ChatGPT’s Ghibli filter is political now — but it always was

When I saw my colleague Kylie Robison’s story about OpenAI’s new image generator on Tuesday, I thought this week might be fun. Generative AI images raise all kinds of ethical issues, but I find them wildly entertaining, and I spent large chunks of that day watching other Verge staff test ChatGPT in ways that covered the entire spectrum, from cute to cursed.

But on Thursday afternoon, the White House decided to spoil it. Its X account posted a photograph of a crying detainee that it bragged was an arrested fentanyl trafficker and undocumented immigrant. Then it added an almost certainly AI-generated cartoon of an officer handcuffing the sobbing woman — not attributed to any particular tool, but in the unmistakable style of ChatGPT’s super-popular Studio Ghibli imitations, which have flooded the internet over the past week.

An ugly use of a software tool shouldn’t necessarily indict that tool. But as the picture joined the host of others on my social feeds, the adorable Ghibli filter and the White House’s social media blitz started to feel somehow made for each other. They’re both, as counterintuitive as it might sound, the product of a mindset that treats basic decency as weakn …

Read the full story at The Verge.