that number is forecast to go over $200 billion. The direction is clear: the only thing standing between users and immersive, personalised AI worlds — whether they be Ghibli, Pixar, or South Park — is processing time. IP rights and energy costs may be barriers, but on matters of AI, it seems that politicians are more concerned with Chinese AI drone swarms than artists’ rights and emissions. Everything else — the demand, the tech, the servers — is there.
Furthermore, it’s amplified by a different kind of AI: interest-graph recommender algorithms. In recent years, feed curation has quietly shifted from the social graph (what you and your friends like and follow) to the interest graph (what you actually pay attention to). The algorithms of TikTok’s “For You” page do not care what you claim to value; they optimise for what you linger on. And what do people want? AI slop. As Altman put it: “one man’s slop is another man’s treasure”. The latest research backs it up. A recent blind study found that most people genuinely prefer AI pastiches of the great poets to the real thing. On a critical level, it is easy to say one believes in the Miyazaki and Nick Cave characterisation of AI creativity as “a grotesque mockery”. In practice it’s harder. While older models made creepy, creatively bankrupt pastiches, emerging visual models are increasingly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Ghiblification is unlikely to be a fleeting trend.
And so here we are at the beginning of the new age of Otaku, possibly the end of shared reality as we know it. While reflecting on the creative process, Miyazaki once explained that “the creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos”. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, the opposite is happening. Reality is being shattered into billions of AI-crafted otaku worlds for one, but perhaps that’s exactly what we want.
