To slop or not to slop. It was one of those days on the internet. Last week, after the introduction of Open AI’s 4o model enabled advanced image generation in ChatGPT, users quickly discovered they could generate a picture of… well, almost anything they wanted. And what they wanted most of all, at least in those very early hours with their newfound superpower, was to feed GPT real pictures of themselves, their loved ones, and various historical and cultural touchstones, and to have their friendly neighborhood superintelligence turn them into anime characters reminiscent of Studio Ghibli, a famous and beloved Japanese animation studio. After the first few Ghibli girlfriends went viral, everyone had to have one, and a classically presenting memetic explosion followed. For just about 24 hours, X — the first platform where users explored the new tool — set aside the culture war, the Tesla firebombings, and the collapse of globalization to share a lot of this: