Disney's embarrassing AI-generated Star Wars video of scrambled up animals was the opening salvo in a year full of AI humiliation

At a TED talk back in April, Lucasfilm senior vice president of creative innovation Rob Bredow presented a demonstration of what he called "a new era of technology." Across 50 years of legendary innovation in miniature design, practical effects, and computer animation, Lucasfilm and its miracle workers at Industrial Light & Magic have blazed the trail for visual effects in creative storytelling—and now Bredow was offering a glimpse at what wonders might come next.

That glimpse, created over two weeks by an ILM artist, was Star Wars: Field Guide: a two-minute fizzle reel of AI-generated blue lions, tentacled walruses, turtles with alligator heads, and zebra-stripe chimpanzees, all lazily spliced together from the shuffled bits of normal-ass animals. These "aliens" were less Star Wars than they were Barnum & Bailey. It felt like a singular embarrassment: Instead of showing its potential, generative AI just demonstrated how out of touch a major media force had become.

And then it kept happening.

At the time, I wondered whether evoking the legacy of Lucasfilm just to declare creative bankruptcy had provoked enough disgusted responses to convince Disney to slow its roll on AI ventures. In the months since, however, it's clear that Star Wars: Field Guide wasn't a cautionary tale. It was a mission statement. Disney is boldly, firmly placing its hand on the hot stove.

Just two weeks after Star Wars: Field Guide debuted on the TED YouTube channel, Disney's AI-fueled debasement of the Star Wars universe continued in Fortnite, where a newly-added, AI-powered Darth Vader NPC was immediately tricked into saying slurs. Despite a brief detour to sue Midjourney for generating images using its copyrighted material, Disney still seems convinced that AI is a rake worth stepping on.

Disney CEO Bob Iger said in November that the corporation intended to juice its Disney+ platform with AI to transform it into "an engagement engine" for Disney's theme parks, hotels, and cruises, before celebrating the "great opportunities in terms of our collection of data and our mining of data." Very cool!

To culminate its year of AI humiliation, Disney—the company that once lobbied Congress to extend copyright terms so Mickey Mouse's immaculate image couldn't be tarnished by entering the public domain—announced last week that it was investing $1 billion in OpenAI in an agreement that licenses more than 200 Disney characters for use in OpenAI products. Just so we're clear, those are the same products that have generated videos of Spongebob as Hitler and Pikachu robbing a CVS.

Maybe Disney's lawyers truly believe that OpenAI can implement safeguards to prevent its characters from being used in nefarious or degrading ends, even if it's technology that can still be coaxed into revealing nuclear secrets if you ask it with a poem. Or maybe after spending the last decade hollowing out its theme parks to justify competing subscription schemes, making a mockery of Star Wars wherever Tony Gilroy isn't involved, and failing to muster any creative ambition greater than asking "what if we just did the cartoons again but with real people," the House of Mouse has simply abandoned any pretense of quality.

But at least Disney hasn't had to endure the AI humiliation alone. In the last month alone, Activision has been called out by a US Congressman for featuring AI art in the weakest Call of Duty launch in recent memory, Elon Musk's own AI boasted that he has the "potential to drink piss better than any human in history," and McDonald's released an AI-generated holiday ad so thoroughly despised that it lasted less than a week before being pulled.

2025 hasn't been the most reassuring showcase for our magnificent AI future, but who knows? Maybe 2026 will be different. After all, I keep hearing AI games are going to be amazing.