Tigger is very much a still a celebrity 
But this means you can’t use him in an AI generated image … for now …
Steamboat Willy and some others won’t go through either despite being in public domain now.
Thought: Do model weights eventually become public domain?
See you in 2050 Paul at your LAN party with our 2TB RAM laptops running 5.6 Sol locally.
wow, that’s a surprising amount, thanks @jeffvpace !
Hey, all, I hope you don’t minding me moving these here! We had a request to keep the valid request more on topic and serious.
Make this a meme thread maybe? Interesting things we find?
How great threads are made? We shall see!
I’ve updated the resulting otherwise non-sensical title and OP 
I asked “Chatters”:
The distinction is not simply whether a character is copyrighted. OpenAI appears to have several overlapping mechanisms—licensing agreements, rights-holder controls, character-specific filters/blocklists, and ordinary safety moderation—and they do not produce a perfectly uniform result across fictional characters.
A few things make your examples particularly revealing:
Mickey Mouse is a special case. OpenAI and Disney announced a three-year licensing deal covering more than 200 Disney/Marvel/Pixar/Star Wars characters for Sora and ChatGPT Images, and Mickey is explicitly named as one of them.
Daffy Duck and the Flintstones are still copyrighted characters, yet ChatGPT Images can sometimes generate them. That tells us there plainly isn’t a blanket rule saying “copyrighted fictional character → refusal.”
Pooh and Tigger actually have a stronger public-domain argument than Daffy Duck does, at least in the US. The original Winnie-the-Pooh material entered the US public domain in 2022, and The House at Pooh Corner, including Tigger, followed in 2024. Disney’s later visual versions remain protected.
So if you can ask for Daffy Duck but get blocked asking for Tigger, copyright status by itself clearly cannot be the explanation.
Caveat: I just tried to generate some images with Pixar characters and I hit the same guardrails
Disappointing 
(but understandable all the same)
Just takes a bit of research…
Conan the Barbarian books are supposed to be in Public Domain (or some of them), but I think a comic book company owns additional rights somehow?
It was always funny to me that Disney retold old myths and repackaged them from Public Domain then fought tooth and nail to keep them out of public domain lol
A one-shot tool to check who’s coming into public domain might be cool…
yeah, that would be really useful as a utility
Prompt
A brightly lit, detailed and colorful four-way split screen cartoon of Popeye and Bruto in a boxing match. Olive Oyl is in the ring holding up the round card in each frame. Each frame must be unique. Popeye wins the match “POW” in the last frame. The background must be well-lit from bright lights shinning down on the boxing match.
