Due to the excessive use of ChatGPT's image generation function, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, on 30 March 2025, urged users to cut back on generating Studio Ghibli-style images, as it is placing an extraordinary strain on the company’s GPU resources and staff. In a message posted on X, the CEO asked users to ease off on image generation, stating that it’s madness and his team needs sleep, hinting that the trend is having serious consequences for the company’s infrastructure and development team.
The issue had already surfaced days earlier, on 28 March, when Altman announced that their GPUs were "melting" due to the increased demand, and he revealed that temporary restrictions would be introduced to make the system more efficient, including reducing the image generation limit to three per day in the free version of ChatGPT. The new native image generation feature, powered by the GPT-4o model, which became available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers on 2 March, has proven especially popular among users, who have been mass-producing anime-style portraits reminiscent of Studio Ghibli’s classic animated films. "It’s super cool to see people loving the images in ChatGPT, but our GPUs are melting," Altman wrote in last week’s post.
The trend has also raised copyright concerns, mainly since Hayao Miyazaki, the 84-year-old co-founder of Studio Ghibli, has previously expressed scepticism about the role of artificial intelligence in animation, even calling AI an "insult to life" in a 2016 documentary. Although OpenAI has stated that its system rejects requests to generate images in the style of living artists, it told TechCrunch that it permits the replication of broader studio styles. The free version of ChatGPT continues to reject requests in a Studio Ghibli-style, citing a violation of content guidelines.
Sources:
1.
Beatrice Nolan
2.
ETtech
3.
Team Digit
