Social media has been taken over by AI-generated images in the style of popular Studio Ghibli movies, created using ChatGPT’s latest update. The “Ghiblification,” as it’s been coined, has caused a Solana meme coin inspired by the anime studio to skyrocket to a $28.3 million market cap. Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki is a well-known AI detractor, having said in a 2016 documentary that the technology is an “insult to life.” But that didn’t stop the meme coin from pumping, with Ghiblification (GHIBLI) skyrocketing to a $28.3 million market cap in less than a day. GHIBLI has since fallen to about $18 million.
That’s not the only meme coin jumping on the AI trend. Binance Smart Chain token GhibliCZ (GHIBLI), which is inspired by the “Ghiblified” version of Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, spiked to a $14.6 million market cap following a related post by the official Binance X account. It’s now down to $4.3 million.Other tokens like Shibli Inu (SHIBLI)—a Ghibli-style Shiba Inu dog—and Ghibli Doge (GHIBLIDOGE) climbed past $1 million, but have since fallen in value.
This trend is made possible thanks to OpenAI’s major overhaul to ChatGPT’s image generation via the GPT-4o model. Those with a ChatGPT Plus subscription are able to simply upload a photo and then prompt the model to “restyle image in studio Ghibli style,” or something similar, to get images of these Ghiblification images. Studio Ghibli is the animation studio behind some of the most popular and critically acclaimed anime films of all time. It’s widely known for its serene, fantasy-themed animation style and immersive world building.
The studio’s most popular film, the Oscar-winning “Spirited Away“, has the 19th most fans on movie rating site Letterboxd and is the 28th highest rated film on IMDb— ahead of titles like “Back to the Future,” “Alien,” and “Psycho.” Other notable Ghibli films include “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke,” and the Oscar-winning “The Boy and the Heron.”
However, it appears that studio co-founder Hayao Miyazaki detests the usage of AI, after a documentary clip of the filmmaker reacting to an AI generated video of a zombie-like beast resurfaced.“I strongly feel it is an insult to life itself,” Miyazaki said, according to the translated video. “I feel like we are nearing to the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
The rise of the GHIBLI token comes one week after Pump.fun launched its decentralized exchange PumpSwap, which has helped stir up extra interest in the token launchpad. Since PumpSwap’s Friday launch, the platform has seen an increase in token launches up from 17,624 to 30,701, boosting its revenue in the process, according to Dune data. Equally, PumpSwap helped Morning Routine (ROUTINE) climb to a $19 million market cap, although it has since reversed track and fallen to $1.4 million. GHIBLI marks the second meme coin to see major success in less than seven days since the PumpSwap launch.
This is a notable increase in the success of meme coins, compared to the weeks prior to PumpSwap’s launch. Meme coin momentum stalled over the last couple months amid broader market volatility, along with scandals around prominent coins—such as LIBRA, the Solana token promoted in February by Argentine President Javier Milei, shortly before it crashed. The Pump.fun sector remains a sizable distance away from its all-time highs achieved in January when Fartcoin (FARTCOIN) surpassed a $2 billion market cap. It now has a market cap of about $550 million.
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