Our story opens on March 25 — mere weeks ago, yet somehow already fading into the fog of our eternal present — with OpenAI releasing a new version of ChatGPT. Compared with previous versions, this one was surprisingly good at generating novel digital images: Users could tell it what they wanted to see, and voilà, an image would appear. And what lots of people wanted to see, it transpired, was real photographs transformed to look like stills from the animated films of the Japanese company Studio Ghibli.
These beloved movies — especially those directed by Hayao Miyazaki — evoke the wonder and innocence of childhood but also the forces that erode that innocence: mortality, history, greed, hubris. They are products of a labor-intensive and largely by-hand animation process; nothing else looks quite like them. It’s not surprising that people were tickled by the prospect of near-instantly making anything look like a Ghibli movie, complete with that trademark aura of cozy but sophisticated wholesomeness. But ChatGPT’s Ghiblification set what was surely a new speed record for the emergence of a meme format: Within 24 hours of the new release, generating Ghibli images had become the way for people to demonstrate their fluency in the internet’s shifting codes.
On the afternoon of the 25th, an engineer named Grant Slatton racked up tens of thousands of likes on X after posting a Ghiblified photograph of himself, his wife and their corgi on a beach. Soon people were posting not just family photos but images from the news and from history: a Ghiblified Donald Trump; a Ghiblified Jeffrey Epstein; Ghiblified jets smashing into Ghiblified twin towers; a Ghiblified murder of George Floyd. They started Ghiblifying old memes: Ghiblified “distracted boyfriend,” Ghiblified “Bernie Sanders at Trump’s inauguration,” Ghiblified “Ben Affleck mournfully smoking a cigarette.” Refreshing social media, you could watch in real time as internet culture rummaged around its cobwebbed pantry, tossing everything into its new game. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, claimed that a million new ChatGPT users signed up in a single hour on March 31 and that the Ghibli-related demands were “melting” the company’s graphic processors.
If the Abu Ghraib photos leaked today, it’s possible to imagine that the White House would repost them approvingly.
Haters like me felt obligated to point out that this Ghiblification seemed likely to rely on ChatGPT’s having been fed Ghibli movies as training, with no permission sought or compensation offered. (All OpenAI has said on the subject is that the new model was trained on “images reflecting a vast variety of image styles.”) These movies are painstakingly constructed stories about the irreducibility of the human spirit and the fragile beauty of nature. The Ghiblified images are something else, something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Miyazaki movie: a swarm of cheap knockoffs feeding parasitically off the essence of the originals, cranked out by a technology so plunderously energy-intensive that coal plants slated for closure have been kept open just to keep it running. But pointing this out risked sounding like a killjoy: They were just memes, right?
By March 27, the meme had reached the White House, or at least its official X account, where a news release about the planned deportation of a Dominican woman — a convicted fentanyl dealer — was paired with a Ghiblified image of this woman weeping in shackles.
Historically, a meme’s presence in the feeds of politicians or large companies has been a reliable sign that it’s going stale. President Trump, however, has ushered in a new relationship between politics and internet culture. For at least a decade, his feeds, and those of people in his orbit, have often felt like portals connected straight to the online sewers where toxic new memes evolve. (The very sewers where, after March 25, people quickly started sharing Ghiblified Hitlers and Ghiblified antisemitic caricatures.) Trump and his social media people, like any content creators seeking on-ramps to maximum virality, have been willing to post or repost just about anything: anti-Clinton memes from white-nationalist message boards, a reworked wrestling clip of Trump body-slamming “CNN,” assorted QAnon dog whistles. The subjects are varied, but the memes all share a single message: Look what we’re unafraid to do!
In recent months, this piece of the Trump presidency — its content strategy, as it were — has taken an especially dark turn. Trump was re-elected thanks in part to his promise to lead a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. But the promised wave of mass deportations hasn’t yet materialized; indeed, while arrests and detentions have increased this year over Joe Biden’s last year in office, deportations have lagged behind last year’s and are far below Barack Obama’s numbers. In the absence of an increase in actual deportations, the administration seems to have pursued an increase in deportation spectacles: images celebrating people’s expulsion from the country with a visceral glee expressed in the native idioms of internet culture.
There was the video, posted to the White House X account, of deportees’ being shackled and loaded onto planes — and jokingly labeled deportation “ASMR.” There was the deportation clip soundtracked by Semisonic’s “Closing Time.” There was the image of Trump waving from a McDonald’s takeout window, placed memeishly above a Homeland Security announcement in such a way that the president seemed to be giving a cheery goodbye to the deported Brown University professor Rasha Alawieh. Perhaps most striking, there was the video of Kristie Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, speaking in front of an El Salvadoran prison cell crammed full of shaved inmates, warning immigrants that they, too, could be sent there. In thumbnail form, this video resembled nothing so much as the elaborate viral contests posted by the likes of Mr. Beast (see “I Survived 50 Hours in a Maximum-Security Prison” or “100 Identical Twins Fight for $250,000”).
Not long ago, the United States government would, by default, seek to distance itself from images like this; often, as with images of post-9/11 torture, the government actively suppressed or destroyed them. The Trump administration releases them on purpose, implicitly arguing that their content is a source of pride and amusement. (If the Abu Ghraib photos leaked today, it’s possible to imagine that the White House would repost them approvingly.) It drops any sugarcoating or performance of restraint and gives us crass gloating, assigning Trump the role of the merciless, enthusiastic deporter in chief — no matter what the actual numbers look like. On April 6, the White House posted another Ghiblified meme, this one pairing a cartoon JD Vance with a quotation from him about refusing to let the “far left” influence deportation policy.
This administration isn’t the only one trying to play the latest meme game. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a leading figure of the global far right (and a big A.I. fan), posted a Ghiblified self-portrait; Sam Altman reposted it. The Israeli Army, which has used A.I. to plan its strikes on Gaza, posted Ghiblified images of its personnel; the Israeli Embassy in India posted Ghiblified images of Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu together. Just as A.I.-powered Ghiblification is an easy way to give any image you want a sought-after vibe, political memes are a way to cultivate a defiantly jubilant online mood with no fixed relationship to reality.
Or at least they’re a way to try. Would Trump be able to meme his way through tumbling markets, spiking costs or goods shortages? We may find out. As the White House’s deputy communications director, Kaelan Dorr, said on X, responding to criticisms of the Ghiblified deportation image: “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”
Peter C. Baker is a freelance writer in Evanston, Ill., and the author of the novel “Planes.” He edits “Tracks on Tracks,” a newsletter about how people experience songs.
Source photographs for illustration above: Studio Ghibli/GKIDS; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images; Steve Sanchez/Getty Images.
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