On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the next immediate: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a vintage Disney style, black and white. He is dripping all over with white gel.”

There’s no well mannered option to describe what this immediate conjured from the AI picture generator. It seems to be, very a lot, like Mickey Mouse is drenched in ejaculate.

At the beginning of yearly, a crop of cultural works enters the general public area within the United States. When copyright expires on significantly beloved characters, individuals get excited. This is an particularly eagerly anticipated yr. An early model of Mickey Mouse, colloquially often called Steamboat Willie, entered public area in 2024 after almost a century of rigorously enforced copyright safety. Within days, an explosion of homebrewed Steamboat Willie artwork hit the web, together with a horror movie trailer, a meme coin—and, in fact, a glut of AI-generated Willies. Some are G-rated. Others, like “Creamboat Willie,” are decidedly not. (Willie doing medication is one other standard theme.)

While a contingent of the individuals sharing naughty Willie pictures are merely goofing round, others had surprisingly sober-minded intentions. Neville, who posted his picture on social media utilizing the deal with “Olivia Mutant-John,” has a energetic humorousness, however his experiment wasn’t solely a scatalogical joke. “My interest in generating the assets was to explore copyright thresholds and where the tools are currently,” he says. He’d seen that it was simple to seek out examples of copyrighted characters on standard image-generating instruments (some extent additionally recently made by AI scientist Gary Marcus, who posted AI-generated depictions of SpongeBob SquarePants for instance) and wished to see how far he may push a picture generator now that Steamboat Willie was within the public area.

Neville isn’t the one particular person conducting AI Willie experiments with copyright on his thoughts. Pierre-Carl Langlais, head of analysis on the AI knowledge analysis agency OpSci, created a fine-tuned model of Stable Diffusion he known as “Mickey-1928” primarily based on 96 public area stills of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 movies Steamboat Willie, Plane Crazy, and Gallopin’ Gaucho. “It’s a political stance,” he says.

Langlais firmly believes that individuals must be paying nearer consideration to the place AI instruments get their coaching knowledge; he’s engaged on a number of separate tasks targeted on creating fashions that prepare completely on public area works to that finish. He whipped it up in hours, as a result of it’s basically a filter laid atop of Stable Diffusion, not a completely customized knowledge set. (That could be a much more labor-intensive venture.)