Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain, and Internet users are having a blast. Many people are using artificial intelligence to subvert the image of the Disney mouse.
As of January 1, 2024, Mickey Mouse entered the public domain. Fortunately for Disney, these are not all versions of the famous mouse, but that of Steamboat Willie, as he appeared in several cartoons from the 1920s.
His arrival in the public domain has obviously delighted many fans, who have already made Mickey the star of a horrific video game. Others posted memes and montages of Steamboat Willie on social media, ranging from schoolboy jokes to animated videos showing Mickey armed with a gun. But some also use artificial intelligence to hijack Mickey’s image, and make him do all kinds of things, from the most absurd to the creepiest.
Communist Mickey, Crucified Mickey, and Terrorist Mickey
On the Reddit r/Midjourney, which compiles the best creations of image-generating AI users, many fans posted their Mickey diversion. We can thus see him visiting Paris in an innocent manner, greeting the camera in the company of Minnie, but also performing Shakespeare, or even taking a very threatening posture, a knife in his hand in front of a burning house.
But others have gone further. As Ars Technica reports, Pierre-Carl Langlais, a digital researcher, trained his own artificial intelligence model on images of cartoons that have fallen into the public domain with Stable Diffusion. More precisely, Pierre-Carl Langlais used 40 images from the cartoon Gallopin’ Gaucho22 images of Plane Crazyand 34 images of Steamboat Willie.
The result is impressive, because the tool allows you to create images in the characteristic style of Walt Disney’s early Steamboat Willie cartoons — and therefore, to make the Disney character do anything and everything. Among the examples created by the researcher, we can see Mickey Mouse in a cinema, or inspiring communist leaders to lead the revolution.
But that’s not all. Pierre-Carl Langlais shared his model on Hugging Face, a specialized platform — and many Internet users took advantage of it. A Bluesky thread by journalist Mike Masnik brings together several creations showing Mickey destroying the World Trade Center towers, being crucified, becoming a gangster, or even transforming into a Lovecraftian monster. This is just the beginning for the Disney hero.
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