Goro Miyazaki told Bloomberg the studio watched the Ghiblification wave without much concern, and that one of its own executives tried it. His position comes with a condition most coverage leaves off.
Studio Ghibli was not especially bothered by the AI trend that turned millions of photos into imitations of its films.
“We didn’t think much of it, to be honest,” Goro Miyazaki told Bloomberg in a feature published this month. Goro is a director at the studio, its managing director, and the son of co-founder Hayao Miyazaki.
His reasoning is that fans have always made derivative art. There is a long tradition, he said, of amateur work built from favourite manga, anime, and game characters, so the Ghiblification craze did not register as a departure.
One of the company’s executives even tried the trend himself, for amusement.
The condition attached to it
The quote that has travelled is the relaxed one. The next sentence is the one that matters.
“If someone started making a lot of money out of it, then it would be a problem,” Goro said.
That is a commercial threshold rather than an endorsement of the technology. The Ghibli-style image wave ran on a tool built by a company that charges for access, which places the trend on a different side of that line than a fan drawing Totoro in a sketchbook.
Goro did say the studio is not denying or feeling negative about AI technology in itself. He also suggested the late Ghibli director Isao Takahata might have experimented with it. “He was someone who was very interested in the latest technology,” Goro said.
Hayao Miyazaki’s famous quote is from 2016
This is where most of the internet has it wrong.
Hayao Miyazaki’s line about “an insult to life itself” gets quoted constantly as his verdict on the 2025 image trend.
It is not.
It comes from a 2016 documentary sequence in which developers showed him an AI-assisted animation of a misshapen humanoid dragging itself across the ground.
He responded by describing a friend with a physical disability, and said whoever made the clip had given no thought to human suffering.
Hayao has not publicly commented on the ChatGPT image wave. Ten-year-old footage about a different demo has been standing in for a statement he never made.
Why the studio’s position keeps getting flattened
Both versions circulating are wrong in opposite directions.
Ghibli is not waging war on AI, and Ghibli is not fine with AI. What Goro described is a studio that finds fan-made derivative work unremarkable and would object if someone monetised it at scale.
Bloomberg’s feature also carries a longer worry, voiced by writer Roland Kelts, that whatever resistance exists now could erode once the founders are gone and the properties change hands.
The studio helped ignite an anime boom now worth roughly $25 billion a year, and is in no hurry to make another film.
Somewhere in Tokyo, an executive has a Ghibli-fied selfie on their phone. Nobody has said which one.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Bloomberg (August 2026), the original feature, Goro Miyazaki’s quotes, the Takahata comment, and the Roland Kelts material
GamesRadar+ (August 19, 2026), for surfacing the monetisation condition alongside the headline quote