General Discussion

Haters like me felt obligated to point out that this Ghiblification seemed likely to rely on ChatGPT’s having been fed Ghibli movies as training, with no permission sought or compensation offered. (All OpenAI has said on the subject is that the new model was trained on “images reflecting a vast variety of image styles.”) These movies are painstakingly constructed stories about the irreducibility of the human spirit and the fragile beauty of nature. The Ghiblified images are something else, something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Miyazaki movie: a swarm of cheap knockoffs feeding parasitically off the essence of the originals, cranked out by a technology so plunderously energy-intensive that coal plants slated for closure have been kept open just to keep it running. But pointing this out risked sounding like a killjoy: They were just memes, right?

By March 27, the meme had reached the White House, or at least its official X account, where a news release about the planned deportation of a Dominican woman — a convicted fentanyl dealer — was paired with a Ghiblified image of this woman weeping in shackles.

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Not long ago, the United States government would, by default, seek to distance itself from images like this; often, as with images of post-9/11 torture, the government actively suppressed or destroyed them. The Trump administration releases them on purpose, implicitly arguing that their content is a source of pride and amusement. (If the Abu Ghraib photos leaked today, it’s possible to imagine that the White House would repost them approvingly.) It drops any sugarcoating or performance of restraint and gives us crass gloating, assigning Trump the role of the merciless, enthusiastic deporter in chief — no matter what the actual numbers look like. On April 6, the White House posted another Ghiblified meme, this one pairing a cartoon JD Vance with a quotation from him about refusing to let the “far left” influence deportation policy.

This administration isn’t the only one trying to play the latest meme game. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a leading figure of the global far right (and a big A.I. fan), posted a Ghiblified self-portrait; Sam Altman reposted it. The Israeli Army, which has used A.I. to plan its strikes on Gaza, posted Ghiblified images of its personnel; the Israeli Embassy in India posted Ghiblified images of Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu together. Just as A.I.-powered Ghiblification is an easy way to give any image you want a sought-after vibe, political memes are a way to cultivate a defiantly jubilant online mood with no fixed relationship to reality.