For much of this week, X has been filled with eerily familiar yet undeniably off-putting images that represent a new frontier in AI’s consumption of human art. Users have discovered that ChatGPT’s latest update allows them to transform any photograph into something resembling a scene from a Studio Ghibli film. Within hours, the internet was awash with these uncanny renderings — everything from 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination to Pennsylvania treasurer R. Budd Dwyer’s televised suicide, all reimagined in the distinctive style of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. This is more than just a passing trend, though. Instead, it’s another milestone in AI’s ongoing appropriation of human artistic expression.

First came the novelty of seeing serious historical events transformed into whimsical anime pastiches. Then came the rush to feed every conceivable meme template into the algorithmic maw. By Wednesday, Elon Musk was participating, a sure sign that whatever subcultural cache the trend might have briefly possessed had evaporated entirely.

There’s something particularly depressing about Miyazaki’s aesthetic becoming the unwitting template for this mass AI experimentation. The 83-year-old animator’s meticulously crafted style — the product of thousands of hours of human labour — has been crudely approximated by the very technology he so openly disdains. In a 2016 demonstration that has resurfaced amid this trend, Miyazaki watched AI researchers present a grotesque digital creature that moved by dragging its head along the ground. His response was unequivocal: “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” He continued: “I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

Nine years later, Miyazaki’s words seem almost prophetic. What is this flood of AI-generated Ghibli knockoffs if not a collective surrender of our artistic sovereignty? The modern internet user, bombarded by an endless stream of content, has outsourced even the act of image manipulation — once a legitimate form of digital folk art — to machines. The lazy shortcut of asking AI to simply “make it look like Ghibli” replaces genuine creative expression with the press of a button.

This hollowness points to a deeper artistic crisis. Human-created memes, at their best, represent a legitimate art form that emerges organically from distinctive individual sensibilities. Consider Donald Trump, whose idiosyncratic communication style spawned endless memorable memes which helped propel him to political prominence. From “covfefe” to “nipples protruding […] very very disrespectful” to “very fine people”, Trump’s linguistic peculiarities created genuinely novel cultural moments that resonated far beyond their immediate context. These weren’t just jokes but authentic cultural artefacts, carrying the unmistakable signature of individual creativity that AI cannot replicate.

The Studio Ghibli meme trend, however, constitutes the further “ensloppification” of internet culture. When anyone can generate unlimited variations of the same basic template with minimal effort, we’re left with an undifferentiated mass of content — or “slop”, to use the increasingly common internet parlance.

The speed with which the Ghibli AI cycle played out illustrates this perfectly. What might once have been a week-long trend with distinct phases of adoption, refinement, and eventually ironic meta-commentary was compressed into less than a day. By the time average users became aware of the phenomenon, it was already being declared “over” by those at the cutting edge. And unlike organic memes that might experience revivals or evolve into new forms, this AI-generated trend will likely never resurface except as a footnote in some future digital archaeologist’s catalogue of fleeting 2025 phenomena.

Musk’s involvement sealed the trend’s fate. When platform owners participate in meme culture, they strip away any remaining countercultural energy. Throughout his tenure at X, Musk has functioned as a one-man validation system for content that catches his eye, transforming niche humour into broadly accessible but quickly exhausted cultural products. His participation marks the moment a trend officially becomes mainstream — and thus instantly passé.

Yet the larger pattern represented by the Ghibli trend — the algorithmic consumption of human art, the devaluation of artistic labour, and the surrender of creative agency to machines — continues unabated. The real tragedy isn’t just that AI can now imitate Miyazaki’s style, but that we increasingly seem content to let algorithms replace the human artistic impulse entirely. When we surrender art to automation, we lose not just the distinctive voices of individual creators but also our collective power for creative expression.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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