What Risk Does Your Business Face for Creating Social Media Posts in the Studio Ghibli Style?

It's everywhere, but is it legal?

Note: A much shorter, less detailed version of this column is available on the Leading-Edge Law Group website.

Have you noticed the Internet meme fad of AI-produced images in the Studio Ghibli style?

Studio Ghibli is a Japanese film company that creates animated movies. Think Japanese Pixar.

Each film has its own plot and characters, but there is an overarching animation style: warm and soft colors, rich backgrounds, dream-like atmospheres, and characters with big, emotive eyes. All its animation is hand-drawn. Indeed, Hayao Miyazaki (the founder of Studio Ghibli) called AI an “insult to life itself” and said he would “never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”

In the past few weeks, AI-generated images in the Studio Ghibli style are everywhere. I generated the above depiction of the justices of the Supreme Court by uploading a picture of them to ChatGPT 4o and giving this prompt: “Draw this picture in Studio Ghibli style.” Even the White House is releasing AI-generated memes in the Studio Ghibli style.

You might not get the same result if you ask ChatGPT to emulate the style of a specific artist rather than a whole studio. Taya Christianson, a spokeswoman for OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT), said in a statement to the New York Times. “We continue to prevent generations in the style of individual living artists, but we do permit broader studio styles, which people have used to generate and share some truly delightful and inspired original fan creations.” Yet, you probably can get past such guardrails with clever prompt crafting.

Is this Legal?

Is it legal for a business to mimic Studio Ghibli style? Specifically, does your business commit copyright infringement when it publishes something in that style, such as a social media post promoting your business? If it’s not legal, are you likely to get sued? Also, if you create something in that style to promote your business, can you protect it from being copied or mimicked by others?

The answers are partially given by two recent reports issued by the U. S. Copyright Office. Overall, the answers may depend upon your level of mimicry. If your meme replicates the specific characters or scenes from Studio Ghibli movies, what you produce will probably be a copyright infringement unless what you put out is a fair use. If you put out this content to promote your business, that’s a commercial use, so it’s probably not fair use.

In theory, this could lead to significant liability. Studio Ghibli or whatever entity owns the copyrights to its movies could potentially recover any profits you earn, other damages, and possibly its attorneys’ fees. It also might recover “statutory damages,” which are up to $150,000 for each copyright-protected work you infringe.

Copying Just an Artist’s Style – Is that Copyright Infringement?

If you do not copy any specific Studio Ghibli characters or scenes but use something drawn by AI in its famous style, that presents a tougher legal question – is it copyright infringement to create something in the unique style of a writer, artist, or other content creator that does not copy any specific thing, such as a movie character, a scene from a film, or a block of text?

Copyright-infringement lawsuits brought in recent years by entertainers, artists, and authors against the AI operators raise that question. Many such cases are pending. For example, this question is raised in the proposed class action lawsuit filed in early April 2025 against Meta Platforms (owner of Facebook and Instagram) over its Llama AI by a group of plaintiffs that includes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Andrew Sean Greer and comedienne Sarah Silverman.

So far, no court has ruled on whether an AI output that mimics the style of a particular content creator is copyright infringement when the output doesn’t contain any reproduction of any specific item of the content creator’s work (e.g., characters, plots, text passages).

The Opinion of the U.S. Copyright Office

The U. S. Copyright Office issued a report in July 2024 that addressed this issue. The Copyright Office noted that U.S. copyright law does not protect artistic style by itself. It noted the distinction drawn in federal copyright law between ideas and expressions in 17 U.S.C. § 102(b), which states “in no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery.”

For example, if you write a book, you own a copyright to the text you wrote, but not to the information or ideas you convey in the text. Someone can learn from your book and convey the same information and ideas with different words without committing copyright infringement. Copying only the style of an artist is akin to taking that artist’s idea rather than taking all or part of a specific work by that artist.

Nevertheless, the Copyright Office expressed sympathy for artists, noting that AI enables imitating artistic style cheaply on a massive scale, and the easy availability of such style-copying outputs can damage the market value of an artist’s creations. For example, if I can have AI write a book on a subject that interests me in the style of Tom Wolfe, perhaps I’ll be less likely to buy a Tom Wolfe novel.

The Copyright Office speculated that AI outputting material in the style of an artist might create valid claims other than copyright infringement, such as unfair competition, deceptive trade practices, or misappropriating someone’s right to publicity, which essentially is using someone’s likeness or voice without permission for a commercial purpose. But these are only speculative legal theories. No content creator has successfully sued an AI operator under them. This report by the Copyright Office doesn’t close the matter. We still need to see how courts rule.

Advice for Creating Studio Ghibli-Style Posts

Here’s my advice: If your business wants to put out something in Studio Ghibli style, give it an image for which you own the copyright and ask it to transform it into that style. Give it a picture you took or a drawing you made, because you own the copyright to that as the author. That makes it unlikely the AI will copy a character or scene from a Studio Ghibli movie.

Also, don’t accompany your meme by writing anything that implies you are licensed by or otherwise affiliated with Studio Ghibli. Creating the false appearance of such a relationship violates the law.

What About Liability for Training An AI on Material Without a License?

The law discussed above concerns the legality of AI output. Later this year, the Copyright Office plans to issue a report on the legality of using someone’s copyright property without permission to train an AI.

AI operators claim this training use constitutes fair use, which is a defense to a copyright infringement claim. Despite the plethora of lawsuits against AI operators, no court has yet ruled on whether it is fair use in the context of generative AI such as ChatGPT or Grok. (In February 2025, a federal trial court held in Ross Intelligence v. Thomson Reuters that using someone’s material without permission to train an AI is not fair use, but that case didn’t concern generative AI. That decision will be appealed, and it’s unclear how soon the applicable federal appellate court will take the case.)

If such training is not fair use, that could starve generative AIs of the training material needed to create outputs in the style of particular artists. Specifically, it would give the artists leverage to demand license fees for using their material in training, which would compensate them for the possible negative effect of generative AI on the demand for their material. Some artists might refuse to grant licenses.

That’s Nice, But Will You Get Sued?

Let’s get practical here. If your business puts a meme on social media in the Studio Ghibli style, is Studio Ghibli (or whoever owns its copyrights) likely to sue you for copyright infringement? As discussed above, it might have only a weak claim (which it would be unlikely to push) if you only imitate its style and don’t replicate any characters or scenes.

So far, it has not filed any lawsuits, there are no credible reports that it has sent cease-and-desist letters, and I have seen no report that it has gotten any material taken off social media by making a copyright claim to a social media platform. Yet, the flood of Studio Ghibli-style AI-generated images is new. It’s too soon to say whether Studio Ghibli will act.

Can Your Business Own a Copyright in the Studio Ghibli-Style Content It Creates?

Setting aside copyright infringement concerns, could you protect what you create using AI in the Studio Ghibli style from unauthorized use by others? In other words, can you own a copyright in the AI outputs that you could enforce against others?

The answer is not black-and-white, but it’s mainly “no,” you can’t own a copyright in AI outputs. That means you may not have a legal basis for stopping others, such as business competitors, from copying or mimicking your Studio Ghibli creation.

In January 2024, the U. S. Copyright Office released a report on copyright ownership of AI-produced material. At a high level, the report says this: Only a human author can create copyright-protected property. An original expression created by a computer is not eligible for copyright protection. You can’t own a copyright to something you create with AI just because you wrote the prompts. It doesn’t matter if you wrote a detailed and unique prompt or shaped the output with a series of prompts.

You can own a copyright in something you create and then improve it with AI, but you own a copyright only to what you created, and you must delineate the difference between what you created and what the AI added. For example, if you take a photograph or draw a picture and have the AI convert it to Studio Ghibli style, you would still have a copyright on what your picture or drawing depicted, but not on the added Studio Ghibli gloss. If your original creation and the AI gloss are inseparable, you may not be able to claim copyright ownership of the AI output.

This report aligns with the few cases that have addressed this issue. For example, in March 2025, in Thaler v. Perlmutter, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court decision that you can’t get a copyright registration on an image generated by AI, because the author must be human.

Does Ownership Really Matter Here?

Does this ownership issue matter practically for businesses? Probably not. My guess is your business is unlikely to create anything in a Studio Ghibli style that will be an important business asset. For example, I doubt you would craft a logo or product packaging design for your business in Studio Ghibli style because it would be antiquated when the fad passes.

If I’m wrong and you do create something important to your business in this style that you don’t want being reused by competitors, you’ll be in a tough spot because you would need to register your copyright in the image to enforce it, and you would have to persuade the Copyright Office that there are elements of your image that you created outside of the Studio Ghibli stylization.

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In the end, be careful here. The Studio Ghibli style is known for its warm, soothing colors, but your legal mood might become red hot if you go too far by mimicking things Studio Ghibli created.

Written on April 24, 2025

by John B. Farmer

© 2025 Leading-Edge Law Group, PLC. All rights reserved.

P.S. Thanks to Savannah Throneberry for her assistance with creating and editing this column. She is a third-year student at the University of Richmond School of Law, the Annual Symposium Editor for the school’s Journal of Law & Technology (Volume XXXI), and winner of the school’s Auzville Jackson, Jr. Award for Excellence in Intellectual Property.