On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the next immediate: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a classic Disney model, black and white. He’s dripping throughout with white gel.”

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

Initially of yearly, a crop of cultural works enters the general public area in the USA. When copyright expires on significantly beloved characters, individuals get excited. That is an particularly eagerly anticipated 12 months. An early model of Mickey Mouse, colloquially often known as Steamboat Willie, entered public area in 2024 after almost a century of rigorously enforced copyright safety. Inside days, an explosion of homebrewed Steamboat Willie artwork hit the web, together with a horror film trailer, a meme coin—and, after all, a glut of AI-generated Willies. Some are G-rated. Others, like “Creamboat Willie,” are decidedly not. (Willie doing medication is one other widespread theme.)

Whereas a contingent of the individuals sharing naughty Willie photos are merely goofing round, others had surprisingly sober-minded intentions. Neville, an artwork director who posted his picture on social media utilizing the deal with “Olivia Mutant-John,” has a vigorous humorousness, however his experiment wasn’t solely a scatalogical joke. “My curiosity in producing the belongings was to discover copyright thresholds and the place the instruments are presently,” he says. He’d observed that it was straightforward to seek out examples of copyrighted characters on widespread image-generating instruments (a degree additionally not too long ago made by AI scientist Gary Marcus, who posted AI-generated depictions of SpongeBob SquarePants for instance) and needed to see how far he may push a picture generator now that Steamboat Willie was within the public area.

Neville isn’t the one individual 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 Steady Diffusion he known as “Mickey-1928” based mostly on 96 public area stills of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 movies Steamboat Willie, Aircraft Loopy, and Gallopin’ Gaucho. “It’s a political stance,” he says.

Langlais firmly believes that individuals ought to be paying nearer consideration to the place AI instruments get their coaching knowledge; he’s engaged on a number of separate initiatives centered on creating fashions that prepare solely 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 Steady Diffusion, not a very customized knowledge set. (That might be a much more labor-intensive venture.)