Counter Strike 2 e-sports tournament organizer ESL criticized by many netizens for deliberately posting several tweets on the topic through its official X (Twitter) account in order to take

Several American e-sports news websites reported that Counter Strike 2 (CS2) e-sports tournament organizer ESL, has been criticized by many netizens for deliberately posting several tweets on the topic through its official X (Twitter) account in order to take advantage of the popularity and trend of the recently popular Japanese anime Studio Ghibli-styled AI images on Sunday.

According to reports, netizens were disappointed that ESL had blindly followed the trend and posted several Ghibli-styled AI images as tweet with the text "If Counter Strike was a Studio Ghibli film, it would look like this", and also questioned what the connection is between Studio Ghibli animation and CS2, and even the entire e-sports circle.

Many netizens also criticized that ESL has time to take advantage of the popularity, but does not use its free time to increase the promotion of CS2-related e-sports activities, and thinks that their approach is very naive. Some even criticized that instead of using the convenience of AI to casually release a few AI-generated images related to the Ghibli style, it would be more valuable and meaningful to cooperate with each team to shoot a documentary/web series/movie with actual funds being spent.

In fact, since OpenAI unilaterally announced and released the Ghibli-styled AI image generator, not only Studio Ghibli employees and fans, but also many people have begun to be upset with the practices of the AI technology developer.

Generally, people evaluate OpenAI's practices as lacking the importance of respecting and protecting copyright awareness, and also criticize the company for criticizing users using platforms such as Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT Plus, Flux, Gemini, etc. to abuse, produce and sell DeepFake stripping nude photos and videos of Korean female idols, stars, Internet celebrities and normal people, while turning a blind eye to allowing users to develop and abuse codes that can convert any photos and videos into Ghibli-styled.

As the controversy has grown, Hayao Miyazaki, the president and animator of Studio Ghibli, also expressed his disappointment in an interview with CNN on Saturday (March 29) that netizens had abused AI to arbitrarily generate Ghibli-styled photos and videos.

He said that he has worked in the animation industry for 62 years, and each work must go through after months and sometimes years of hard work and preparation without sleep to produce.

Nowadays, with the convenience of AI, you can just input a few words into the code to create an AI-generated image that anyone can abuse to create using their own style. This is human disrespect for animators and the animation industry, and will also cause future generations to have serious misunderstandings about how difficult the production process of cartoons and animation works is.

In fact, ESL is not the first e-sports unit that has been criticized by fans for deliberately posting Studio Ghibli-styled generated images tweets through X in order to gain popularity and trend.

Experienced American CS2 team Faze Clan was also criticized by fans for posting similar tweets in the same way at the same time.