AI Trends Like Ghibli And Nano Banana: Fun Fads Today, Potential Privacy Nightmare Tomorrow

New Delhi (Vishvas News). Every few months, a new viral AI trend sweeps the social media space. A few months ago, ‘Ghibli-art-style’ portraits took social media by storm, with people creating dreamy, animation-inspired avatars based on their original photos. In September 2025, Google Gemini’s Nano Banana, a new AI image-generation model, went viral, letting users transform their selfies into 3D figurines, toy-style personas, and nostalgic retro portraits in sarees.

These viral trends may be entertaining, but they collect huge datasets and can later reproduce your face or style, even without new uploads, which means that you are normalising giving up control of your likeness. Today, it may be a whimsical avatar, but tomorrow it can be a deepfake or manipulated image used somewhere without your permission.

Through this explainer, we differentiate between fact and fiction. These viral AI trends are more than just harmless fun; they represent a significant shift in how personal data is collected and used, posing real threats to privacy and security that go beyond simple entertainment. While people are captivated by the creative possibilities, they often overlook the hidden risks.

The Ghibli animation & Nano Banana Wave: Entertainment or Threat

These viral trends were created using OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool and Google’s Gemini 2.5 to preserve recognisable faces and memories of passed loved ones while maintaining likeness. Many users don’t need pro or paid accounts to recreate these hottest trends. What used to take days of effort can now be pumped out in minutes, blurring the line between human creativity and algorithmic efficiency. Especially for a generation raised on Instagram reels, the line between ‘adorable fake’ and ‘dangerous fake’ is razor-thin.

The image below is created using the Nano Banana image generation model via Google AI Studio.

Viral Prompt created using Google Gemini: Convert the uploaded image into a stunning 4K HD portrait. The subject should have long, dark, wavy hair cascading over her shoulders. She should be wearing a translucent, elegant red saree draped over one shoulder, which reveals a fitted blouse underneath. White flowers should be tucked behind her right ear. She is looking slightly to her right, with a soft, serene expression. I want her face to remain exactly as it appears in the uploaded image without any alterations. The background should feature a plain, warm-toned wall, illuminated by a warm light source from the right, creating a distinct, soft-edged shadow of her profile and hair on the wall behind her. The overall mood should be retro and artistic.

Below are Images created using the Nano Banana image generation model via Google AI Studio.

But beneath all the glitz and glamour, these viral creations aren’t just fun distractions or entertainment; they highlight a deeper truth about how advanced artificial intelligence technologies are blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Also, every data collected is turning these tools into repositories of massive datasets, which can be used later in ways different from the original creation.

Research shows that “Ghibli-style content created by AI raises important copyright challenges while posing considerable ethical questions about ownership, creator identification, and the pressure on computational systems due to its widespread popularity.”

Other challenges also include biometric and facial data harvesting, where users upload their face, family photos, or pet pictures, and the tools capture metadata, facial geometry, expressions, lighting, and angles. All this is rich biometric data, which can be used to create deepfakes, face-swap abuse, and misuse of likeness, giving fraudsters opportunities for impersonation, digital harassment, or even scams. It can also implicitly train data acquisition without explicit consent and raise copyright and Artist Rights Erosion (ARE). Also, legal frameworks (especially around biometric data) are not fully equipped to catch up in many countries, including India. 

While AI companies claim to use invisible watermarks to label AI-generated images, this creates a dangerous imbalance, where a fake image could be used for misinformation or scams, and there’s no easy, public-facing way to verify its authenticity. There is a key need for traceability by holistically discussing AI watermarking techniques. The said techniques have their own limitations, such as technical implementation, lack of robustness, making it prone to manipulation, and false positives.

Facing the threat, several senior officers have warned people about risks in AI trends like saree-style Ghibli/Nano Banana images. These AI trends may look like harmless fun today, but they are setting the stage for how billions of people will consume news, culture, and even politics tomorrow. Every click, every post, every AI-created content will make you shape the future of AI, media and the truth itself.

This is where AI literacy matters. Users need to learn not just how to enjoy trends, but how to spot manipulation, demand transparency, and question the incentives behind viral AI-generated content.

To decode better, Vishvas News spoke to AI and Deepfake Expert Azhar Machwe, who warned that viral trends like Ghibli and Nano Banana may look fun but exploit online data, copy human creativity, and fuel easy monetisation. He cautions that beyond copyright theft, these tools pose ethical dilemmas on misinformation, originality, and the future of creativity.

Exclusive: AI & Deepfake Expert Azhar Machwe on the Risks Behind Viral AI Trends

1. How AI Collects Data

“Data is collected through the open resource that is the internet. The internet contains both legal and illegal sources of data. Studio Ghibli did not permit OpenAI; however, there are enough examples in the wild to allow models to recreate the style … the amazing thing is how the models can get high-quality patterns and use them to transform any image.”

2. Beyond Ghibli: Any Style Can Be Cloned

“This principle can be applied to any labelled style (eg, the famous painter like Van Gogh) where enough samples are present to extract common patterns. This is also applicable to speech generation (voice cloning) and writing style copying (eg style output as if written by Shakespeare). More examples available on the internet easier it becomes to extract patterns and replicate.”

3. How Monetisation Happens

“Monetisation is easy because the tough part (creating content) is done by AI based on user interaction rather than real skills. Then, creating physical artefacts like Nano Banana-based 3D models is easy. Especially when you see the easy availability of 3D printers that can work with a variety of materials. Earlier, it would have been the tough job of a person to create a 3D model, requiring skills and creativity, and then ensure a better 3D print. Now the AI model is working hard.”

4. The Business Model

“Monetisation is also happening in another fashion – through the sale of paid access to this tech. Because of the above points, when people compare AI to the internet and steam engine – I feel they are missing a point – before AI, nothing could challenge or substitute human creativity, which was a major source of innovation and subsequent monetisation.”

5. Ethical Dilemmas – Copying Creativity

“Ethical aspects are threefold: there is the basic aspect of copying / using patterns created by others, like monetising someone else’s creativity. The other side of this is that nothing is truly unique, as we are all inspired by something. No innovation stands in isolation.”

6. Ethical Dilemmas – AI as a Weapon

“Secondly, the question of this becoming a weapon in the wrong hands to spread misinformation has big implications. Never before have such tools been available on such a large scale. The other side of this is the fact that it is not ethical to limit technology, and there are other examples where negative aspects are ignored in front of the bigger positive aspects (such as nuclear energy, plastics, and petrol engines).”

7. Ethical Dilemmas – What Is True Creativity?

“Finally, what is the threshold to know something when AI can do it for you. This is a pure ethical dilemma. Can an artist claim to be an artist if they prompt their art? During the early days of Gen AI, an artist created a ‘painting’ using MidJourney AI titled: ‘Space Opera Theatre’. It won the first prize in an art competition, but once it was realised that it was AI-generated, the entry was disqualified. The core dilemma is – what is true creativity? The other side is that writing prompts are an art form as there are no rules that guarantee specific outputs.”

Conclusion: Every few months, a new viral AI trend sweeps the social media space. A few months ago, ‘Ghibli-art-style’ portraits took social media by storm, with people creating dreamy, animation-inspired avatars based on their original photos. In September 2025, Google Gemini’s Nano Banana, a new AI image-generation model, went viral, letting users transform their selfies into 3D figurines, toy-style personas, and nostalgic retro portraits in sarees.

Tags

• ai literacy
• deepfakes