On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the next immediate: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a classic Disney type, black and white. He’s dripping throughout with white gel.”
There’s no well mannered technique 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.
Firstly of yearly, a crop of cultural works enters the general public area in america. When copyright expires on notably beloved characters, folks get excited. That is an particularly eagerly anticipated 12 months. An early model of Mickey Mouse, colloquially generally 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 medicine is one other standard theme.)
Whereas a contingent of the folks 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 energetic humorousness, however his experiment wasn’t solely a scatalogical joke. “My curiosity in producing the property was to discover copyright thresholds and the place the instruments are at present,” he says. He’d seen that it was straightforward to search out examples of copyrighted characters on standard 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 example) 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 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 Secure Diffusion he referred to as “Mickey-1928” based mostly on 96 public area stills of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 movies Steamboat Willie, Airplane Loopy, and Gallopin’ Gaucho. “It’s a political stance,” he says.
Langlais firmly believes that folks must be paying nearer consideration to the place AI instruments get their coaching knowledge; he’s engaged on a number of separate tasks centered 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 Secure Diffusion, not a very customized knowledge set. (That may be a much more labor-intensive challenge.)
