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 strategy to describe what this immediate conjured from the AI picture generator. It appears to be like, 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 in america. When copyright expires on notably beloved characters, individuals get excited. That is an particularly eagerly anticipated yr. An early model of Mickey Mouse, colloquially referred to as Steamboat Willie, entered public area in 2024 after practically 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, 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 common theme.)
Whereas a contingent of the individuals sharing naughty Willie pictures 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 at present,” he says. He’d observed that it was straightforward to search out examples of copyrighted characters on common 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 wished to see how far he might 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 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 needs to 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 practice solely on public area works to that finish. He whipped it up in hours, as a result of it’s primarily a filter laid atop of Secure Diffusion, not a very customized knowledge set. (That will be a much more labor-intensive mission.)