For a Brief Moment, Everything Was Ghibli: Gearoid Reidy

For a brief moment, everything was Ghibli.

We all know that social media algorithms elevate material that you’ll engage with — typically content designed to enrage. But one instant last week felt like a reprieve when, following the release of a new OpenAI image-creation tool with few guardrails, suddenly everything was decked out in the telltale style of the Japanese animation studio.

Why it went viral is anyone’s guess. It seems to have begun with an innocuous tweet noting the brownie points attainable by converting family photos into Ghibli style. GPT-4o can of course do other styles; it could just ...