The White House’s official X account also joined in the meme, posting a Ghibli-style image of a crying woman who was being arrested by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. The account explained that the image was of a real person who it said was a fentanyl dealer who had recently been arrested.

The posts which went viral on social media reignited the debate over what AI companies owe artists and whether copyright laws need to evolve to incorporate the rapid technological shifts that AI is ushering in.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI released the updated version of its image-generating AI tool on Tuesday and at the same time, it said it was relaxing its rules on how people could use its technology, allowing them to use the AI to make images that mimicked the look and feel of existing artistic styles.

The explosion of images, ranging from friendly selfies to re-creations of violent historical photos, underlines how AI tools are upending the world of art and copyright, ushering in a world where anyone can use AI to make complex images, songs and writing that mimics the style of creative geniuses who may have trained for years to hone their skills. Lawsuits are working their way through the courts, trying to force AI companies to pay for the images and other content they scraped from the internet to train their technology. But the companies are moving ahead with the new tech, arguing that AI will enable more people to fulfill their creative vision and help existing artists make even grander creations.

“AI lab employees should not be the arbiters of what people should and shouldn’t be allowed to create,” Joanne Jang, head of product at OpenAI, said Thursday in a post on X explaining why OpenAI had changed its policies to allow more freedom with what kind of images people are allowed to make with its tools.

Spokespeople for Nippon TV, the Japanese media conglomerate that owns Studio Ghibli, did not respond to a request for comment. A representative of GKIDS, which distributes Studio Ghibli films in the United States, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Our goal is to give users as much creative freedom as possible. We continue to prevent generations in the style of individual living artists, but we do permit broader studio styles — which people have used to generate and share some truly delightful and inspired original fan creations,” said Kayla Wood, a spokeswoman for OpenAI. “We’re always learning from real-world use and feedback, and we’ll keep refining our policies as we go.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman celebrated the viral moment, changing his profile picture on X to a “Ghiblified” version of himself and then later saying that the company had to slow down people’s access to its tools because so many users were trying to use it at the same time.

Studio Ghibli, headed by artist Hayao Miyazaki, is known for its dreamy watercolors and intricate illustrations — each frame in a Ghibli film is drawn and colored by hand, the studio has said. Sometimes artists spend months working on a single scene. Miyazaki himself has railed against the use of artificial intelligence in art.

“I would never want to incorporate this technology into my work at all,” he said in a video posted to YouTube in 2016. “I strongly feel it is an insult to life itself.”

As social feeds filled with Ghibli-style selfies, some artists posted in protest: Amid an ongoing battle over AI training data and the rights of artists, was OpenAI really going to let its users spam the internet with images so clearly dependent on Miyazaki’s distinct style?

“The sad part isn’t that AI is generating Ghibli-style art, imitation is inevitable,” said poet Puneet Sharma in a post on X. “What's sad is that most users know nothing of Miyazaki, nor do they grasp the difference between process and processed, between creation as a journey and consumption as a shortcut.”

Since OpenAI released the first public model of ChatGPT in 2022, legal questions have swirled about the company’s use of real artists’ and writers’ work to train its chatbots. Many publishers and creators — from online newspaper to popular songwriters — have argued that AI companies are violating copyright law when they scrape content from the internet to teach chatbots how to generate text, images and video.

AI models like the ones built by OpenAI are trained on huge amounts of information. OpenAI and other AI companies including Google, Meta and Microsoft have all used public data from the internet for this training, though they do not disclose specifically what they have used for individual AI models. Datasets of Studio Ghibli movies and still images are easily available online.

A wave of lawsuits seeks to challenge the use of copyright works in AI training, but AI companies have argued that qualifies as fair use, a concept in copyright law that allows someone to reuse someone else’s art if they transform or remix it in a creative way. Several major lawsuits from authors and news organizations are seeking to determine whether AI generation really falls under fair use. Court rulings are still months away.

The Ghibli trend echoes some of AI’s viral moments. Namely: People love to share images of themselves. When the generative AI app Lensa shot to the top of app charts in late 2022, people took to X, Instagram and Reddit en masse to share AI selfies in the style of Renaissance paintings, anime or fairycore.

Artists raised concerns at the time, saying the app’s stylistic copying showed why real-world artists and designers were losing work and income to AI.

Ben Zhao, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago and co-creator of the tool Glaze, which helps artists protect their work from AI mimicry, said he’s disappointed to see OpenAI take advantage of Studio Ghibli’s beloved style to promote its products.

By publicly “Ghiblifying” himself, Altman gave his tacit approval to the trend — a move made more insulting by OpenAI’s claim that it blocks its models from mimicking the work of living artists, Zhao said.