Ghibli-Inspired Image Trend Prompts OpenAI to Set Limits

To manage the heavy traffic, the company placed rate limits on how many images users can generate.

On March 25, OpenAI added an image generator to ChatGPT 4o. Within hours, people began sharing their results, especially drawings that resembled the animation style seen in Ghibli films.

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Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, joined in on the trend by posting an artificial intelligence (AI) made portrait of himself. Elon Musk also posted an image that showed a Shiba Inu being held up like a scene from The Lion King.

However, the trend, also called "Ghiblification", put pressure on OpenAI’s systems.

Altman explained that the system was struggling to keep up with the volume of requests. "Our GPUs are melting", he wrote, adding that they were introducing rate limits to keep things running while working on improvements.

OpenAI did not say exactly how long these restrictions would stay in place. However, Altman mentioned that users on the free tier of ChatGPT would be limited to three image generations per day.

The company explained that rate limits help keep the system stable when a large number of people use it at once. Without limits, the servers could slow down or become unreliable.

Meanwhile, Google introduced Gemini 2.5 Pro, the latest version of its AI model, on March 25. How does it perform? Read the full story.