Prompting Creativity: Generative AI, the Ghiblify Yourself Trend,and the Culture Industry in Indonesian Digital Culture
TL;DR
It is argued that the Ghiblify trend produces a sense of creative agency while placing users within standardized, commodified, and algorithmically governed systems of cultural production.
Abstract
This study examines the Ghiblify Yourself trend as a form of AI-mediated visual communication in Indonesian digital culture. With this trend, users transform personal photographs into Studio Ghibli- inspired images using text-to-image generative AI. Although often seen as playful digital entertainment, the practice reveals deeper questions about platform participation, visual self-presentation, creativity, and algorithmic mediation. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s theory of the culture industry, this study aims to explain how users experience creative agency in prompt-based image production and how this practice reflects the changing relationship between art, technology, and industrial society. The study used a qualitative design involving semi-structured interviews with nine informants, non-participant digital observation of content on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter/X, and a literature review. Data were analyzed through open, axial, and selective coding. The findings show five main themes: FOMO and platform-driven participation; nostalgia and family memory; digital fantasy and the imagined self; prompting as pseudo-creative labor; and algorithmic mediation and false creativity. This study argues that the Ghiblify trend produces a sense of creative agency while placing users within standardized, commodified, and algorithmically governed systems of cultural production. The article contributes to communication studies by clarifying how AI changes authorship, agency, and visual meaning online.