"Miyazaki style" meme takes the internet by storm, Ghibli token surges over 100 times in half a day

Author: 0xFacai, BlockBeats

Last night to this morning, a large number of meme images that are very similar in style to Hayao Miyazaki's films suddenly emerged on social media platforms like X. For example, the following "Super Generic" meme, which is still very popular on the internet, has gained a new charm and vitality under the "Ghibli style" rendering of Miyazaki.

Of course, some classic old anime and famous scenes also appeared in this "remake feast," turning into hellish jokes like "Vans should thank you" and "airplanes crashing into buildings"…

Meanwhile, a meme coin named $Ghibli has also entered a fast track mode on the blockchain. Since its issuance at 6 PM yesterday, it has been on a steady rise, and under the hype from various parties this morning, its market value has soared, surpassing 24 million dollars at the time of writing, with a 24-hour increase of over 10,824%.

What happened? What is Ghibli?

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

On Tuesday, OpenAI launched the built-in image generator of GPT-4o, which is officially referred to as "the most advanced image generator to date" and has the capability of "precise, accurate, and realistic outputs with local multi-models." People found that this image generator is particularly good at replicating the anime style of Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli.

In a tweet on Wednesday, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman was the first to kick off this "Ghibli virus spread," even changing his profile picture to an image in the Ghibli style.

Subsequently, many Twitter celebrities began to imitate him, uploading their own images rendered in the Ghibli style. Even Musk, the founder of OpenAI's competitor Grok AI, wrote in his "image tweet": This is today's theme.

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

The reason the GPT-4o model is named "O" is that it is an "Omni" model. This means that OpenAI has trained it not only on text code but also on image code and even audio and video, enabling it to understand all these forms of media and their similarities, and generate the given media based on user prompts without connecting to any external models.

Recently, AI giants have been engaged in fierce competition over image creation models, with Google also recently updating its Gemini 2.0 Flash experimental image creation model. Clearly, having AI as your personal artist to create an image that fully understands your meaning is becoming a very simple task.

However, Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, has previously expressed strong opposition to AI-generated animation. At a conference in 2016, Miyazaki stated about AI animation: "I feel completely disgusted. If you really want to create something creepy, you can go ahead. I never want to incorporate this technology into my work," adding that he believes it is "an insult to life itself."

How to generate your own Ghibli?

First, navigate to chat.com or chatgpt.com, and make sure you are using a GPT Plus, Pro, or Team account, and that the AI model selector shows "GPT-4o."

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

Of course, the related meme token $Ghibli has merely combined the artistic aesthetics of Studio Ghibli with the trend of AI-generated content in its narrative, which is why it quickly gained popularity on Twitter. However, the team information behind the token is currently unclear, and investors should approach the corresponding risks with caution.