ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli-style images show its creative power – but raise new copyright problems

Social media has recently been flooded with images that look like they belong in a Studio Ghibli film. Selfies, family photos and even memes have been re-imagined with the soft pastel palette characteristic of the Japanese animation company founded by Hayao Miyazaki. The update significantly improved ChatGPT's image generation capabilities, allowing users to create convincing Ghibli-style images in mere seconds. It has been enormously popular – so much so, in fact, that the system crashed due to user demand. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT are best understood as "style engines".