OpenAI has a Studio Ghibli problem

When you can create art just by asking for it, what might you create? If you’re anything like the internet these last few days, you’d create some lovely things — stylized family portraits, a thousand different looks for the Distracted Boyfriend meme — and some truly, deeply, unfathomably horrifying ones. But most of all, it turns out, you’d turn everything, everything into a Studio Ghibli creation.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about the Ghibli-ification of everything this week. The Verge’s Kylie Robison joins the show to explain OpenAI’s new image generator inside ChatGPT, which is vastly more powerful and accurate than anything the company has released before. It immediately made clear both how interesting and fun these AI tools can be, and how hugely problematic they are both legally and morally. The lawsuits seem to practically write themselves, but it’s still not at all clear where any of this is headed.

Before we get to that, though, Nilay and David have some gadget news to talk about. We wonder aloud about the ongoing virality of the Canon G7X Mark III, and why any five-year-old camera would be so huge on TikTok. We also talk about the return of OG Facebook, the newest update for the AirPods Max, why Apple might want to put a camera in your Apple Watch, what’s coming up at WWDC, and whether the end of the Echo brand is really upon us. After that, it’s AI time.

Finally, in the lightning round, we bring you America’s favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a Dummy. We also talk about the ongoing Signal attack-planning saga, Elon Musk pressuring Reddit CEO Steve Huffman to moderate his platform differently, the latest on the TikTok ban, and the twists and turns in the future of the car business. Tariffs, y’all. Tariffs.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first in gadget news:

And in OpenAI, Studio Ghibli, and other AI news:

And in the lightning round: