Last night to this morning, X and other social media platforms suddenly saw a surge of various memes extremely similar to Hayao Miyazaki’s film style, such as the following “super universal” meme that remains popular on the internet, which has gained new charm and vitality under the Ghibli style rendering.

Of course, some classic old animations and iconic scenes also appeared in this “remake feast”, transforming into hell jokes like Wan’s thanks and planes crashing into buildings……

Meanwhile, the meme coin named $Ghibli has started a speed run on the chain, rising continuously since its launch at 6 PM yesterday, and its market value has soared under various parties’ hype, reaching over $24 million with a 24-hour increase of over 10,824% at the time of writing.

What Happened? What is Ghibli?

Of course, all of this is thanks to the newly launched GPT-4o feature.

On Tuesday, OpenAI launched the built-in image generator of GPT-4o, which was officially described as “the most advanced image generator so far” with the ability of “precise, accurate, and realistic output of local multi-models”. People discovered that this image generator is especially good at replicating the anime style of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ghibli Studio.

In a tweet on Wednesday, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman initiated this “Ghibli virus spread” and even changed his avatar to a Ghibli-style image.

Subsequently, many Twitter celebrities began to imitate, uploading their own Ghibli-style rendered images. Even Musk, the founder of Grok AI and OpenAI’s rival, wrote in his “image tweet”: This is today’s theme.

Although ChatGPT previously allowed users to create images from text prompts, it was done by routing to another separate OpenAI model, DALL-E 3.

The GPT-4o model was named “O” precisely because it is an “Omni” model. This means that OpenAI has trained it not only in text and code but also in image, audio, and video, enabling it to understand all these media forms and their similarities, and generate specified media based on user prompts without connecting any external models.

Recently, AI giants have been engaged in fierce competition in image creation models. Google has also recently updated the experimental image creation model of Gemini 2.0 Flash. Clearly, making AI your personal painter and creating a picture that completely understands your intention is becoming very simple.

Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founder of Ghibli Studio, had previously expressed strong opposition to AI-generated animation. In a conference in 2016, Miyazaki said about AI animation: “I feel completely disgusted. If you really want to make something creepy, you can proceed. I never want to incorporate this technology into my work”, and added that it is an “insult to life itself”.

How to Generate Your Own Ghibli Style?

First, navigate to chat.com or chatgpt.com, and ensure you are using a GPT Plus, Pro, or Team account, with the AI model selector showing “GPT-4o”.

Use the “+” button in the lower left corner of the text input box to upload an image, and then you can tell the new GPT-4o with image creation model to “redraw this picture in Ghibli animation style”. You can also upload multiple images and combine them into one picture through the Ghibli style. In short, try more, and 4o will bring you many surprises.

Of course, the related meme token $Ghibli is merely narratively combining Ghibli Studio’s artistic aesthetics with the trend of AI-generated content, and the attention is the reason for its rapid popularity on Twitter. However, the team information behind the token is currently unclear, and investors should be cautious about the corresponding risks.