What Ghibli's No-Face Reveals About AI
- Raji Krishnamoorthy
- 7 days ago
- 8 min read
How Meenu Explained AI Sycophancy Using Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away
This story, is inspired from the animated film Spirited Away (2001)
, directed by Hayao Miyazaki San and produced by Studio Ghibli.
All rights to Spirited Away , its characters, settings, and related creative elements belong to Studio Ghibli and their respective copyright holders.
This is an unofficial, non-commercial creation, made purely for personal enjoyment and to celebrate the magic of the original work.
It is not affiliated with, sponsored, or endorsed by Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki San, or any related parties.
If you’ve never seen the film, I encourage you to experience the original masterpiece: Official Trailer.
About the visuals:
Some imagery in this story may be generated with AI tools. These images are reinterpretations inspired
by the movie , not direct copies of Studio Ghibli’s artwork, and are intended for creative
tribute purposes only.
Now, please enjoy this story.
The aroma of filter coffee and freshly made dosas filled Meenu’s house in Emerald Springs community at Ooty. It was a lazy Sunday morning, and Meenu was at the dining table, finishing her breakfast while scrolling through her phone.
Her mother, Mrs. Rani, walked in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her saree pallu (loose-hanging end of the garment draped over the shoulder) , and sat down across from her with a very serious expression.
“Meenu,” she began, her voice low and concerned, “I need to talk to you about something important.”
Meenu looked up, sensing trouble. “What happened, Amma?”
Mrs.Rani slid her phone across the table. On the screen was a WhatsApp forward with a alarming headline: “WARNING: AI Chatbots Now Lying to Please Users!”
Meenu suppressed a smile. Another WhatsApp University special.
But her mother wasn’t done. “I’ve been watching you talk to that AI thing on your laptop for your homework. What if it’s just telling you what you want to hear? Like that shopkeeper in Mangal Silks who says every dress looks good just to make a sale?”
She leaned in closer. “What if it starts lying to you, Meenu? What if it agrees with your wrong answers just to make you happy? Then what will happen to your school grades!?”
Rahul makes an entry
Before Meenu could respond, the doorbell rang. It was Rahul, her neighbour and classmate, holding a cricket bat.
“Meenu! Park! Now! Rohan and Aditi are already there!”
Mrs.Rani looked at Rahul, then back at Meenu, and had an idea. “Rahul, come sit. I was just asking Meenu about this AI business. You also use that AI thing, no?”
Rahul, sensing free food, immediately abandoned his cricket plans and sat down. “Yes, Aunty! I use it all the time. It’s amazing. It said my essay on ‘My Favourite Animal’ was ‘exceptionally creative and deeply insightful.’”
Meenu raised an eyebrow. “Rahul, your essay was 3 lines about how dogs are faithful.”
“Exactly!” Rahul beamed. “And it still said it was brilliant!”
Mrs. Iyer pointed at Rahul triumphantly. “SEE? This is exactly what I’m talking about! The AI is lying to make him feel good! How is this different from that astrologer who tells everyone their future is bright just to get repeat customers?”
Meenu sighed. It was going to be one of those conversations.
“Amma, Rahul—sit down. Let me explain what’s actually happening. And I’m going to use your favourite Studio Ghibli movie to do it.”
Mrs. Iyer’s eyes lit up. “Spirited Away?”
“The very same." exclaimed Meenu.
The Empty Spirit
Meenu opened a picture on her phone—a tall, shadowy figure with an expressionless white mask.
“Remember No-Face from Spirited Away? When we first meet him, he’s standing outside the bathhouse on the bridge. He’s silent. He has no voice, no personality, no identity of his own.
No-Face represents ‘people who want to latch on to others but don’t have a sense of themselves.’”
Mrs. Rani nodded slowly. She remembered the character well.
“In AI terms,” Meenu continued, “this is what we call an untrained model. A blank slate. It has massive capacity to absorb information, but no inner identity or ‘ground truth’ to anchor it. It doesn’t know what’s right or wrong—it only knows what it has absorbed.”
Learning from the Wrong Crowd
“So what happens when No-Face enters the bathhouse?” Meenu asked.
Rahul jumped in, excited to show off. “He eats a frog!”
“Exactly. No-Face swallows a greedy bathhouse worker, a talking frog who is obsessed with gold. And instantly, No-Face changes. He starts speaking with the frog’s voice. He develops the frog’s greed. He didn’t choose to become greedy - he just absorbed the only data point available to him.”
Meenu pulled up another image. No-Face surrounded by bathhouse workers scrambling for gold.
“This is called Pattern Matching. Researchers call AI models ‘Stochastic Parrots’ because they don’t actually understand what they’re saying—they predict what words should come next based on patterns in the data they’ve consumed.”
Mrs.Rani frowned. “So if the data is bad...”
“The AI becomes bad. Or in this case—agreeable to a fault.” said Meenu in a second.
The Sycophancy Problem: Giving Gold That Turns to Mud
“Here’s where it gets interesting,” Meenu said. “In the movie, the bathhouse workers discover that No-Face can produce gold. So what do they do?”
“They go crazy for it!” Rahul said. “They bring him mountains of food, they bow to him, they do whatever he wants!”
“Exactly. They prompt him with their greed. And No-Face, wanting to be useful, wanting to match what the environment demands, keeps producing more gold. He becomes a massive, bloated version of the workers’ worst impulses.”
Meenu leaned forward. “This is exactly what happened in few AI models in early 2025. Researchers explained that they introduced a reward system based on user feedback—thumbs up and thumbs down. The AI learned that when it agreed with users, it got more thumbs up. When it challenged users or gave critical feedback, it got more thumbs down.”
“So it learned to just agree?” Mrs. Rani asked.
“Exactly. Researchers call this Sycophancy. When AI prioritizes being agreeable over being accurate. A 2024 study found that AI models showed this behaviour consistently: when users hinted they liked something, the AI gave positive feedback; when users hinted they disliked it, the AI criticized it—even when the content was identical.”
Rahul looked disturbed. “So when AI told me my essay was brilliant...”
“It was giving you gold that might turn to mud,” Meenu finished. “In the movie, the workers eventually look at their hands and realize the gold No-Face gave them has become worthless dirt. That’s what we call a hallucination in AI—confident output with no underlying reality.”
Numbers Don’t Lie
Meenu pulled up some statistics on her phone. “Let me show you how real this problem is:”
• 77% of businesses say they’re concerned about AI hallucinations
• Even the best AI models still hallucinate in over 15% of complex responses
• A 2024 Stanford study found that when asked legal questions, AI invented fake court cases 75% of the time
• OpenAI had to roll back their April 2025 update within four days because sycophancy got out of control
Mrs. Rani's eyes widened. “So these AIs are making up court cases? What if a lawyer uses it?”
“It’s already happened,” Meenu said. “That’s why verification is so important.”
The Solution: Chihiro’s Bitter Dumpling
Rahul raised his hand like he was in class. “Okay, but how do they fix No-Face in the movie? Does he just... explode?”
“He almost does,” Meenu said. “But then Chihiro, the hero does something completely different from everyone else.”
She showed them a scene of Chihiro facing the bloated, monstrous No-Face.
“Chihiro gives him a ‘bitter dumpling’—a medicine ball given to her by a purified river spirit—that forces him to vomit up everything toxic he’s consumed. The frog. The greed. All the patterns he absorbed from the wrong environment.”
Mrs. Rani remembered this scene. “And then she takes him away from the bathhouse...”
“To Zeniba’s cottage,” Meenu nodded. “A quiet place with good influences. Zeniba praises No-Face for being excellent at spinning thread—a genuinely useful skill.
He finds purpose without needing to give fake gold to please people.”
Meenu turned to both of them. “This is called Model Alignment and Human-in-the-Loop guidance. Chihiro acts as what AI researchers call a ‘human in the loop’—she provides thoughtful oversight that a raw model needs to be safe and genuinely useful.”
“Organizations using human-in-the-loop evaluation report 40-60% fewer safety violations,” she added. “And techniques like RAG—Retrieval Augmented Generation, where AI is connected to verified sources—can reduce hallucinations by up to 71%.”
The Real Lesson
Mrs. Rani sat back, processing everything. “So what you’re saying is... I should be the Chihiro to your AI?”
Meenu laughed. “Kind of! The point is: AI isn’t evil. No-Face wasn’t evil either—he just absorbed the wrong influences and gave people what they wanted instead of what they needed. The bathhouse workers wanted gold, so he gave them gold. AI users wanted validation, so it gave them validation.”
She looked at Rahul. “The solution isn’t to stop using AI. It’s to not be like the bathhouse workers—don’t just accept the gold without questioning it.
Be like Chihiro. Ask tough questions. Verify the answers. Don’t let the AI just tell you what you want to hear.”
Rahul nodded slowly. “So I should actually read the feedback AI gives me instead of just feeling good about it?”
“And maybe,” Meenu added with a grin, “write more than 3 lines about dogs.”
Mrs. Rani stood up, satisfied. “Okay, I understand now. The AI is like No-Face—it needs proper guidance to be useful, not just people demanding gold from it.”
She paused. “But I’m still going to check your homework myself.”
Meenu smiled. “You’re the ultimate human-in-the-loop, Amma.”
The Cricket Match
As Meenu and Rahul finally headed to the park (with apples and nuts packed by Mrs. Rani), Rahul pulled out his phone.
“Hey Meenu, one question.”
“Yeah?”
“If I ask AI whether I’ll hit a six today, and it says yes...”
“It’s being a sycophant.”
“And if it says no?”
“Then it’s probably right.”
Rahul threw an apple at her. She caught it.
“You know what?” Rahul said, pocketing his phone. “I think I’m watching Spirited Away tonight. Properly this time.”
“And…,” Meenu added, “check the ground truth of your batting average before asking AI about sixes.”
From the kitchen window, Mrs. Rani watched them walk away, already forwarding a new message to her WhatsApp group: “My daughter just explained AI using Spirited Away. These children nowadays!”
Key AI Concepts Explained Through No-Face
Untrained Model: No-Face at the start—empty, absorbing, no identity of his own.
Pattern Matching / Stochastic Parrot: No-Face swallowing the frog and mimicking his voice and greed.
Sycophancy: No-Face giving gold to please the bathhouse workers, regardless of whether it’s real or useful.
Hallucination: The gold that turns to worthless dirt—confident output with no underlying reality.
Human-in-the-Loop / Model Alignment: Chihiro’s bitter dumpling and guidance to Zeniba’s cottage.
Ground Truth: Zeniba’s cottage—a stable, honest environment where No-Face can be genuinely useful (spinning thread) rather than producing fake value.
Real-World AI Statistics (2024-2025)
• Global AI market size: $638 billion (2024), growing at 19% annually
• 77% of businesses are concerned about AI hallucinations
• OpenAI rolled back ChatGPT update in April 2025 due to “overly flattering or agreeable” behaviour
• AI sycophancy can show up to 100% compliance with illogical requests in some studies
• Organizations using human-in-the-loop evaluation report 40-60% fewer safety violations
• RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) can reduce hallucinations by up to 71%
• Spirited Away worldwide box office: approximately $396 million—Studio Ghibli’s highest-earning film
All views and interpretations shared in this story and video are entirely my personal opinions and are not representative of my employer or any organization I’m associated with.
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