Seattle engineer’s Ghibli-style image goes viral, and sparks some backlash over AI art

By the end of last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asking people to “please chill” on making images with his company’s updated AI image generator. “Our team needs sleep,” Altman said on X.

In another post, Altman said “our GPUs are melting” and OpenAI had to introduce rate limits to cope with “biblical demand.”

Seattle software engineer Grant Slatton deserves a bit of the credit for overwhelming OpenAI just a couple days after the release of the ChatGPT-4o update. He was among the throngs of users who turned to the image generator to make a Studio Ghibli-style animated artwork based on a simple photograph of himself with his wife and dog at the beach.

In his post last Tuesday, the day of the update release, Slatton wrote, “tremendous alpha right now in sending your wife photos of yall converted to studio ghibli anime.”

Slatton has a decent following on X, and by Friday he was the subject of a Business Insider article on the flood of people rushing to use AI to make artwork in the style of the Japanese film studio. His post has now been viewed 46 million times and his X thread is loaded with artwork from others who responded in kind with their own AI-generated family images.

But not everyone has been thrilled with Slatton’s viral image generation. He’s received some nasty feedback from what he calls a “vocal minority,” and while he’s just been deleting the messages and moving on, he’s been left to consider AI’s impact on art and the source of people’s resentment.

“This isn’t to say there aren’t completely valid criticisms of AI image generation from everyday artists, ranging from IP theft, economic concerns, to more philosophical topics like the meaning of art,” he said. “But the people who have thoughtful and cogent opinions here aren’t the ones calling for tech bro lynchings.”

Slatton is a founding engineer at Row Zero, a 4-year-old Seattle startup that describes its product as the “world’s fastest spreadsheet.” He previously spent eight years at Amazon Web Services.

Row Zero co-founder Breck Fresen posted his own “Ghiblified” family image on LinkedIn, writing that Slatton “won the internet” last week, and adding that Row Zero received its share of angry emails over it all.

Slatton, who generated the new Ghibli image with a simple text prompt, has been attracted to the style previously. For their wedding announcement in 2019, he and his wife enlisted an artist friend to draw a Ghibli-style portrait of their family. Slatton said that artist is “thrilled” by the possibilities of the new tech, and sent him a bunch of photos of her family for ghiblification since she didn’t have access to the new model yet.

While many rushed to generate their own Ghibli-style images last week, others rushed to defend original art and artists. Some even shared a 2016 quote from director Hayao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away”), in which he appeared to express his disdain for AI as “an insult to life itself.”

One user on X called Slatton a “bozo” and told him to learn to draw. He responded with a painting he did of his wife, illustrating that his interests in art go beyond his computer.

OpenAI told Business Insider that ChatGPT does allow for generating images with “broader studio styles,” but that it would block requests for “generations in the style of individual living artists.”

“Our goal is to give users as much creative freedom as possible,” a spokesperson said.

Slatton said that while most of the rhetoric focuses on “stealing” the style, he doesn’t think the extreme vitriol is downstream of that belief. He pointed to gig apps such as Fiverr, where artists will do Ghibli-style drawings of people for a few dollars. Are they stealing the Ghibli style, too?

“I think the hate is predominantly due to completely valid fears of economic insecurity of small-time artists, combined with the general anti-big-tech culture wars that have been going on since people were throwing bricks at the Google commuter shuttles 12 years ago,” Slatton said. “The recent rightward political reorientation of some prominent technologists is also feeding this much broader culture war.”

Slatton added that his position on AI image generation remains mostly unchanged, as he feels like the same conversation has been going on for years.

“This particular reaction is nothing new in kind, only in magnitude — due to the mass scale of the Ghibli trend,” he said. “There’s been the same rhetoric going back to the first decent AI image generators (DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc).”

Related: Even VC firms are getting in on the viral hype around ChatGPT’s updated image generator