The Stupid Thing Is Worth Money

I would like to write something so stupid that people put on a costume and become it.

Not admire it. Not call it an important contribution and leave it unopened on a table. Become the damned thing. Walk around inside an idea I had, making it worse in ways I hadn’t thought of. I could stand at the edge of the room pretending to be offended. That would be a fine afternoon.

Instead I have been reading about Tung Tung Tung Sahur, a smiling wooden creature with a vacant stare. Kari Paul reports in the Guardian that people make fan art and animations of him, dress as him, and buy things bearing his likeness. He began in 2025 with an Indonesian teenager called Noxa and OpenAI’s image generator. Now there are companies fighting over who can make money from him.

The wooden bastard has representation. I can hardly get a reply.

He isn’t just a random stick. He is based on a kentongan, a drum used to wake people for the meal before the Ramadan fast. The name carries the sound. I had looked at a piece of somebody else’s life and seen a piece of wood. This is one of the economies available to a man who prides himself on observation.

According to the court documents Paul describes, Noxa arrived at the character through seven prompts in fifteen minutes. Instructions included “human face” and “no hands, legs like a human, and a human face.”

Fifteen minutes. I can spend that deciding whether a man in a story should enter through the front door. Then I have to decide why anyone should care that he has arrived.

I want the time to count. All those afternoons. The deleted pages. The sentence I liked until I read it aloud. Put them somewhere on the invoice. Surely a creature assembled in a quarter of an hour ought to wait politely while my characters finish being neglected.

But I don’t actually want anyone laughing at a joke because I suffered through writing it. That would be an appalling audience. They would need my medical history before deciding whether to smile.

And time isn’t the legal test either. The US Copyright Office’s January 2025 report says copyright protects human expression, including within work that contains AI material. With the generally available technology it examined, prompts alone don’t give the user enough control over the output’s expression. Repeated prompting doesn’t solve that. Human changes or creative arrangements can qualify for protection; that doesn’t automatically protect the underlying generated material.

So seven is not a magic number, and an eighth request for better legs would not necessarily deliver a certificate of authorship. Nor would wasting a whole winter. I find the second part harder to forgive.

The commercial fight is older than this week’s article. Paul reports that Mementum, the French agency representing Noxa, sent a demand in September 2025 over the character’s use in the Roblox game Steal a Brainrot. The game companies sued, arguing that the claimed rights don’t exist because the image lacks the required human authorship. Their lawyer, Aaron Moss, distinguishes real creative choices from sparse prompts and choosing an image. He isn’t saying every work involving AI is unownable.

Mementum says originators should share in the success when their characters become global franchises. Its lawyer Steven Stein told NPR in August that a quickly drawn human picture could qualify for copyright. The agency has also countersued over trademark, a different claim concerning brand identity, not a copyright verdict. Paul’s report says it doesn’t yet hold a US trademark for this character. I am not reading the announcement of a winner.

I can understand wanting the teenager in the money. I can also understand wanting him out of it if I have already built a popular game around his creature. The second wish can be expressed as a magnificent defense of culture belonging to everyone. Everyone is a useful fellow. He rarely comes by to inspect the accounts.

But the people making the animations aren’t merely a convenient excuse for a game company. Fabian Mosele, who has made videos of the character, objects in Paul’s reporting that many creators brought these images to life and helped make them popular. Why should the first prompter get to gatekeep the result?

If I got my lovely afternoon, if strangers dressed as my character, I would want credit for starting it. I would tell the story of the moment he occurred to me. Perhaps tell it twice, for somebody who arrived late. Meanwhile the people wearing him would be supplying things I could not have put in the original: their voices, their bad dancing, some terrible joke that caught on and became the part everyone remembered.

I would want the terrible joke removed from the official account of my genius. I would also want its audience.

That doesn’t give me a ruling or a fair division of anybody’s earnings.

In my imagined room, somebody has put on a costume of a character I wrote. He has misunderstood the character completely. He is saying a line I would never have given him.

Someone laughs.

I was about to correct him. I wait to hear whether he has another.

Additional reporting: A battle over ‘Italian brainrot’ could shape who owns AI art

Primary report: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (January 2025)

Source: Who owns ‘brain rot’?: inside the international legal drama over a beloved meme