Artists fed up with T-shirt vendors stealing their work tricked their automated systems into generating shirts with characters such as Mickey Mouse, Pikachu, and Bart Simpson.
Online artists say unscrupulous T-shirt vendors are using bots to search social media for comments such as “I want that on a shirt.” When the bots find them, they quickly take images from the original posts and upload them to T-shirt marketplace sites without regard for copyright or artist credit.