Even as Ghibli AI images have taken over the internet with brands, political parties and regular internet users all trying to Ghiblify their lives, the company generating most of them is feeling the heat.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has jokingly asked people to stop generating AI images on the latest version of ChatGPT. “Can y’all please chill on generating images. This is insane our team needs sleep,” he posted on X. “We just haven’t been able to catch up since launch so people are still working to keep the service up. Biblical demand, i have never seen anything like it,” he added.
Altman even joked that the viral image trend was delaying the arrival of AGI. “Nothing makes me happier when you affirm AGI. Do you have any new timelines? I know it’s a huge shot in the dark,” a user asked him. “it will come sooner if you stop using our gpus to make images…” he replied.
The Ghibli trend began when OpenAI had demoed how images could be turned into AI drawings in its livestream announcing its native image generation. In the demo, Altman and two other OpenAI researchers had taken a selfie, and then instantly turned it into a cartoon image. Right after the livestream got over, people began furiously trying out making those images themselves. The results were spectacular — much better than any AI tool had previously managed — and the trend became viral.
It now appears that OpenAI’s servers are unable to keep up with the load of managing all this demand. Generating images take a lot more GPU bandwidth than generating text, and OpenAI’s new autoregressive techniques to generate images are even more resource intensive, and take more time. As such, OpenAI is likely using most of its GPUs to generate these images, as opposed to research or building new models.
Altman might have joked about asking people to not generate AI images, but the episode shows how unpredictable the response to AI can be, even to those people building the models themselves. AI models now can program, write reports, and create legal briefs at least as well as the average human, but what appears to have gone viral is a trend about generating Ghibli images. And this shows how futile it could be predict how AI progresses impacts the world — it could be just better to sit back and go with the flow.