The world of A.I. art has been an intriguing thing to watch develop. While there are plenty of entirely valid reasons to criticize the results of the plagiarism machine’s output, the output of said machine is sometimes worth looking at, if only because of the utterly bizarre things we see come out of it. The latest A.I. creation to go viral is a set of mostly naughty Christmas ornaments that are probably about to get sued.
The ornaments in question come from a company called Homacus, and they use a variety of copyrighted characters, mostly from Disney, like Beauty & The Beast, Snitch, and Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, but also include the likes of The Grinch, Shrek, and Chucky and Tiffany from Child’s Play. They're in a variety of poses that run the gamut from the naughty to the borderline pornographic. On the company’s TikTok page, you even get A.I. animated versions that are…wild.
Are they kinda funny? Sure. Is it more than a little weird that somebody has decided to make naughty Christmas ornaments with characters from cartoons? That’s also a big yes. In some cases, to make the filthy stuff work, the ornament has even had to create an appropriate female character, which was likely also created by A.I.
Not all of the ornaments are quite so dirty. Some of them, while still having that weird smooth look that comes from A.I. are a little cute. There’s one of Walt Disney World’s Cinderella Castle, where you can add the names of family members, that, while the color is all wrong, is at least a little charming.
As cute, or funny, or just plain wrong as these ornaments are, it’s difficult not to see a pretty big problem on the horizon. If you’ve ever been inside a Hallmark store during the holiday season, then you’ll recognize the general design of these ornaments. They look a lot like the officially licensed character ornaments you’ll find there. And then there are the characters themselves. One imagines that the copyright holders won’t look too kindly on this sort of use of their characters. If they had only used Mickey and Minnie from Steamboat Willie, they'd be in the clear, as the first Mickey Mouse short is out of copyright.
There might be an argument for a fair use case of parody, except that the company is selling these ornaments to the general public for money. With some of these TikTok videos getting hundreds of thousands of views, and the Grinch one above receiving well over 1.5 million, it seems unlikely that the lawyers won’t take notice.
