Enlarge / AI-generated results of a Gangster Mickey Mouse, an Eldritch Horror Mickey Mouse, and a Basketball Mickey Mouse created by a model trained on public domain Mickey Mouse cartoons from 1928.
Schroedingercat, Kevin Elliott, David Binkowski
On January 1st, three early Mickey Mouse cartoons entered the public domain in the United States, and AI experimenters have wasted no time in capitalizing on them. On Monday, a digital humanities researcher named Pierre-Carl Langlais uploaded an AI model trained on these public domain cartoons to Hugging Face, and anyone can use it to create new still images based on a written prompt. Although the results are crude and sometimes garbled, they show remarkable early experiments with integrating the public domain Mickey into the AI field.
The new model can create images of Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Peg Leg Pete. “The image targets created are retained.” [sic] “We must adapt to the 1928 design to bring Mickey, Minnie and Pete into the public realm,” Langlais writes on the model card. “This is a work in progress: while the model is in development, the generated images should be reviewed to be sure.” They are truly public domain design.
To create the model, Langlais refined a version of Stable Diffusion XL with 34 cartoon stills from Steamboat Willie, 22 stills from Plane Crazy, and 40 stills from The Gallopin' Gaucho – all published in 1928 and now in the public domain. More still images would have meant more cost and training time, so he probably kept the number of images low for practical reasons, although this resulted in lower quality results. And Langlais writes in the model card that the training photos are not as high quality as possible, but that could change over time: “Hopefully higher resolution versions should be available since the cartoons are now part of the public domain.”
AI-generated version of Mickey Mouse from 1928 with the prompt “Drawing of Mickey, a muscular barbarian with weapons next to a CRT television, cinematic, 8K, studio lighting”
Benj Edwards
AI-generated version of Mickey Mouse from 1928 with the prompt “Drawing of Mickey, a muscular barbarian with weapons next to a CRT television, cinematic, 8K, studio lighting”
Benj Edwards
AI-generated Mickey Mouse from 1928 with a sword.
Key!
Mickey Mouse eats cucumbers and shows that the results aren't always perfect. More training time and better training data could potentially resolve this issue in the future.
Benj Edwards
Shortly after news of the new model surfaced on social media, a thread on Bluesky created by Techdirt editor Mike Masnick featured people using the new AI image generator to humorously create images of Mickey Mouse, the Disney probably didn't want to see, including Mickey smoking crack. He attacks the US Capitol, gets nailed to a crucifix and becomes an eerie horror. Since 1928, Mickey cartoons have not included crucifixes or Lovecraft horror films, so any concepts not found in the original works come from the Stable Diffusion XL base model.
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Of course, Mickey Mouse has been the subject of this kind of parody before, sans AI. Many of these images would likely fall under fair use regulations for parodies even if early Mickey hadn't exactly entered the public domain. And AI-generated images of Mickey used to be largely possible using an unfiltered AI image generator. Above all, it is experimenting with the fact that it is now possible to legally and unrestrictedly use Mickey Mouse images from 1928 as AI training data (although the legality of copyrighted training data in the USA is still unclear).
It's worth noting that using Stable Diffusion XL here doesn't make these images 100 percent legal, as the base model still contains copyrighted works in its training data. But as we just mentioned, it's not necessarily illegal either since the problem hasn't been fully solved yet. There are many nuances at work here. To make the legal situation even more interesting, AI-generated images are technically in the public domain (and cannot be copyrighted) in the US, although some of the images may not be fully public domain if they contain certain copyright representations. protected designs or characters used without permission.
As we previously reported, the three 1928 Mickey Mouse cartoons were scheduled to be released to the public much earlier (on January 1, 1999), but due to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act passed in 1998, that date was pushed back 25 years . It is worth noting that this public domain approval does not cover later versions of Mickey and commercial use of the Mickey Mouse name still has trademark implications. Expect these issues to be thoroughly tested over time as the American public “owns” an early version of Mickey.