Something bad happened that made Mattel’s new line of dolls for the upcoming film Wicked accidentally promote a link to a porn website. Funny, this happened just months after Mattel started designing its packaging with an AI tool from San Jose-based Adobe.

Maybe you heard about the single most hilarious scandal that happened this weekend. With the upcoming Hollywood movie version of Wicked ready to carpet-bomb America’s kids with marketing and merchandising over this coming holiday season, the toy giant Mattel released its first batch of Wicked fashion dolls to retail shelves. And the packaging for the dolls, very unfortunately, presents a link to the highly NSFW pornographic website Wicked.com instead of the correct WickedMovie.com website.

In a timely twist, the top video currently being promoted on Wicked.com is Stormy Daniels starring in Stormy Trumps All.

How on earth could this have happened? Mattel is not saying, and maybe they never will. All we have is a very red-faced apology statement to Variety magazine in which a spokesperson said, “Mattel was made aware of a misprint on the packaging of the Mattel ‘Wicked’ collection dolls, primarily sold in the US, which intended to direct consumers to the official WickedMovie.com landing page. We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this. Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children. Consumers who already have the product are advised to discard the product packaging or obscure the link and may contact Mattel Customer Service for further information.”

Discard the product packaging? Those dolls are now going for $300 a pop on eBay!

Regardless, maybe what bit Mattel in the ass here is that they thought they were defying gravity by using AI tools to design their toys’ packaging. As Fast Company reported in June, Mattel had started using a generative AI product called Firefly from San Jose-based Adobe to start designing their toy box exteriors.

Per Fast Company, the AI tool promotes that “a text prompt is all that’s needed for the program to spin up its own fully formed concept image.” What could possibly go wrong!

“Mattel makes about 4,000 new toys a year, and a lot of that is packaging,” Mattel chief design officer Chris Down told Fast Company. “There’s a high volume of stuff—and that gives the first clue as to why we’d be interested in tools that would make the outcomes better or stronger, would allow the creative process to move faster, and would give us a production or creative execution advantage.”

That Fast Company article was published in late July of this year, and noted that “the resulting designs are expected to hit shelves in the coming months.” It is now three-and-a-half months later. Do the math, people.

The movie version of Wicked is being released in two parts, with the second part slated for release at Thanksgiving 2025. We’ll see if Mattel’s AI design tool only has a brain by the time that next batch of toys is coming out.

Related: Can We Talk About How Creepy and Meta It Is That OpenAI Made a Voice Assistant That Sounds a Lot Like Scarlett Johansson? [SFist]

Image: [Left] Universal Pictures, [Right] High Angle View Of Man Watching Adult Movie On Digital Tablet (Getty Images)