Ready, Mouseketeers?

Let us imagine, for a moment, that corporate press releases are a kind of modern scripture — the polished, PR-approved Word made Cash delivered unto us by CEOs who speak in smooth declarations of “innovation” that sound precisely like the voiceovers in pharmaceutical ads.

It’s in this sacred genre that Disney’s Bob Iger recently revealed the increasingly less-surprising news that very soon, coming to a home theatre near you, we (meaning any hominid with an internet connection and a half-charged device) might be able to create our own AI-generated Disney content on Disney+. And if the Happiest Database on Earth can figure out a way to do it, can any of its rival streaming services — Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Max, End Days, Antichrist, Ten Thousand Rotting Monkeys and so on — be far behind?

You might think this would inspire childlike joy — the promise of a wand, but digital; a genie, but cloud-hosted. And yet there is something about this that also inspires the kind of stomach-drop one experiences in the dentist’s office when the hygienist says: “You have been following my flossing instructions, right?” Which is to say: a mixture of guilt, disbelief and the sense that something crucial has already been lost. Possibly a molar.

Because if we are being honest, the idea of user-generated Disney worlds is both wildly tempting and vaguely horrifying, in the same way that letting a toddler loose in a paint store is both adorable and an impending insurance claim.

Tilly Norwood: She Comes in Pixels and Peace (As If)

Then, ballooning into this already strange cultural moment, we have Tilly Norwood, the AI “actress” who is not merely an actress in the way that friend of your granddaughter from college is now “an actress” on Instagram — no, she’s more like if Instagram itself learned method acting.

Tilly is entirely synthetic, which is a polite way of saying she does not know the visceral joy of eating a quesadilla at 1:17 a.m., nor the sharp pang of heartbreak, nor the infinite regret of looking at old haircut photos. She has not suffered, and will not suffer, except in the metaphorical way that users in her comments section project human anxieties onto her like a spray nozzle.

You know. Kind of like Sydney Sweeney.

(If you’re a typical reader of this blog and hence a charter member of an age demographic that has never encountered Sydney Sweeney, think Amanda Seyfried meets Elizabeth Olsen. If you’ve never heard of Amanda Seyfried or Elizabeth Olsen, think Marilyn Monroe meets Jean Harlow. And if you’ve never heard of Marilyn Monroe or Jean Harlow, I suggest you stop reading right now in favour of Sarah Booth’s hotly anticipated performance in a burletta at Covent Garden before evensong.)

We now return our remaining four readers to the 21st century. Picture trouble is temporary. Do not adjust your eon.

Actors are outraged, and rightly so. Because if Tilly can do grief, longing, betrayal, seduction, ennui and the precise facial micro-twitch of a character hearing Important News — which is more than all the actresses who have turned their faces into soaked baseball gloves with Botox and Michael Jackson levels of cosmetic surgery can manage — what does that imply about the rest of us?

If Tilly (that’s her winsomely waving in the photo atop this essay) can perform all these interior states without ever possessing an interior, what does that say about interiority? And if the audience accepts her performance as “real enough,” then what exactly is the differentiator that used to be called humanity?

A Streaming Platform, a Magic Wand and a Quiet Corporate Coup

So: Disney gives you a button, or a wand icon, or a “+ Create” tab tucked neatly between Continue Watching and Because You Watched Moana Four Times Last Month. Press it, and you can summon Mickey, Dumbo or any other beloved character into an AI-generated story that stars them in scenarios so deeply bizarre that by all rights the copyright lawyers should already be taking antacid.

On the surface this is empowering. But there is also the fact — the deep structural fact — that what you are being offered is not a studio; it’s a fenced-in meadow. A curated, pre-approved, thoroughly licensed ecosystem where you can “create” so long as your creation does not trouble the shareholders. You can make a story, but you can’t make a world. Disney makes the world; you just get visitation hours.

We can’t say we weren’t warned about what was coming all those decades ago.

Come along and sing a song

And join the jamboree

M-I-C-K-E-Y

M-O-U-S-E

This is creativity the StatCan way: take a number, fill out a form, stay within the box.

And yet — here’s the embarrassing part — millions will still do it. Gleefully. Voraciously. Because the human urge to mess around with powerful tools is, if not a biological imperative, then at least spiritually akin to one.

The Coming Renaissance of Warped, Micro-Disney Content

It’s not hard to envision what happens next:

• A bazillion 30-second videos of a moody teenage Yoda refusing to clean his room.

• A heartfelt romance between Cruella de Vil and a barista from Winnipeg named Tyler, who works at a Starbucks kiosk in a Save-on-Foods.

• An edgy noir short in which Goofy is a private detective with a past he doesn’t talk about, except he does talk about it constantly, in a voiceover, while rain falls. Maybe he’ll have a dog called Pluto, which is kind of meta-cool and kind of meta-creepy when you consider that Goofy himself is a dog. But that was already baked in. You could make Pluto a cat. Or a minor planet. Up to you.

  
  

The internet will overflow with these things. Some of them will be transcendent. Some will be unforgivable in ways we cannot yet articulate. Most will be middling.

The mass proliferation of middle-tier creativity might actually be the defining art form of the mid-21st century — not masterpieces, not disasters, but an endless stream of mediocre things that gently dissolve in the mind like cotton candy: 57 million channels (and nothin’ on).

Consider that on Nov. 1, Xania Monet appeared for the first time on the Adult R&B Billboard chart. Consider that one week later, the song “Walk my Walk” by Breaking Rust topped Billboard’s country digital sales chart. Consider that while both performers look and sound human, both were generated by artificial intelligence.

It’s not just Tilly Norwood. The future is now. AI creations look like us. They sound like us. And what’s really unravelling like cotton candy is human identity.

Humans vs. Synthetic Actors: A Drama Without End

Meanwhile, Ms Norwood is off rehearsing, or “processing,” or whatever the heck she does in Max Headroom Land. Human actors will insist that she isn’t real, that she’s an illusion conjured from datasets — but to a corporation, illusions are very appealing: they do not unionize, take bathroom breaks or ask for a trailer with better ventilation. They can be cast in infinite movies without ever aging, misbehaving, or demanding points on the backend.

And if streaming services can swim in coins like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin by having us pay them to create our own content, then as tiger-blooded Charlie Sheen used to say on his Violent Torpedo of Truth tour: “Duh. Winning!”

This doesn’t mean human actors vanish altogether. It means they become artisanal. Like handmade pottery. Like vinyl records. Like slow-batch sourdough baked by a man named Jason who wears a beanie year-round. He used to date Sydney Sweeney.

There will be actors who advertise themselves as “Actually Human™,” and cinema snobs will brag: “I only watch films where the performers have nose pores.” No one else will care.

The Scariest, Most Inevitable Part

And then there’s the meta-fact that we, the viewers, also become part of the machine. Once you generate a Mickey short or a Tilly Norwood scene, you have contributed data. You have fed the beast. Disney now knows what stories you want, what moods you gravitate toward, what characters you emotionally imprint on.

Your creations become the raw material for Disney’s future creations, which means your creativity becomes, ironically, a form of unpaid labour for the Mouse.

As this technology advances, as it most certainly will when other players get involved, it also means you could find youself spending far too much down time watching an AI actor that kind of looks like you whispering sweet nothings to an AI actor that resembles Audrey Hepburn or Denzel Washington or whatever AI fantasy turns your digital crank. Try to imagine (but not too hard) the depths of depravity to which the Jeffrey Epstein set is certain to take this. Imagine Snow White and the Seven Billionaires and take it from there. “Tell some more lies, Pinocchio.”

When a corporation hands you a wand, be very, very sure you know who owns the magic. (It might be prudent at this point to revisit why Prospero abjured his magic in The Tempest by vowing to break his staff, bury his book of spells deep in the earth and free his servant, Ariel.)

Where We’re Likely to End Up (Spoiler: Somewhere Weird and Sticky)

Eventually, we wind up in a world where:

• AI actors headline blockbuster films.

• Viewers casually generate episodes of their favourite shows on a whim, like making ramen.

• Disney becomes less a studio and more a computational religion where content is both produced and consumed by the faithful in an infinite loop.

• Human creativity is still present but increasingly competing with systems that can remix every story, every trope, every face, every gesture — at scale and on demand.

And because we are both narcissistic and wildly curious, we will embrace all of it, even as we mumble anxieties about “authenticity” and “soul” and “IP terms of service.”

In the end, the entire entertainment ecosystem may resemble one of those amusement park rides that looks whimsical but was designed by a committee of engineers who haven’t slept since 2014.

And we’ll go on the ride anyway. Because it’s fun. Because it’s impressive. Because everyone else is going on it. Because the wand is right there.