The launch of ChatGPT's new Ghibli-style image generation feature caused a significant surge in user traffic, pushing the platform to an all-time high in weekly users, app downloads, and in-app revenue. However, this led to glitches and outages due to the massive influx of users. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the capacity challenges and anticipated delays in new releases.

While the feature gained global attention, it also sparked controversies, especially regarding copyright issues with Studio Ghibli. The images generated by ChatGPT often had errors, such as extra hands or people, because the AI does not store actual images but instead encodes the "Ghibli" style as patterns. This triggered concerns from Ghibli artists about the use of their artwork to train AI models. The controversy was further fueled by Miyazaki’s 2016 remarks expressing his disapproval of integrating AI into his works.

There were also privacy concerns, as viral Ghibli-style images could potentially be reverse-engineered to uncover the original photo. However, technically, it’s not possible to retrieve the original image from the AI-generated versions.

In response, Google launched its Gemini 2.5 beta, competing with OpenAI's image generation capabilities, though it did not replicate Ghibli-style results. As trends like the Ghibli-style image surge fade, OpenAI needs to focus on improving the chatbot’s quality and handling increasing user numbers to maintain its edge over competitors.

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