Disney and OpenAI’s new $1 billion partnership seems symbolic of the dire times we’re living through. In exchange for access to the generative AI firm’s API and tools like ChatGPT, the studio plans to allow users of OpenAI’s Sora AI video generator to create clips featuring hundreds of Disney-owned characters. Sora AI users will be able to generate as much extraterrestrial Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars slop as they want, and Disney will share some of it in a special section on the Disney Plus platform. It’s not hard to see where this is going.
Disney CEO Bob Iger described the partnership Marking “a significant moment for our industry” and saying it would provide the studio’s customers “richer and more personal ways to connect with Disney characters and their favorite stories.” Iger also said the deal aims to “expand the reach of our storytelling through generic AI while respecting and protecting creators and their works.”
This may actually be how Iger thinks going to bed with OpenAI will work out, but when you honestly look at what Sora AI is and how Disney’s past experiments with generative AI have gone, it’s clear that this is all going to end up very silly.
At its core, this partnership is about OpenAI securing a new influx of capital and Disney coming into strong support of one of the big next-generation AI companies fighting for dominance of the tech sector. The $1 billion that Disney has promised will not provide a complete solution. OpenAI’s cash flow problemsBut it would become the first company of its kind to do business with a legacy entertainment studio on this scale. Although Sora isn’t immediately being integrated into the production workflow for Disney’s projects, it will give the studio a concrete way to signal to the public about its interest in using generative AI. And the second thing is, Disney is getting access to a ton of useless content that it can stream without paying anyone to create it.
After months of lawsuits being filed by various studios, including Disney, against Gen AI companies for creating models trained on unlicensed IP, this seems beyond strange. Disney will Pay OpenAI For use with Disney characters such as The Avengers and The Mandalorian. At first glance, the transaction seems clearly unbalanced, but the situation is even stranger when you look at what Sora AI is capable of doing.
Although Sora can turn a few text sentences into dazzling video footage, the AI-generated clips are always short, awkward, and full of inconsistencies that make them not suitable for use in the type of entertainment that people are typically willing to pay for. This is why so many “movies” and Ads created with generative AI Looks like complete garbage. But those limitations are probably why Disney plans to focus on bite-sized, user-generated content.
Entertaining fans by treating them with their own unique creations on corporate-owned IP is nothing new, but what’s different here is the way Disney wants to capitalize on that behavior. The Sora AI integration will give Disney direct access to the content pipeline that customers will pay the studio to use. This system will effectively invite Disney Plus users to become subscribers And Unpaid employees, which is a scenario that probably seems ideal for Disney’s executive leadership. But the last time Disney gave people the ability to mess with their IP like this, things quickly evolved in a way most expected.
While the players could not make FortniteThe generation of AI-powered Darth Vader NPCs does whatever the hell they want, and with enough encouragement it was possible to persuade the James Earl Jones-voiced character to say hateful, bigoted things. Epic Games came up with some ideas to try FortniteWerder was stopped for behaving inappropriately, but – shockingly – the players still found solutions because that’s just the way people are. That same “let’s do it because we can” energy is what animates a lot of the clips you see on the dedicated Sora AI social video platform, where it’s easy to find footage of celebrities like Mister Rogers and Bob Ross saying and doing offensive things.
OpenAI likely told Disney leadership it has taken measures to keep people away from character creation Incredible Shout racist slurs. But even if the studio reviews every single Sora AI output involving Disney characters, there’s still going to be an endless stream of content that’s a far cry from the quality of the IP’s original creators – skilled human artists.
It’s hard to believe Iger’s assurances that this partnership was intended to honor and protect the art and artists that have made Disney such a powerful company. The company says that the Sora AI will not be allowed to reproduce the voices or likenesses of any actors associated with its characters, but that’s also a sign of how soulless this whole endeavor is. This gives Disney a solid way to ensure that it never has to pay again the artists whose work originally brought these characters to life. It also appears that Disney thinks people can be entertained by simply showing familiar, irrelevant faces.
