Sex, Drugs, and AI Mickey Mouse

On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the following prompt: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a vintage Disney style, black and white. He is dripping all over with white gel.”

There’s no polite way to describe what this prompt conjured from the AI image generator. It looks, very much, like Mickey Mouse is drenched in ejaculate.

At the start of every year, a crop of cultural works enters the public domain in the United States. When copyright expires on particularly beloved characters,…