In the opening scene of the 2008 Disney/Pixar film WALL-E, we zoom in on our home planet Earth only to find it a dystopian wasteland. Nuclear power plants and electricity lines fill the skyline, and as the screen pans closer to what we think are skyscraper buildings, it is soon revealed they are actually towers of garbage.
The year is 2805, and Earth has been destroyed by corporate greed and humans’ innate laziness. The movie was supposed to be a warning … that if we continue down this path of putting profits before people and our desire for immediate gratification, we will not only lose our one precious planet but also our ability to think for ourselves.
Perhaps the suits at The Walt Disney Company should log into their Disney+ accounts and give this film a re-watch.
Disney’s Slop Era
I just returned home from attending the D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event in Anaheim, CA. This convention, put on by Disney’s D23 – the official Disney fan club – happens every two years, and three-day passes sell out within hours. I’ve attended every single one, starting with the first in 2009. Yeah, you could say I’m pretty serious with my Disney fandom, even though the last couple years have been rough (park reservations, price increases … seems like everywhere you turn, we are paying more and losing perks).
Unfortunately Disney is continuing to lose me, due to their embrace of Generative AI.
On Saturday, the Imagineering Pavilion featured a panel discussion called “Accelerating World-Building & Theme Park Design with New Creative Tools” led by Kyle Laughlin, a SVP with WDI, and Hannah Elsakr with Adobe.
Can you guess what those new creative tools are???? If you guessed AI, you would be correct!
Even more egregious than simply admitting that Imagineering is using Generative AI is that they justified it by claiming their use of AI tools will “put more value in front of the guest” and implied new attractions and refurbishments will happen sooner.
But do guests actually want Disney to speed up the creative process? Is that actually a good thing?
On the daily we are surrounded by GenAI slop. It’s on restaurant menus, websites, Instagram posts, streaming ads, billboards, etc. People who use it make excuses …
“I can’t afford a graphic designer and now I can make flyers!”
“It’s just a tool, I still have to come up with the prompt!”
“I used to spend half an hour making a cover image for my YouTube video, now it takes 30 seconds!”
Bestie, who cares how much time you saved if the output looks like ass.
Whenever I see a business using GenAI, I turn the other way. I unfollow the page. I leave a negative comment.
“Oh, don’t be so mean, it’s harmless!”
Environmental impacts aside, humanity is going down a very dangerous path if we continue to outsource creativity to robots.
For 100 years, The Walt Disney Company has been the gold standard of human creativity. While technology has changed, for example from 2D animation to 3D computer animation, the ideation process has not. Get a bunch of talented creatives in a room for the “blue sky” process, and literal magic is the result.
Running those creative ideas through AI destroys the human aspect of it. Creativity needs time to breathe and can’t be rushed or else the result is … slop.
(Also, the suggestion that AI tools will only speed up the creative process and not result in job losses would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.)
So Now What?
You may be thinking, what can we do? The genie seems to be out of the bottle, right?
I personally think we still have time to fix this. And the solution is to fully reject GenAI usage.
Disney and other creative companies will continue to embrace AI as long as the public is accepting of it. We need to speak out against it. Stop giving our dollars to business that use it. Educate others on how to recognize GenAI so they can reject it as well.
And we need to completely STOP using it, even if it’s just for seemingly harmless silly memes.
WALL-E was a warning, but if Disney and similar companies continue to embrace GenAI, it’s a certainty.
Continued suggested reading: I Have Fallen Out of Love with Disney, and the Company’s Flagrant Commitment to the Use of Generative AI is to Blame, by my friend Mike Celestino
About the Author
A little background on me in case you’re new here … from 2011 to 2025 I was a Disney blogger and content creator. I lived and breathed Disney. I went to Disneyland about once a week to check out anything that was new and different. You could find me at the parks on the first day of any major event, especially the food festivals. Disney never invited me or paid me! I made my money through banner ads, affiliate links, and brand collabs. I just really loved spending time at Disneyland and sharing my favorite things.
That all changed during the entertainment strikes of summer 2023. The writers’ guild went on strike first, fighting for better streaming residuals and against AI usage (among other things). My husband is a TV writer and we ultimately lost 6 months of income, a hit we are still feeling 3 years later.
A couple months later the actors followed, and the union asked content creators to stand beside them. And most of them didn’t. I watched as several Disney creators, people I considered friends, chose to stand with the studios instead of the creatives. It made me view the creator industry in a different way. Because what do you mean you’re supporting the studio execs who said people like my husband should lose their homes? That dragging out the strike as long as possible was a “cruel but necessary evil?” (Source)
The following year, I sat at the Honda Center for D23: The Ultimate Fan Event with 10,000 of my fellow Disney fans, watching in disgust as they cheered for newly-reinstated CEO Bob Iger, who was among the studio execs who wanted me to be homeless.
That was the moment I realized I am not the Disney fan I used to be.
Plus, not only was AI a threat to my husband’s job, but it came for my job, too. Hundreds of articles I’ve written were being fed into the AI machines, and with the introduction of LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini AI, people weren’t reading websites anymore. Why would they, when the Google AI summary at the top of the search results gave them the answer they needed?
AI models stole my articles, along with millions of others, to make their own product with zero compensation to me.
Cool.
I knew I needed to seek out a career that couldn’t be replaced by AI. I launched a new business in Summer 2025 selling crystals, minerals, and other witchy things. I never thought I could run a physical product business, and I still don’t really know what I’m doing, but the dawn of the AI-era forced me out of my comfort zone, and I’m loving it.
I never thought I’d write an article again, but Disney promoting the use of GenAI inspired me to get my thoughts out. Thank you for reading. 🙂
(No AI was used in the making of this article, as evidenced by my typos and overuse of commas. So. Many. Commas.)
