Studio Ghibli is a celebrated Japanese animation studio known for masterpieces-in-motion like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. It was founded by the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, known his signature Ghibli style comprisingcartoon characters, captivating cinematography, and moving storylines. For a typical Japanese animation studio like Studio Ghibli, talented artists work round the clock to create beautiful hand-drawn images, and then there are animators that bring these intricate images to life.
Enter Generative AI, which can now easily replicate the exact art style and churn out millions of Ghibli-esque images in a fraction of the time taken by human artists. Clearly, it raises many concerns.
Now that the users are leveraging various AI tools to transform their photos into Ghibli art, one can’t unsee the shoddy imitation of the creative styles of industry veterans and experts. Many may argue that this fancy image generation model is a threat to copyrights, artists, and individual creativity. Moreover, it also attracts skepticism about the privacy of user data on which these AI tools are being trained.
Ghibli AI Image Creator – A Fun New Feature or a Shady Data Harvester?
The recent trend of creating Ghiblified images has taken the world by storm. It has unlocked a new way for individuals, celebrities, and brands to interact with AI and to recreate personal images in Ghibli-art style using a few prompts.
While users are having fun creating and sharing their images on social media, they should understand how these data-intensive tools work to transform your ordinary image into a Ghibli-fied image.
Behind the scenes, an AI tool works on advanced data processing algorithms or architectures like Stable Diffusion or GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) at play. These algorithms rely heavily on user inputs, which, in this case, are images.
Read More – What is Diffusion in AI?
When a user uploads an image to Ghiblify, the AI tool temporarily stores the input image on its cloud server and processes it in real time. To transform the image, the tool runs the uploaded image through integrated image generation models, such as ChatGPT’s 4o model.
Such models are trained on millions of open source or publically available images scrapped from the internet.
The end result – a fancy Ghibli-esque image engineered for social media.
Ghibli-style Images and a New Wave of Cybersecurity Threats
Using AI to create images or art is not risky per se. It depends on the type of input. If the input is just a prompt or text explaining a situation, AI will use its mathematical models to create something as per the prompt.
AI image creation tools become risky when users try to transform existing images into artificial art. Stylized or transformed images can be used for committing widespread cybercrimes.
Here are some real risks of using personal images in AI –
- Metadata leaks
- Dataset poisoning
- Deepfake disguised as Ghibli filter
- Facial Feature extraction
Metadata Leaks
Every image contains EXIF metadata that includes image size, device name, date, location coordinates, and more. When you upload an image on an AI tool, the tool acquires all of this information and stores it on the servers. When you try to transform images with people, faces, location, etc., AI gets additional data, including facial data, street views, room layout, and more.
Because of how easily the tool transforms the image into a Ghibli-style image, many users tend to skip the privacy policy or leave the checkbox unmarked. Using an AI tool without checking the privacy policy implies that the image and its associated data have been given voluntarily for AI model training.
Most AI image-transforming tools don’t strip the metadata from the input or output images. This can result in a major metadata leak if Ghiblified images fall into the wrong hands. Attackers can use reverse diffusion tools to reconstruct a user profile using information from the stolen metadata.
Dataset Poisoning
Developers scrape publically available images to train their AI image generation models. Attackers can use these instances to infect the input data by sneaking in images with pixel-level triggers. These triggers negatively affect the AI model and trigger unexpected behavior, such as embedded QR codes inside the stylized images.
Deepfake in the Guise of a Cute Anime Filter
Deepfakes are a threat to individuals, organizations, and national security. They can easily be used for spreading disinformation across the web or to manipulate the masses. While deepfakes can be detected using specialized tools, Anime-style or Ghibli-style deepfakes tend to be harder to detect because of complex textures and art style.
Attackers can take advantage of such filters to hide their ulterior motives. They can launch widespread phishing attacks using stylized avatars, create false influencer personas hidden under a guise, or trick uninformed audiences into clicking links or scanning QR codes.
Facial Feature Extraction
While Ghiblifying personal images, the AI tool preserves latent vector/space to train its model and generate accurate results. A latent space or vector is a compressed set of data points comprising essential underlying features of an image. These mapped data points help the AI model predict the structure of the input data or use it to generate new images.
If such an image generation tool or its embedded structure falls into the wrong hands, it can lead to serious cybercrimes, including identity thefts. Attackers can use the model inversion attacks to regenerate facial features or an eerily close representation of the original face to attack facial recognition systems.
Safety First
Ghibli-style image creation model has helped users enhance their creative ideas in various domains. But, they should be mindful of certain points to avoid scams and unwanted attention from cybercriminals. Here are some tips to keep in mind while creating Ghibli-style AI images:
- Use a powerful EXIF data scrubber to permanently erase metadata data from an image.
- Refrain from uploading personal images with faces, location, or an indoor layout.
- Use textual prompts instead to engineer Ghibli-style images.
- Reverse search on Google, Yandex, or other web browser to check if your transformed image is being used elsewhere.
- Check AI app privacy policies before using them. If there is no privacy policy, don’t use it.
A Fun Illusion in Disguise
Thanks to AI, anyone can create a Ghibli-style image using a few prompts. . However, this comes with profound implications for artists, as imitating their style without giving any compensation or due credits takes away years of hard work they put in honing that skill.
From a privacy perspective, users uploading personal images on AI tools unknowingly give their consent to these to process their images for AI training. An image’s data can be easily used nowadays by miscreants to trigger widespread cyberattacks, such as manipulation, phishing scams, identity thefts, spread of misinformation, and more.
This post is not to instill fear but to inform users of the hidden dangers of AI and how to use it wisely. Remember, when something is free, the hidden cost is you. Hence, before using an AI tool to transform your image into a Ghibli-style art, ask yourself – How are you paying for this free service?
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