I, Ghibli
The last week of March was chaos. Exciting chaos. Why? Because OpenAI launched a new way to generate images. First, I generated an image for my partner — she was awestruck, and I earned a ton of brownie points. Then I generated an image of my sister and sent it on the family group. That’s when all hell broke loose. I generated images non-stop until midnight.
A week later, the rush is over. The wave has passed. I’m no longer the image support guy. So, let me reflect. OpenAI launched the model on 25th of March. They have done many launches before but this one hit the world different. People went mad, like my family, like almost every family who came in contact with 4o image generation. In a week 120M people generated more than 800M images.
It didn’t happen all at once. OpenAI began rolling out GPT-4o on May 13, 2024 — starting with text. Then came voice, and finally, after a 10-month wait, native image generation arrived on March 25, 2025.
Ghiblify
People went mad in one very specific way: the Ghibli way. In the demo, the OpenAI team showed that you could upload a picture of yours and ask the model to "Ghiblify" it, ie, make it in the style of a popular anime studio - Studio Ghibli.
Here is the style of the studio.
Here’s what it generated when I gave it a photo of me falling off a chair.
Here is another one, this time in a different style, but equally good.
Flood
Instagram, X, LinkedIn — everything was flooded. People were sharing moments they’d normally keep private. A quiet dinner. A blurry fall. A sleepy baby. Why? Because Ghiblified images feel real enough to connect... but not real enough to expose. That’s new.
Subscriptions
In India, people don't pay for subscriptions. But they are paying for this. In fact, this was the first time anyone in my family asked me about the price of a subscription — and I’ve been their tech support guy for over a decade. OpenAI said that India was their fastest growing market now. This is bonkers. Insane. The subscription is $20 plus taxes in India and people are still paying for it — "The most recent Household Consumption Expenditure Survey for 2022-23 shows the average monthly per capita consumption expenditure across all goods and services was around ₹2,000-5000 in rural India and ₹3,500-6400 in urban India." So paying ₹2300 for one subscription is INSANE.
Predictions
Ghiblification is just one aspect of 4o, it can also generate flawless text, has spacial awareness and can handle multiple elements in one image. You can control resolution, size, colors, aspect ratio. It can make almost everything that Canva can, and it can do it in 1% of the time and maybe 10% of the effort. You don't have pixel level control but for everything where good-enough suffices, this will replace your Canva use. Think: educational content, flyers, product posts — anything where “good enough” beats “perfect.” What blows my mind is that this is just version one. If this gets better at the same rate as the text models, you might never need to open a design tool again. Just describe how it should feel. Vibe designing.