Recently, OpenAI launched its image generator for GPT-4o. People soon discovered that it was good at copying Studio Ghibli’s art style, and used it as a filter for their selfies and family photos, or to make memes. There were also more distasteful uses, such as Ghibli-fied pictures of 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, or the White House tweeting a Ghibli style picture of a crying immigrant being arrested by ICE.

Sam Altman also changed his Twitter profile picture to Ghibli style, and claimed that this new model doubled OpenAI’s user base to 800 million. He also teased a version 2 with more advanced capabilities.

Yet, despite all the hype, the Ghibli filter is just a fad that will have no long term impact. After all, it can only copy the original’s style, but not its substance. Studio Ghibli’s iconic art style is only one small part of what makes it so good.

Hayao Miyazaki, the animator of both movies and Studio Ghibli itself, made movies based on his own life experiences. This gave his movies the depth and authenticity that a computer can never match.

This is seen most in The Boy and the Heron, released in 2023. The protagonist’s life closely mirrors Miyazaki’s own childhood. The boy’s father, like Miyazaki’s, worked at a factory manufacturing fighter jets. Just as Miyazaki’s family had to flee Tokyo during World War II, so did the protagonist’s family have to evacuate to the countryside due to war. The protagonist losing his mother in a hospital fire was inspired by Miyazaki’s loss of his own mother to spinal tuberculosis.

Even when he was adapting someone else’s work, Miyazaki’s experiences guided his creative decision making. This was the case in Howl’s Moving Castle. In the novel by Dianna Wynn Jones, the titular character has no qualms supplying magical weapons to the king. By contrast, he is seen to be a pacifist in the movie because of the animator’s experience during the war. In fact, it was his anger at the Iraq war that inspired Miyazaki to make this movie.

He claims that his earliest memories are of bombed out cities, which explains why pacifism is a constant theme in his movies. Another recurring theme is environmentalism, with Ghibli movies often featuring scenes of lush hills and wilderness. TV tropes even has an entire page dedicated to Ghibli Hills. Miyazaki grew up during a period of rapid economic development, where hills and forests gave way to factories and cities.

Studio Ghibli’s movies are so good not merely because of its iconic art style, but because Miyazaki channeled his own experiences into his movies and made viewers feel what he felt.

This is true of any good art in general, as I wrote in a previous article. James Bond is popular because his creator Ian Fleming was an actual spy during World War II. New Amsterdam is a good TV show because it is based on Eric Manheimer’s experiences as an actual medical director of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Since AI has never lived, it cannot draw inspiration from anything and can merely generate cheap imitations of real art.

OpenAI’s Ghibli filter is fun to play around with for a while, but it has no real use case, just like anything else the company has made. Even as I am writing this, people have already started to move on from it. A year from now, most people will have forgotten about this entirely. Miyazaki’s movies, on the other hand, will stand the test of time.