Last week, OpenAI’s chatbot had a record-breaking spike in users due to the craze for creating Ghibli-style AI art using ChatGPT’s image-generation tool. This briefly limited the use of the feature and put a burden on the company’s infrastructure.
Users from all around the world flooded social media with pictures inspired by the hand-drawn aesthetic of Studio Ghibli, the well-known Japanese animation studio founded by acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki and known for films like “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro.”
In an X post on Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated, “We added one million users in the last hour,” drawing a comparison to ChatGPT’s explosive launch more than two years prior, which saw the addition of one million members in five days.
According to data from market research firm Similarweb, the average weekly active user count surpassed 150 million for the first time this year.
According to the market research organization, the ChatGPT app’s weekly active users and global app downloads surged by 5% and 11%, respectively, over the previous week, while in-app purchase revenue rose by 6%.
After the AI startup released improvements to its GPT-4o model, enabling sophisticated picture generating capabilities, last week saw an all-time high in active users, in-app subscription revenue, and app downloads, according to SensorTower data.
However, as it copes with an increase of traffic brought on by the popularity of its image-generating tool, the chatbot has had a number of bugs and low-scale outages over the past week.
Concerns over possible copyright infringement have also been raised by the widespread use of the AI technology for the Ghibli effect.
The legal environment around AI-generated visuals that imitate Studio Ghibli’s unique aesthetic is a murky one.
