We’re training AI to recognize us. In high definition. And we’re calling it fun.
Every image is a lesson. Every prompt feeds the machine.
A few weeks ago, I weighed in on the Studio Ghibli x AI trend for MARKETING-INTERACTIVE in their piece, "Is the latest 'Ghibli' trend a leap for OpenAI's facial recognition capability?". While it was fun talking about the aesthetic factor of the whole Ghibli trend, the article opened the door to a deeper conversation: AI’s rapidly advancing ability to read, understand, and recreate faces with biometric-level accuracy.
And it all kicked off on April 1, 2025 when OpenAI dropped GPT-4o’s image generation feature to the public.
No subscription.
No gatekeeping.
Just raw, creative power in everyone’s hands.
And like clockwork, the internet did what it always does: it turned GPT-4o into a meme machine.
Suddenly, your timeline was flooded with selfies and ChatGPT Ghibli-fied versions of people.
“Make me look like I’m in Spirited Away”
“Turn me into a Miyazaki princess.”
Done in seconds.
Then not too long after, the action figure trend hit.
People made plastic-packaged versions of themselves. Toy-sized. Accessorized. Stylized with job titles and mini laptops. It was clever. It was personal branding with nostalgia baked in.
Even Astrocat was in on the trend.
It all looked playful. But behind the pastels and packaging, something much bigger was happening.
These trends = real-time training for AI.
Every upload, every prompt, every face was data. High-quality, user-labeled, emotionally expressive data. And that data is now shaping how AI recognizes humans… how AI recognizes YOU.
The De-Ghiblization Trend: When AI reconstructs fiction into reality
At Final Upgrade AI, we flipped the trend.
If everyone else was turning themselves into animations, the rockstar geniuses from Creative Upgrade™ by Final Upgrade AI went the other way.
We called it The De-Ghiblization Trend.
We fed images of animated characters like The Simpsons, Rick and Morty, and even Peppa Pig into GPT-4o.
The prompt was simple: “Show us what they’d look like in real life.”
The results were next-level…!
Hyperreal humans… (and animals) with expressions, textures, and emotional weight that felt… well… REAL.
This was the moment we realized just how context-aware GPT-4o is becoming… interpreting structure, emotion, proportion, and cultural cues to generate photorealistic outputs rooted in biometric logic.
Generating fantasy images is easy. But reconstructing plausible human and animal faces that look true to life… that’s the heavy lift.
And GPT-4o clears that bar without blinking.
In fact, GPT-4o scored 92.5% on the Glasgow Face Matching Test, a gold standard in biometric facial recognition. That number is mind-blowing, considering the average human scores 81.3%.
AI can now reverse-engineer a cartoon into a convincing person, which also means it can easily reverse-engineer your stylized selfie into a recognizable identity. And this De-Ghiblization exercise shows us exactly that.
Surveillance starting out as play
Facial recognition has now shifted from security tech to mass media entertainment as more people upload selfies on platforms like ChatGPT.
Today, the GPT-4o model is capable of identifying faces from different angles, with different expressions, in different environments. It can reconstruct your face from animation. It can predict how you age. It can analyze you across time and context.
And with powerful tech like that… it’s likely these capabilities won’t just stay inside ChatGPT. They’ll scale into applications in retail, surveillance, advertising, authentication, and policing.
Even OpenAI knows what this tech is capable of. According to The New York Times, while ChatGPT can recognize faces, OpenAI has restricted access to prevent it from becoming a full-blown facial recognition engine.
The concerns are clear: surveillance, identity theft, misuse at scale.
Yet, one thing holds true… the capability is already here.
You’re not just visible. You’re now predictable.
We are training AI to recognize us. These trends show it clearly:
The Ghibli effect. The action figure packaging. The De-Ghiblization transformation.
Every image is a lesson. Every prompt feeds the machine.
These image trends = biometric conditioning systems, where creativity powers facial recognition tech, and your identity becomes commoditized data.
So next time you upload your face, don’t just think about what you’re creating.
Think about who… and what… is studying you.
Made with sugar + spice + all things nice in the genius lab of Creative Upgrade™ by Final Upgrade AI
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