If everyone can now be Miyazaki, where does that leave actual Miyazaki?

This was the question I asked myself as OpenAI’s stunning new 4o image generation tool went fully viral, turning the internet and everyone on it into a still from a Studio Ghibli movie.

Those bajillion images floating online? Not made by the Ghibli team. Not even by hyper-talented AI artists. Just regular humans — like you or me.

What happened? Well, these sorts of tools have kind of been around for a while (Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL·E, Stable Diffusion) but they all had friction: weird UIs, Discord servers, third-party plug-ins, often not great slot machine results.

What OpenAI just did with 4o is jam everything together in one place, clean it up, and make it feel like magic.

But this isn’t just a “better image model.” It’s a totally new way of generating visuals built directly into ChatGPT where the language model and image model work together in real time. The technical details, laid out in the OpenAI blog post, are worth reading but the real take away is that it just works.

You type it, 4o Image Gen draws it. Want a Ghibli-style otter in a puffer vest holding a baguette? Done. Add text to the image? It actually spells it right. Want to change just the background? Keep the character consistent across 3 images? Done.

The result: AI image gen finally feels fun, intuitive, and honestly a little bit wild.

Creative Blowback Now Also At Scale

Of course, it didn’t take long for the backlash.

Artists (and, honestly, a lot of regular people) pointed out loudly that this isn’t fan art, it’s AI-fueled mimicry, and the volume of it felt overwhelming. The old Miyazaki clip resurfaced, the one where he calls AI-generated animation “an insult to life itself.” (Yes, it’s out of context, and the original clip shows he’s talking about a specific zombie animation but the vibe is very real.)

And, of freaking course, these aren’t Miyazaki films. Spirited Away has more soul in three seconds than all the Ghibli-style image prompts on the internet combined. No one’s confusing these outputs for the real thing, and the actual films aren’t going anywhere. I’d even argue this makes them more valuable in the canon of human creativity.

But what freaked people out wasn’t the quality. It was the scale and ease of creation. This wasn’t one or two images floating around. It was a flood. And that kind of speed-to-volume makes every creative shift feel existential.

To go back to that opening question: no, no one can be Miyazaki. He’s a singular artist (working with a very talented team, of course) who’s honed his voice over decades of incredible work.

But the real question for every creative now is: What about me? Will I ever get to be my own version of Miyazaki?

Remix Culture Lives (Again)

So here’s where I landed: this moment doesn’t feel like the end of creativity to me.

It’s more like the late '90s, when remix culture cracked open the gates and invited everyone in.

In my opinion, GPT-4o Image Gen and other AI tools aren’t killing originality. They’re doing what Photoshop did for design, what early DAWs like Pro Tools and FruityLoops did for music — turning what used to take expensive tools and deep technical know-how into something you could do from your bedroom. I lived through that. It was chaotic, weird, and glorious.

Suddenly, you didn’t need a label or a recording studio. Just a laptop, some samples, and a point of view. That era gave us Paul’s Boutique — a masterpiece built from other masterpieces. It didn’t erase the originals. It reframed them.

And yeah, eventually sample-heavy music evolved into a system that paid the original artists — once the culture caught up. Maybe AI needs to go through the same growing pains.

So no, you don’t become Miyazaki. No one gets to. But that’s the wrong goal.

The real question is: can you use these tools to become your own version of that kind of artist? Someone with vision, voice, and something to say?

That’s the bet now. And honestly, it’s a good one.

WHAT'S A CREATIVE TO DO NOW?

Let’s reset for a second: this isn’t about “AI taking over” or the “soul being drained from the world.” It’s a matter of re-framing this for you, the creative human.

It’s about you finally having the tools to level up, even if you’re already good! You get faster & cheaper iterations with way fewer gatekeepers in the way.

If you’ve been sitting on an idea, a character, a weird world you’ve always wanted to build — now’s the moment. Spend some time this weekend getting to work. The tools are here. The playing field just tilted in your favor.

Here’s how to leverage the 4o Image Generation moment to kickstart yourself:

Ride the trend, but twist it.
Sure, you can prompt “Ghibli-style photo of my cat.” But what about “Ghibli-style scene of Werner Herzog on Hot Ones, solemnly eating a ghost pepper”? Or “Pixar-style campaign poster for the shrimp from True Detective Season 4”? Weird + timely = sticky.

Use AI as the engine, not the driver.
Let 4o image gen handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on the fun part, the idea. Generate fast. Refine faster. Try a ton of things. Get to the stuff that makes you smile.

Treat prompting like a craft.
Don’t settle for your first idea. Rewrite it five ways. The best stuff comes from iteration, voice, and specificity. Now you can REALLY iterate at scale.

Build a world, not just a post.
Sketch a character. Then their room. Then the moment their life changed. Suddenly you’re not just making content — you’re creating something that could last.

No one’s saying it’s easy. But it’s possible now. And that’s new.

-Gavin