WooJung Jon

Abstract This article uses the viral “Ghiblification” trend—the mass conversion of user-supplied photographs into a visual idiom associated with Studio Ghibli—to ask how law should respond when generative AI makes aesthetic patterns reproducible at scale without necessarily copying any single work. It offers a comparative doctrinal and institutional account of the United States, Japan and South Korea, using developments in the European Union and China only as contextual comparators.

You have full access to this article via your institution. Spurred by a new image-generation feature embedded in OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer 4 omni (GPT-4o) model, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli spread across social media in late March 20251. These images — characterized by soft watercolour skies and the lyrical stillness perfected by Japan’s Studio Ghibli — were generated primarily using text prompts by third-party users.