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

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.

In the past few weeks, AI-generated images in the Studio Ghibli style are everywhere. Even the White House is releasing AI-generated memes in the Studio Ghibli style.

Does your business commit copyright infringement when it publishes something in the Studio Ghibli style, such as a social media post promoting your business? If that’s not legal, are you likely to get sued?

Overall, the answer depends upon your level of mimicry. If your meme replicates the specific characters or scenes from Studio Ghibli movies, what you produce would probably be a 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, such as the 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 the issue, but the U. S. Copyright Office issued a report in July 2024 that addressed it.

The Copyright Office noted that U.S. copyright law does not protect artistic style by itself. It cited the distinction drawn in federal copyright law between ideas and expressions.

Copyright law protects original artistic expressions in specific works but not ideas or facts. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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? 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.

In the end, be careful. 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.

NOTE: A longer, more detailed version of this column is available on John Farmer’s Substack, which is here.

Written on April 23, 2025

by John B. Farmer

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