Ghibli style is running wild on ChatGPT, adding millions of users on AI platform

OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, said that ChatGPT has added one million users in the last hour, suggesting the rapid growth of this chatbot due to the new Studio Ghibli style image trend on the internet.

“The ChatGPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. We added one million users in the last hour.” Sam wrote on X.

On March 25, OpenAI released 40 image generation model, natively employing the image generation capability to the chatbot. It is trained for contextual accuracy, understanding the prompt and rendering the most accurate content.

The company is doing this by leveraging 40’s improved knowledge and to transform uploaded images into anything based on user input.

Once you upload an image, the model analyzes and learns the uploaded file and renders a new version with described style using image generation. Though, the new model has numerous art styles, one specific style has picked up a wide interest from internet users.

Leading all roads to Ghibli, a Japanese studio with decades of dominance in the animation industry, which released some memorable works in the animation industry, including Spirited Away and Princes Mononoke.

Users are experiencing this nostalgia by turning their photographs into Ghibli style with ChatGPT image generation and starting a worldwide trend that is surging a massive user base for OpenAI.

Following, this launch and mass usage, the OpenAI chief introduced a temporary rate limit to cool down GPUs and work on efficient outputs to allow more users to access the image generation model.

This limit also led to the surge in usage on Grok, xAI’s latest Large Language Model (LLM) based chatbot. However, users can now regain access to ChatGPT to start using its image generation.