Critique Doesn’t Have to Be Cruel

On the Studio Ghibli AI trend, memory, ethics, and the danger of shame-based backlash

The Studio Ghibli AI trend has been quietly blooming across the internet—soft, nostalgic, and unexpectedly intimate. People are feeding in personal photos: moments with their partners, quiet afternoons with their pets, everyday memories of home, friendship, celebration. These aren’t staged or performative. They’re ordinary snapshots—made tender through a dreamy visual style. For many, these images become gentle tributes to the people and places that hold meaning. They're not just pretty pictures. They’re acts of remembering. Acts of love.

There’s something about Ghibli’s art that makes you instantly soften. The quiet compositions, the warmth of the colors, the way stillness is allowed to breathe. It’s a visual language that doesn’t rush you. It creates space—not just to look, but to feel. People are reaching for that softness, not to be impressive, but to be close to something that feels safe and beautiful.

But as the trend spread, so did the backlash. People are being mocked—called “cringe,” “AI weirdos,” “a threat to real art.” And circulating through the criticism is one quote, attributed to Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki himself: that AI art is “disgusting,” and “an insult to life itself.”

That quote has been passed around like a moral mic drop. Case closed.

Except it’s not. Context matters.

The quote comes from the 2016 documentary Never-Ending Man. In it, Miyazaki is shown a grotesque AI-generated animation—a headless, zombie-like creature dragging itself forward by its distorted arms. The creators are proud of their work, calling it innovative and “inhuman” in a way only AI can produce. Miyazaki doesn’t hide his discomfort. He shares the story of a close friend living with a disability, someone for whom movement is a daily challenge. In response to the animation, he says:

“Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is… I am utterly disgusted.”

“I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

It was a deeply human moment. A refusal to let technology imitate pain without compassion. But that moment has since been pulled out of context, reposted and re-used to shame people for crafting AI images of gardens, grandparents, beloved pets, or everyday life with someone they love. That’s not what Miyazaki was condemning. And turning his words into a weapon against tenderness misses the entire point.

What gets lost in the noise is that Miyazaki’s relationship with art—and even with Ghibli—has always been full of contradiction. He has long expressed cynicism about the animation industry, the commodification of imagination, and even his own role in sustaining it. In his work, there’s often a quiet resistance: to speed, to profit, to over-explanation. He has said again and again that Ghibli’s heart lies not in spectacle, but in slowness, in observation, in the sacredness of ordinary life.

And that’s exactly what many people are trying to capture through this trend. These AI-generated images aren’t just aesthetic experiments. They are attempts to say: this moment mattered. Me at the tea stall with my father. Me in the room I shared with my sister. Me and my dog in a garden that no longer exists. These aren’t impersonations of Ghibli—they are homages to the quiet magic it taught us to recognize in our own lives.

This doesn’t mean we avoid the hard questions. AI art is ethically complicated. Most of these tools are trained on datasets without consent, and that includes the visual vocabulary of studios like Ghibli. Artists deserve control, credit, and care. And it’s right to challenge the industry practices that strip away those rights. We must talk about consent, copyright, and the future of creative labour.

But that doesn’t mean we have to shame people who are simply exploring a new way to hold their memories. For many, AI is not a shortcut—it’s a doorway. A way to visually express something they feel but have no other means to capture. Not everyone has the time, access, or training to learn traditional art forms. That doesn’t make their emotional impulse less valid.

When something becomes massy—when it leaves the curated world of professionals and enters the hands of the many—it becomes vulnerable to ridicule. But what are we really mocking here? That people want to see themselves in a softer world?

Yes, we need to talk about AI’s ethical grey zones—about consent, ownership, labor, and artistic credit. Those are vital conversations. But we lose something essential when our critique becomes cruel, or when it’s shaped more by superiority than substance. Quoting Miyazaki out of context, with half-read analysis and moral panic, is not real advocacy for artists. It's just another form of gatekeeping—disguised as principle.

What Miyazaki expressed in that moment was not cynicism—it was care. Deep, intuitive, embodied care for the dignity of human experience. That’s what should guide our conversations too.

We can protect creativity, uphold ethics, and question new technologies without shaming people who are simply trying to remember, to imagine, or to feel close to something they love.

Let’s not allow ridicule to replace reflection. Let’s not let tenderness be shamed out of existence.

Critique can be rigorous. It can be passionate. But if it forgets how to be kind, it’s not worth much at all.