Ghibli and Nano Banana: The Viral AI Trends That Took Over the Internet in 2025
AI trends like Ghibli-style images and Google’s Nano Banana figurines went viral in 2025, transforming selfies into anime art and collectible 3D toys.
AI trends of 2025: Ghibli-style portraits and Google’s Nano Banana figurines dominated social media.
In 2025, all kinds of scapegoats for celebrity gossip and anthems of the endless dancing meme were in place for AI-generated creativity. Top two trends evolved this year, with dreamy Ghibli-style images and weird little Nano Banana figurines: two completely different ways for people to socialize with generative AI.
Ghibli-Style Image Craze
During the elevation period, soft pastel hand-painted portraits poured into Instagram, X, and TikTok feeds, all of which appeared as if they were drawn out of frames of a Studio Ghibli film. Using OpenAI's GPT-4o, users would turn their pets, homes, vacations, and even boring selfies into animesque nostalgic-style artworks.
The response was too much. Over 700 million Ghibli-style images had been generated in just a few days by 130 million users, the trend capturing the hearts through an imagination of living life inside an animated fairy tale with a basic touch of childlike wonder, said OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap.
Soon, OpenAI's servers got overwhelmed from the assignment and had to impose restrictions, like a free user could generate just three images a day.
The Nano Banana Figurine Craze
While the Ghibli wave was fading away, the Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model broug
