Privacy experts warn of data risks in ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli image trend
Privacy advocates have warned that ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli art generator, launched on March 26, 2025, may pose risks to users who upload personal photos. Experts allege OpenAI could be using the viral trend to collect facial data and personal images for AI training, potentially circumventing data protection regulations.
What happened
ChatGPT launched a Studio Ghibli image generation feature on March 26, 2025, allowing users to upload personal photos and receive animated versions in the style of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.
The feature went viral on social media, with millions of users uploading personal images. On March 30 at around 4 PM, the surge in usage caused ChatGPT's servers to crash.
Reported impact
Privacy experts and cybersecurity advocates warned that users uploading personal photos unknowingly shared facial data and private images with OpenAI. Critics alleged the trend could enable identity theft, creation of fake profiles, data security breaches, and legal complications if photos are misused.
Index analysis
According to privacy advocates including Luiza Jarovsky, co-founder of the AI, Tech & Privacy Academy, voluntarily uploaded images give OpenAI legal consent to process them under different terms than web-scraped data, allowing the company to use submitted photographs without facing legal limitations.
Experts alleged OpenAI's privacy policy explicitly states the company collects personal data input by users to train its AI models when users have not opted out, and that the company gains access to original personal images while only processed versions are visible to other platforms.
Governance controls
Critics alleged that OpenAI's data collection methods through the Ghibli feature could circumvent GDPR regulations by obtaining user consent through voluntary submission rather than scraping, providing the company leeway to utilize users' facial data.
Classification
Sources and evidence
Sources not yet published
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