What seems like a harmless filter today may actually be an open door to a new level of digital exposure.
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| Studio Ghibli style with ChatGPT |
Turning your photo into a Studio Ghibli-style illustration is undoubtedly one of the most charming - and viral - fads of recent days. Thanks to OpenAI's image generation tools, thousands of users have published versions of themselves with the aesthetics of the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, as if they had stepped straight out of My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away.
Ghibli, AI and the aesthetic trap
However, what seems like an innocent game could have worrying implications in terms of privacy and use of personal data. Data protection lawyer Eduard Blasi has issued a stark warning: uploading personal images, even artistically transformed ones, involves “voluntarily handing over access to intimate and unique photos of yourself or your family members.”
Beyond the image itself, what is relevant is that this data feeds the training of artificial intelligence algorithms, which turns each uploaded image into a valuable asset for technology companies. In Blasi's words, “we are providing the platform with greater leverage.”
A filter with invisible consequences
Such warnings are not new. It already happened with the FaceApp phenomenon a few years ago, when millions of people gave their face to an application that promised to show what they would look like when they were old. Then, too, alarm bells went off about the mass release of biometric data. According to Blasi, the current situation is comparable, albeit more sophisticated: “We are falling again, but this time under a layer of nostalgic and artistic aesthetics”.
The concern lies not only in the terms of use or what data the company developing these tools collects, but also in how it could be used in the future. The images generated could be used to train facial recognition models, generate fake avatars or, in a darker scenario, be used for impersonation.
Although OpenAI claims to have responsible use policies, experts insist that effective control over the data is lost the moment it is uploaded to the network.