OpenAI launched 4o Image Generation, image generation built natively into GPT-4o, making it the default image capability in ChatGPT. It rendered text without mangling it, followed instructions closely, and let you keep working on the same image through conversation; it went out to Free, Plus, Pro and Team users. Within days, redrawing your own photographs in the style of Studio Ghibli had become a worldwide pastime. Sam Altman changed his own profile picture on X to one of those images on the 27th, and posted that the company's GPUs were "melting" under the load. OpenAI said 130 million people made 700 million images in the first week. The company said it declined prompts naming the style of an individual living artist while permitting broader studio styles, a line that drew criticism. Hayao Miyazaki's remark that such work was "an insult to life itself" — made in 2016, watching a demonstration of CG animation — was quoted back widely, while Studio Ghibli itself said nothing about the trend.