In late March 2025, social media became inundated with a viral new trend thanks to ChatGPT’s image generator going public for all users, which took the internet by storm almost immediately.
Folks flocked to the AI with requests to recreate photos of themselves as Studio Ghibli characters in a fad that was impossible to avoid on basically any platform. TikTok, X, Instagram and even Facebook became swamped with profile photos and avatars of people in the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s famous film protagonists.
However, the craze gained just as much pushback as it did popularity. AI critics condemned those using ChatGPT to generate images that they felt violated Ghibli’s IP copyright, calling it a veritable ‘slap in the face’ to hardworking human artists.
Despite this discourse, folks continued to hop on the trend to an almost frightening degree. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the “biblical” demand on ChatGPT was so high that it was literally “melting” the company’s GPUs, asking users to “please chill” so his team could sleep.
While it might seem like such a popular product would generate big bucks as a matter of course, experts in the field say otherwise. In a surprising twist, Corpora.AI CEO Mel Morris revealed in an exclusive interview with Dexerto that all this hype is likely costing OpenAI tons of money, more than they could ever hope to make back in the short term. There are more concerns here than ethical ones.
AI expert says ChatGPT “losing lots of money” amid Ghibli fad
Corpora.AI is a tool that helps professionals research by “creating precise, distilled insights from the breadth and depth of global content.” As the company’s CEO and an expert in the AI field, Morris is well-aware of the financial toll such tools take on companies… and who really profits from them.
“They launched this type of service and no matter who you are, it’s fun to play with,” Morris began. “You see people creating images just for the fun of it. They share it with their friends. Everyone gathers around at their desk and they all think that’s a funny way to look at this person with a nice avatar that’s been created, or a real looking person but it’s based on them, and so it’s fun.
“There’s a hype factor that gathers momentum very quickly. I had a phone conversation just last night about this and someone said, ‘Yeah, these guys are burning through GPUs doing this. Literally, they’re burning through GPUs, they’re almost catching fire.’ They’re having to run that hard to do it, and that’s taking away the capacity,” he explained.
“The same sort of models that we’re running for doing GPT and those sorts of things running on the same hardware and probably in the same cloud-based server form. So, all of a sudden now we’re putting another demand on the GPUs.”
ChatGPT’s image generator went viral as users flocked to the app to recreate themselves as Ghibli characters – something they even did for OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, who set one fan’s image as his profile photo on X.
But if OpenAI isn’t making money off ChatGPT, then who is? Well, according to Morris, the biggest winner of the viral Ghibli trend are companies like Nvidia, Intel and Apple, who host cloud storage and services that are being used by AI models like ChatGPT.
“It’ll be the cloud vendors who are saying, ‘Wow, where’s all this demand coming from for all of these GPUs?’ Meanwhile, service levels for the rest of the things that are probably closer to making revenue are gonna decline because of the pure supply and demand economics. Using the same basic type of hardware to support a massive intake of workload is bound to have a knock on effect on the bandwidth on the GPU value that we have.
“From a point of view of the economics of it, it looks great! We’ve had millions of people start using this thing here. Bad news is — let’s not talk about how much it’s costing us, because we’re absolutely [spending] a fortune and probably losing lots of money servicing that demand. AI vendors cannot at the moment make profit because the models they’ve developed currently are too inefficient for the application that people are using it for. So, you hear Sam Altman coming out with comments like, ‘Well, we’ve launched this plan and even at this price, we won’t be making any money.’”
“It creates a mockery of so many things”
Of course, this conversation only touches on one side of ChatGPT’s viral Ghibli trend. The fad saw plenty of criticism, even from those within the anime industry, such as One Piece anime director Megumi Ishitani, who said she was “in despair” over the craze.
The Vice President of GKids, the company who distributes many of Ghibli’s films, had a similarly damning take on the ordeal. “In a time when technology tries to replicate humanity, we are thrilled that audiences value a theatrical experience that respects and celebrates Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s masterpiece in all its cinematic hand-drawn glory,” he wrote.
We asked Morris about the implications of AI in creative fields and what this could mean for the future of many industries — and his response surprised us.
First, Morris explained that it’s getting increasingly more difficult to clock content as AI-generated, which could lead to some very scary consequences in the future, such as forged evidence in court cases, for instance.
“At that point, what happens? Anyone in a crime scenario is in court and they just literally produce their own fake video that says, ‘That wasn’t right. Here’s what happened.’ And that creates a mockery of so many things. We’ve seen this issue with digital photography, where people can create really perfect digital photographs that are very small, and people can’t detect the difference. One extreme is this could bring about very, very bad circumstances, real-world issues upon us.”
X: JamianGerardCorpora.AI CEO Mel Morris says AI-generated content is getting harder to parse from human-created work, something evident in this still of a Twitch streamer that was created completely by AI, which referenced a number of top streamers like Pokimane.
He went on to point out how quickly technology was adopted in fields like TV and movies, many genres of which have become rife with CGI special effects that use physics engines to create the movement of snow, or hair, or any number of elements in an animated film, for instance.
“I don’t know how you reign that in. Is it fair? No, it’s not fair. Is it right? Is it ethical? That’s borderline, isn’t it? It is borderline, that’s the best that you can say. But I’ll tell you what, [AI is] not gonna go away, and I think that, particularly in the States, it’s very unlikely that people will get away with court cases trying to pursue those sorts of issues. There will be some landmark cases, and let’s hope they fall down on the sense of reason and fairness. Because if they don’t, then that door’s already closed.”
The value of human art vs AI-generated content
However grim the future of AI might seem, experts say that not all hope is lost. Dexerto also spoke with Shouvik Paul, the COO of Copyleaks, a company that offers tools to help protect businesses from AI plagiarism and detects if AI has been used in their own work. According to Paul, it’s highly unlikely AI ever truly replaces human creations like art, music, film and more due to the inherent value we place in human creativity.
“People are gonna place a different value on human-generated content versus AI-generated content. Then there’s the psychological element of it. I can go generate music with no instruments or whatever else, and it’ll sound really good, right? I do think that we probably will appreciate AI generated music, potentially.
“Do I think that AI-generated music will win a Grammy in the future? I don’t know. Because as a human, we will place a different value on something that’s human-created versus AI-created. Same with art, by the way. I think that if I went to an art gallery and I saw a painting that was created by AI, it’s not that I wouldn’t appreciate it.
“I might be like, ‘This is beautiful. Would I pay a million dollars for that? Probably not.’ …I think where we are today is that people will place a different value on AI-generated, versus human-generated content.”
That’s why, despite the viral rise in popularity of AI-generated content and the despair surrounding it from artists like Hayao Miyazaki himself, it’s unlikely that we’re “near the end of times.” By nature, humans will always value what they create with their own hands over something generated by a computer, which is why, according to Shouvik, AI-created books on Amazon hardly sell any copies, while decades-old animated films like Princess Mononoke continue to rake in millions at the box office to this day.
