The Indian internet has been full of Ghibli pictures over the last few days, and the company behind most of these images has taken notice.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that India is outpacing the world in AI adoption. “What’s happening with AI adoption in india right now is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity–India is outpacing the world,” he posted on X.
Altman in the last few days has indicated that India has taken to GPT in a big way. After announcing that his company’s servers were “melting” from the demand, and that they were adding more than 1 million users every hour, Altman had appeared to hint that it was India behind these massive numbers. Just yesterday, Altman had reshared a post from the MyGov India account, which had created Ghibli-styled images of PM Modi, with the Indian flag.
He’d also reposted a post from India post, which showed Indian postmen in Ghibli-style images.
The Ghibli images have certainly taken over the Indian internet in the last few days. They’ve been used by everyone from political parties to entertainers to lakhs of common people. Social media networks are full of them, and their adoption has been spurred by their use by celebrities and official government accounts. All this has meant that ChatGPT is seeing a surge in Indian users.
It remains to be seen if this surge stays — it’s possible that many of these people have created ChatGPT accounts just to create cartoon images of themselves, and will leave the platform when the trend fades away. But this Ghibli trend has been an extremely powerful initiation of the world’s largest market to AI — it’s very likely that many of these new users will stay on, and discover the other capabilities of ChatGPT’s AI models. And if AI adoption in India does indeed move significantly after this viral moment, Studio Ghibli will forever be credited as the force that brought AI to the masses in India.