Ghiblification Is not the problem. Concentration of artistic power is.

I have this view, that those arguing that the Ghiblification trend is an insult to artists, have got it mostly wrong.

The panic is misplaced. What people should be concerned about isn’t whether AI is replacing artists. It’s who owns the tools, who controls the pipelines, and how creativity is quietly being fenced in by a few tech players.

This itself is not a new story. It is an old one — one of power concentrating around access, infrastructure, and enforcement, while everyone else argues about taste and authenticity.

What we’re watching is not the death of art. It is the quiet and at-scale takeover of the conditions for making and sharing it. It’s not imitation we should fear — it’s when only a handful of companies get to decide who imitates, and who gets paid. The scale of this concentration that AI enables is what should be the concern here. Those that claim that AI might be Humanity's last invention, need to focus on its real threat.

And now that this point is on the table, let’s address the three other things people keep circling back to: Would Miyazaki be offended? Is AI art real craft? And does imitation degrade originality?

I. Would Miyazaki care?

I don’t think Hayao Miyazaki would care about the Ghiblification trend that flooded the internet in early 2025. It's mostly those who are unable to create something like the great director that seem to be obsessing over and ranting about this supposed “affront to artists” — with their predictable arguments about copyright infringement and creativity deterrence.

Now, yes, there’s the infamous quote from 2016 when Miyazaki was shown an AI-generated animation. He was horrified. He said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

But context matters.

This moment comes from the documentary Owaranai Hito — The Never-Ending Man — a portrait of Miyazaki grappling with retirement and continuing to be creative. In it, he embarks on his first CGI project, Boro the Caterpillar. He doesn’t reject the new tool. He experiments with it, albeit with disdain and reluctance. Eventually he adapts, then returns to what he does best. That’s what artists do.

The point is: Miyazaki was not rejecting technology in absolute terms. He was reacting to a shallow use of it. The AI demo he saw lacked not skill, but soul. It had no intentionality. It had a sense of movement that was not grounded in meaning. His discomfort wasn’t with technology — it was with indifference.

And as of today, neither Miyazaki nor Studio Ghibli has issued any public statement on the Ghiblification trend. That silence should tell you something.

II. What counts as craft?

Let’s continue with Miyazaki to understand the ethos of artists and craftsman like him. To understand Miyazaki’s relationship with craft, you need to look at how he works — or rather, how he obsesses. Ghibli’s work isn’t for the attention economy. It’s a meditation. Built over years. Layered with meaning.

As Steve Alpert recounts in Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man, while watching Princess Mononoke scenes repeatedly during production:

“I once repetitively watched a sequence where the heroine San charges into the Tataraba Fortress, leaps up onto the roof, and speeds across it. Then the hero Ashitaka leaps up and goes after her. What I noticed after seeing this again and again was how the tiles on the rooftop react to being stepped on, first by the light and lithe San, barely registering the weight of her compact body and small feet, and then by the heavier and less graceful Ashitaka. Just by how the rooftop registers the tread of their feet you have a sense of the weight, mass, velocity, and physical force exerted by each character. What I also noticed in the sequence was that when Ashitaka jumps up onto the roof he causes a few of the tiles at the edge of the roof to crumble. Pieces of them fall to the ground.

With my newly gained knowledge of animation, I realized that what was unusual about this is that the roof is a part of the background and not something that normally moves in animation. Princess Mononoke was the last major feature-length animated film to be drawn by hand and animated on hand-painted cels. In hand-painted cel animation the moving pieces are done in a somewhat simplified style that allows them to be more easily replicated and manipulated. But the elaborate backgrounds on which they move are too detailed, too intricate, and too finely done to be manipulated (animated) in that way. Also, they are done in watercolor and not pencil.

In other words, in order to get those few pieces of rooftop tile to crack and crumble to the ground, Miyazaki would have had to get an animator to specially create elaborate hand-painted cels to match the background image and to painstakingly recreate them in enough versions of crumbling to make the effect work. This sequence lasted on screen for perhaps only a few seconds or less. But it would have taken a large chunk of someone's time (and therefore money) to create. This on a project that was already precariously in danger of not meeting its production deadlines.”

That level of care for a detail barely anyone would consciously notice — that’s not just technique. That is philosophy. That’s the difference between making art and just making content.

Someone with that kind of dedication isn’t going to be threatened by a trend. Leonard Cohen put it best: 

“You can add new technology — synthesizers, effects — but a song without a soul is still a dead song.” 

That’s Miyazaki’s position. I doubt he’d waste time being offended by machine mimicry.

All AI is doing right now is mimicking. Some results are charming, sure. But they’re not creating anything truly original. The outrage against Ghiblification is sort of virtue signaling. Because originality was never about output. It was about seeing, noticing, intending. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said,

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

AI doesn’t bear anything within it. It just recombines. But even recombination has its place. The right question isn’t whether AI threatens art. The real question is whether audiences will still care enough to tell the difference.

III. Imitation isn't theft. It’s how craft evolves.

Levelling the AI imitates accusation is shallow. Are we really arguing that human artists don’t learn from existing works? Does emergence of a new tool threaten an art form completely? Emergence of photography did not kill painting. And when photography took over realism, painters didn’t give up — they reimagined what it meant to see. Impressionist and surrealist movements were born. The two art forms are unique. 

Are we seriously going to ask artists to avoid digital brushes and synthetic paints because they’re too easy? Should we instruct storytellers to avoid the Hero’s Journey because it is templated? This kind of logic borders on the absurd.

As Leonard Read said in I, Pencil, everything today is built through distributed craft — no single creator, but a web of specializations, tools, and imaginations. Artists will use AI just like they used synthetic paints and make better things. 

Just like fast food doesn’t destroy high cuisine, Ghiblification doesn’t impact what Studio Ghibli stands for. One is engineered for mass attention. The other is for depth. We know the difference.

AI is just the next new tool humanity has discovered. Artists will experiment with this, the market will react, and once it commodifies, new things will have to be found — things that hit a chord the way Spirited Away once did. AI won’t be creating that. At least not without a human prompt. And what the artist creates with a new tool will often be better than what a non-artist can create with the tool. Basically, tools don’t make the artist, on the contrary, new tools make the artists even better.

The concern is not that anyone can now produce a Ghibli-style frame in five minutes. The concern is when those five minutes belong to a platform that logs your data, watermarks your work, and licenses your prompt to someone else.

And that brings us back to where we started.

The real danger isn't that artists will be replaced. It's that artists — and all of us — will be locked out.

Locked out of meaningfully shaping the tools.
Locked out of owning our own work.
Locked out of the new infrastructure being built under the guise of creativity.

Ghibli’s films were born from a context where the director had the final say. Not the algorithm. Not the platform. That’s what we’re at risk of losing.

So yes — use the new tools. Experiment with Ghiblification. Remix. Reimagine. But don’t confuse the tool for the vision.

And don’t be distracted by outraging over mimicry while the platforms are building moats around your cathedral.

Outrage, if you must, against monopolization of creativity.

PS: My previous post on this was more of a rant and had some errors, like wrongly calling the book by Steve Alpert by the name of the documentary. I have updated my views here and have also presented a more comprehensive view.