https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/01/early-mickey-mouse-is-now-in-the-public-domain-and-ai-is-already-on-the-case/

On January 1, three early Mickey Mouse cartoons entered the public domain in the US, and AI experimenters have wasted no time taking advantage of it. On Monday, a digital humanities researcher named Pierre-Carl Langlais uploaded an AI model to Hugging Face that has been trained on those public domain cartoons, and anyone can use it to create new still images based on a written prompt.  While the results are rough and sometimes garbled, they show notable early experimentation with integrating public domain Mickey into the AI space.