THEORIZING THE GHIBLI EFFECT: A CRITIQUE OF AI, AESTHETIC THEFT AND THE CRISIS OF AUTHORSHIP IN THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

Abstract

This article theorizes The Ghibli Effect, a techno-cultural phenomenon where generative AI simulates the visual style of Studio Ghibli while eroding its emotional, ethical and ontological depth. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault, it conceptualizes AI’s aesthetic theft that severs artistic authorship from lived experience, memory and intentional labour. Studio Ghibli’s celebration of slow life, relational existence and patient creativity is contrasted with the mechanical reproduction and capitalization of artistic forms. Through the frameworks of aura, authorship and situated aesthetics, the authors argue that algorithmic reproduction destabilizes cultural memory and signals a crisis in contemporary art. The Ghibli Effect is not mere stylistic mimicry but an ethical rupture in creative labour displaced by extractive automation. It highlights paradoxes of slow existence, commodified sensibility, and the loss of memory in machine-made art. Ultimately, the phenomenon is situated within broader socio-religious and philosophical voyages of power, revealing how technological infiltration undermines cultural heritage and spiritual imagination, while placing artistic equity at risk as subaltern voices and human creativity are overshadowed by algorithmic authority.