It didn’t take long for AI to take care of the world’s most famous mouse. What would Walt Disney have thought?
January 1 was a historic turning point for Mickey, the American cultural icon par excellence. Indeed, the first three Walt Disney cartoons representing this famous character have fallen into the public domain. An event which had the immediate effect of inspiring certain AI experimenters. Pierre-Carl Langlais, Head of Research at Opsci, has already developed an AI model specifically trained on these cartoons. Available on Hugging Face, anyone can have fun generating images from Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Peg Leg.
Experimentation and technical limits
Langlais did not create his model from scratch; it is in fact a “refined” version of Stable Diffusion XL. This was therefore formed from images of the first three cartoons in which Mickey appeared in 1928: “ Steamboat Willie “, ” Plane Crazy ” And ” The Gallopin’ Gaucho “. Given the very limited quantity of images (96 in total) which were used for training for practical reasons, the results are currently rather questionable.
Langlais himself admits: “ This project is still under development: as long as the model is in development, it is important to verify that the generated images actually respect the designs that are in the public domain “. It’s barely the beginning and the room for improvement is still quite large.
Legal and parody aspects
The situation still raises some rather interesting legal questions. Currently, ongoing experimentation with the 1928 images aims to evaluate how they could be used to train AI models. A potentially legal approach, despite some unclear areas around copyright in the United States. However, it should be noted that using Stable Diffusion XL (which includes images protected by copyright) cannot guarantee the total legality of these images. Technically, AI-generated images are therefore in the public domain; but copyright is infringed from the moment certain elements of the image (designs, characters) protected are used without authorization. Rather complex.
It didn’t take long for some Internet users to have fun with Mickey by turning him into a parody. An editor of TechdirtMike Masnick, highlighted the renderings on Bluesky rather imaginative of certain creations: Mickey attacking the American capitol, nailed to a cross or smoking crack, there is no shortage of ideas. We can’t wait to see what happens to Disney’s little baby in the coming months, the imagination of creatives is often inexhaustible when it comes to parody!
Source : Ars Technica
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