> As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
I say this with no snark or disdain: Sam has mastered the art of the flywheel.
Re licensed ai videos, if anyone wants to see the perspective the C-suites are being sold on, check out this episode of Belloni's The Town, in which they discuss the vision for AI + IP
https://overcast.fm/+AA4DU9JreIE
What are the terms? It is not at all clear from the announcement. "part of this three-year licensing agreement", it _could_ mean the license cost is $1 billion, which Disney in turn invests in OpenAI in return for equity, and they're calling it "investment" (that's what's hypothesized above, but I don't think we know). Disney surely gets something for the license other than the privilege of buying $1 billion in OpenAI stock at their most recent valuation price.
Disney gets the opportunity to tell the board and investors that they are now partnered with a leading AI company. In effect, Disney is now an AI company as well. They haven't really done anything, but if anyone asks they can just say "of course we're at the forefront of the entertainment industry. We're already leveraging AI in our partnerships"
Isn't that the case for most ultra-rich CEOs? All of the CEOs of Microsoft apparently started off either building product or helping develop the business into something profitable. But at some point it doesn't really matter if you have the skills to be an individual contributor, a team leader, or even a vice president. The role of CEO mostly is to keep investors happy & secondarily to put the right people in the company together to make things happen.
Has he made billions? He's obviously done well but I'm not sure he has been able to capture any value from openai except for publicity, and what else does he have? A few $10m from loopt and ycombinator?
>Has he made billions? He's obviously done well but I'm not sure he has been able to capture any value from openai except for publicity, and what else does he have?
Americans mostly. Both abuse copyright law to profit off of works done by creators/inventors of the past. Neither contribute much to humanity these days.
What if who's wrong? Sam? If right means turning a profit, he's most certainly wrong. It would be a very stupid investment to give money to him but it turns out there no shortage of dumb money. Can't blame the guy for taking money people are literally throwing at him. If you know anything about the guy he has no interest in business or profit. He just wants to create AGI. Mostly out of curiosity it seems.
I can't really see how Altman is a sociopath? I think his current vision greatly exceeds the technical capabilities that OpenAI can ever build. OpenAI seems to have produced some genuinely interesting products on the other hand. But they aren't profitable at present and I don't see it happening.
Altman talks to the talk of a CEO who is going to build a company that can change the world. It's what investors want to hear. He seems to make as many attempts as possible to actually execute on that. I think most of those plans are unlikely to be as successful as desired. But this isn't Theranos level fraud, where what they are trying to build is obviously impossible.
I never thought this could happen, especially after the "Ghibli scandal".
OpenAI has pulled a majestic business move. They got to allow people to generate Disney characters without issue AND will give 1 billion dollars to OpenAI?
Now the internet will be flooded by Disney character's videos, and since they don't have to pretend they didn't train on their intellectual property anymore I'm really curious to see where this will bring us.
>Now the internet will be flooded by Disney character's videos
How is Disney okay with this anyway? They've sent their lawyers after daycare centers who dared to paint a picture of a Disney character on their walls. Why are they suddenly going to ignore me prompting a video of Winnie the Pooh hitting the bong?
Disney, is well aware of the writing on the wall that copyright is going to continue to become increasingly harder to enforce, as generative ai distances itself from brute mimicry, and because infringers can generate new versions faster that takedown notices can be filed. Their alternative is to either be steamrolled, or leverage their IP while it has worth in order to latch on to the AI market. Plus, they give a solid explanation: it is free advertising when there are guardrails on how the characters can behave/say/portray (which is the advantage of the deal — I assume a similar one with Google, Microsoft or Apple will be forthcoming too).
When a true “leader” big or small emerges, every bit of capital will flock to it, leaving a burned out nest of ai company husks. But hey…maybe this time will be completely different. (And upon consideration, I think this is exactly why. All their deals are with the husks, while keeping their IP to leverage with the winner.)
They have to consider China. Right now Z-Image Turbo lets you render stills of any popular cartoon character you like, at frankly-disturbing levels of quality, doing almost anything you like. That's a relatively-tiny 6G-parameter model. If and when a WAN 2.2-level video model is released with a comparable lack of censorship, that will be the end of Disney's monopoly on pretty much any character IP.
Also, notice how Disney jumped all over Gemini's case before the ink was dry on the OpenAI partnership agreement. My guess is that Altman is just using Disney to attack his competitors, basically the 'two' part of a one-two punch that began by buying up a large portion of the world's RAM capacity for no valid business reason.
Mickey Mouse's character design as of 1930 is in the public domain. But if you ask an AI image model for "Mickey Mouse", you'll probably get something based on more recent versions of the character which are still copyrighted.
Scroll down on this page[0] and you'll see the different Mickeys and most of them are not under copyright. You got Steamboat Whillie + gloves but no Fantasia Mickey or later. Definitely no red-pants version.
Unsurprisingly Disney knows what they're doing and they have 95 years to modify a character's looks (and how the public imagines that character) before it enters public domain.
I have a feeling that the long-term economics of this don't really work. OpenAI is burning money and Altman has already gone out in public saying how Sora-generated content is being made in large volumes for little audience.
>People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
If OpenAI is going to pay Disney money for Winnie the Pooh smoking crack, I get the feeling that the money is going to come not from Sora profits but from companies that invested in OpenAI. Companies like Disney. Not that Sora is going to generate any profit if I can generate a video for free and I then post it on Discord instead.
> I have a feeling that the long-term economics of this don't really work. OpenAI is burning money and Altman has already gone out in public saying how Sora-generated content is being made in large volumes for little audience.
Let me introduce you to ponze scheme. He is feeding the hype, that's all that matters right now. More and more cash... The only real winner will be Nvidia when the bubble explode.
Yes, that's what makes Disney investing in OpenAI as part of this so confusing to me. Sign a licensing deal that means OpenAI pays you every time someone uses your character? Absolutely. Who cares if they're burning cash, as long as you get your payday it's all good. But investing in the company means their cash burning is your problem too. I don't know why you'd do it.
It’s ego and desperation for one last hurrah. Disney has a history of being a corporate governance nightmare - which Iger ironically contributed toward fixing. He’s undoing all that now.
>People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
That was the issue even the biggest Ai fans pointed out from day one. People aren't gonna post their videos on Sora. They are gonna make it on Sora and post on TikTok. A watermark won't change that reality (and I don't think ClosedAI is worried about brand recognition and taking a hit for that).
Likenthr rest of the scene, it's so utterly tone deaf.
It's not just that: generative AI tools make it so easy to make content that you run into discoverability problems. The pool of available content becomes huge but without a way to market or otherwise differentiate yourself, no one will likely stumble across it.
We already see this dynamic with the "vanity press" pay-to-play record labels / distributors like DistroKid: the vast majority of their catalog has never been played or was only played to test the initial upload. Huge numbers of tracks have a tiny number of views, with many literally never played. "Democratizing" content creation predictably does this, and it's frankly bizarre it wasn't anticipated.
The brand rot will be disgusting here. I thought "family" companies like Nintendo and Disney hit so hard, against their best interests, because they didn't want the next pregnant Elsa or Nazi Mario to cause a storm on their carefully tailored brands.
Seems like Nintendo still has that long term thinking. Disney was just waiting for the right price.
I mean, Disney can do basically whatever it wants and nothing will change. If my gay, Muslim friends are still willing to patronize the parks, despite their very real disagreement with how Disney conducts its business, then what hope is there for the exhausted, overworked mom whose child won't stop wailing about watching Frozen? This will absolutely tarnish the brand, and yet people will still consume Disney slop.
Disney has a long history of donating large dollars to ultra-conservative legislators and presidential hopefuls (they also donate to liberal candidates as well). As for the Muslim portion, it’s most likely due to Disney donating $2 million to Israeli Non-profits and condemning terrorism while making no statements or donations to the Palestinian people’s or groups that attempt to provide to the Palestinian people Israel was bombing in the closing months of 2023. The BDS movement has and keeps Disney on their list of boycott targets to this day.
IMHO the smart people saw the "Ghibli scandal" and thought "omg this is the feature of IP".
You don't like the last Star Wars trilogy? Pay us a few hundred dollars and you can rewrite your own story, thank you very much this is where you put the credit card number.
I’m pretty sure people don’t want that for the same reason people buy books instead of writing things they want to read. It’s not just to save the effort— stories are good because they surprise, challenge, and inspire us. I think the idea of the “everyone can make the exact movies they want to see” thing conceptually makes sense at first blush, but I just don’t think people want something that matches their assumptions entirely.
Not only that, they’re materially worse than real movies. Designer t-shirts still sell despite people being able to buy blank t-shirts and color them in with laundry markers.
If it's smart it won't be what you planned, but it'll almost always be what you like. If you thought the Vader scene at the end of Rogue One was stupid fanservice, it leans one way; if you went "FINALLY! YES!" it leans another. Lather rinse repeat across many potential inputs.
With the right sensors, your sentiment will be apparent to the system and it will be able to tune on the fly.
I think curated interactive environments like games are a much more realistic application of those distant technologies than automatically modified Hollywood movies on the fly.
And personally, I have absolutely no desire to modify movies that bothered me, story-wise, artistically, or editorially, with my own ideas. Likewise, I also don’t want to modify classic paintings to make the people fit my preferences for attractiveness. And I sure don’t want it done automatically.
Art is interesting because it comes from other people’s brains.
> It’s not just to save the effort— stories are good because they surprise, challenge, and inspire us.
Maybe, but that's the minority of demand. Most book sales are to people looking for something comfortable - think the near-infinite supply of practically interchangeable romance novels or detective stories.
No, it’s not the same as generating yourself a static piece of literature to read. It’s the difference between having an hours-long conversation and listening to an hours-long monologue. They are neither conceptually nor practically the same activity. It’s much closer to playing a video game.
Yes, we should abolish it. Great that you drew a shitty drawing, why would that mean I can’t draw a mouse anymore?
It’s archaic. The only thing we need now is identification. Oh, this is actually produced by Disney? Great. Oh, this is some Chinese knockoff? I might not want to consume it then.
I watched an interesting video about how the look of cinema has changed dramatically with the advent of green screen sets, CG, VFX, and a move away from large scale on-location scenes. This feels like we're inching towards a new era of cinema that has lost its charm in being real. Maybe I'm just getting old and this is what everyone seems to like (or can't relate to the charm of older cinema from the 90s).
Another thought I had. Is there no desire to make a modern film that still intentionally looks like an old Pixar film. Less poly. Simpler lighting. No fancy physics effects. In the same way PS1 graphics are popular now.
To add to that (extremely thought-provoking) video, I do think that the Marvel model of "pre-viz everything to death, the edit's already done before filming begins" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgvgi3ShcmY - can lose a lot of spontaneity. Perhaps the fading luster to Marvel films overall will bring us back from this place.
On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
There a ton of indie video games that march to the beat of that drum. “Oldschool” graphics, more about gameplay/story. I imagine there is a market for this.
I read this as "Disney approached OpenAI and threatened to sue them into oblivion --> OpenAI negotiated that Disney will use OpenAI internally for free, and will buy $1B of equity to have an ownership stake in the company".
Disney comes out pretty good from this one; they're going to have a ton of people using the service to create all sorts of stuff that will—on the whole—increase brand awareness and engagement with Disney.
OpenAI comes out pretty good from this, with a customer who's probably not paying much (if anything), $1B additional runway, but reduced ownership of the company.
>they're going to have a ton of people using the service to create all sorts of stuff that will—on the whole—increase brand awareness and engagement with Disney.
In the same way making a bunch of porn of a character increases brand awareness and engagement with an IP, sure.
OpenAI got away scot free here in avoiding a billion dollar lawsuit. Disney is gonna further melt away a century dynasty of art and culture. They're both gonna lose long term but I guess they both win for next quarter.
AI has driven the corporate suites of these companies insane.
> As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
I don't know what kind of hypnosis tricks Sam Altman pulls on these people but the fact that Disney is giving money to OpenAI as part of a deal to give over the rights to its characters is absolutely baffling.
OpenAI and ChatGPT have been pioneering but they're absolutely going to be commoditized. IMO there is at least a 50:50 chance OpenAI equity is going to be next to worthless in the future. That Disney would give over so much value and so much cash for it... insane.
Afaict it might be another circular deal? They buy equity (at what evaluation?) and options, and license some IP (is this the billion flowing straight back?) to OpenAI (not to SORA users?) for very restricted use cases, with a commitment from OpenAI to support Disney's copyright racketeering.
Disney only exists now to exploit the IP it has bought. They just want to join the circle of OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft et al making meaningless deals with each other.
If OpenAI has exclusive rights to AI generation for Disney and other IP rights holders, that would create the kind of moat they've been missing so far.
Disney is buying equity from OpenAI. You frame it as "giving OpenAI money" because you hold a (quite insane) assumption that OpenAI's equity is worth nothing.
Can you buy equity from OpenAI without also giving OpenAI a license to use your IP? Even if the equity is worth $1 billion, how much is Disney's IP license worth?
Thats a business agreement not a moat.
And you might have rights to generate the characters but they still need to do something. You only have to look at the repeated Disney flops to see they themselves have no ideas.
These kinds of parternships also throw in free inference with MFN clauses, which make a mutual moat.
A moat doesn't have to be a feature, and equity stakes have been fairly successful moats (eg. Much of AWS's ML services being powered by Anthropic models due to their equity stake in Anthropic).
A moat is a permanent feature protecting a castle against attack. That’s the metaphor. If it’s not their own device intrinsically protecting them then it’s not a moat in my book.
> That is not how we use the term "moat" in this context, because competitors eventually converge on offerings within 1-2 years.
Then I guess we need a new term because that's not how I interpret the term moat either. To me, ChatGPT chat history is a moat. It allows them to differentiate their product and competitors cannot copy it. If someone switches to a new AI service they will have to build their chat history from scratch.
By comparison a business deal that can be transferred to a new partner the second it expires is much more temporary.
But Sam Altman has already said that they need to be able to ignore copyright laws because the Chinese are going to ignore them too. How is access to Disney IP a moat if everyone involved (except Disney) gives no shits about copyright?
Buying already existing shares of a public company is very different from buying just-created shares of a private one.
You literally are just handing them money for a piece of paper that says “lol you now own x% of whatever this thing turns out to be worth in the future.”
Shares are always "x% of whatever this thing turns out to be worth in the future". It can be something, it can be nothing.
Disney is giving them money in the hopes that the AI market (bubble?) keeps growing and the value of OpenAI grows with it. And importantly, Disney wants to shift to AI generated slo... content so partnering with a top player with a proven product is a safe choice. Disney licenses its IP to OpenAI, OpenAI can then provide tools that generate said content Disney-style.
> Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees
Right, but the distinction is that if I go buy a few thousand shares of DIS today, I'm not handing money to the Disney company, rather I'm handing it to the previous owners of those shares. The total pool of them is fixed, so it's all basically zero sum. At most my purchase might signal (in a microscopic way) to the market that there's demand, and push up the price, which benefits Disney.
It's very different when a privately held company creates new shares to sell, because then the money used to purchase those shares really does go right back to the company.
If Disney could throw concepts at their properties like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or Paw Patrol or any of their other CG shovel content (which my kid loves, of course) and have a new episode every day of the year, they would, and this lets them do that without employing the staff to make that happen. If all it took was a writer to put a pitch together and Sora to turn out an episode, that'd be a steal for $1B.
OpenAI equity is worthless now. It's a company that absolutely cannot turn a profit, not with how much they're spending. And with a CEO that regularly lies about... everything (I'm sorry, you can't just spin up hundreds of gigawatts of power generation, especially not in the US, but also because the only company that makes gas turbines has a seven-year backlog).
The only people who don't think it's worthless are the people who would be worth a lot less if that were the case. Hug your loved ones and make peace with your gods, because the crash is going to be insane.
I've been thinking the same since GPT3 too, and since ChatGPT, and since Claude and... But here I am, still paying for ChatGPT Pro because it's literally has the best model you can get access to for a fixed price each month, and none of the others so far come close. I still use Anthropic's and Google's models to compare/validate against, because I assumed at one point they'd surpass OpenAI, but so far they haven't. This all makes me believe less and less each day that it'll actually be commoditized.
I think OpenAI having the best model still isn't enough. The AI marketplace isn't really in a race to the top, it's in a race to the mass market middle. If Gemini is good enough for the majority of people to complete the majority of tasks they want to then market effects and bundling can get an already dominant company like Google to take over the market. And that's without considering the integration possibilities, e.g. Gmail and Google Docs.
That doesn't mean everyone will use Gemini. As a software engineer I prefer Claude Code and will pay good money for it. I'm sure there will be plenty of other specialisms that will have preferred models. But OpenAI's valuations are based on the idea that it's going to be everywhere, for everything, all the time. And I'm skeptical. ChatGPT Pro is a $200 a month product. That's not a mass market proposition.
> good enough for the majority of people to complete the majority of tasks
It will never be this. There is always the expectation of being able to do more things.
"Log into my work email and deal with all of them whilst I have a bath".
"Start a company for me to earn some extra weekend cash by washing peoples driveways. Find and hire some people to do the actual washing"
"Find a nice house for me by a lake, negotiate a good price and buy it (get a mortgage if necessary) then book all the removals services and find me a new job nearby".
If 3 or 4 competitors can all provide a mostly identical product, isn't that a commodity? That is essentially the case right now, with the different companies playing around with UI, integrations and business model.
If all models were equal then sure. But for professionals who use these to solve complex problems and need correctness above all? The models and weights are not equal and interchangeable.
I use them every day for coding and Gemini 3 pro, Opus 4.5, and GPT 5.1 (haven’t tried 5.2 yet) are basically identical in terms of ability. Opus 4.5 has a slight edge in my personal experience so far.
That's interesting. I think besides the hard facts (like numnber of possible tokens before throtteling happens) the perceived quality differs from use case to use case. In that sense, ChatGPT is my daily driver, in terms of helping with coding problems or debugging Claude feels far superior to me. And when it comes to ideation and creativity (product idea validation, etc.) Gemini surpasses both of the other in my opinion.
But what could possibly be the secret sauce? Whatever it is, eventually enough engineers will move between orgs to get that stuff cross-pollinated.
Certainly there’s little to suggest that it has much to do with Altman’s leadership or a culture of engineering excellence/care that has been specifically fostered at OpenAI in a way that isn’t present at Facebook or especially at Google.
> OpenAI and ChatGPT have been pioneering but they're absolutely going to be commoditized.
I am not sure that it is very interesting that LLM apis are a commodity. It's not even a situation where it is _going_ to be a commodity, it already is. But so is compute and file storage, and AWS, Google and Microsoft etc have all built quite successful businesses on top of selling it at scale. I don't see why LLM api's won't be wildly profitable for the big providers for quite a long time, once the build out situation has stabilized. Especially since it is quite difficult for small companies to run their own LLMs without setting money on fire.
In any case, OpenAI is building products on top of those LLMs, and chatgpt is quite sticky because of your conversation history, etc.
This will not end well for Disney, there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged. This feels like another circular investment where Disney is hoping to make money back I'm sure. On the other hand, assuming they do the freemium stuff, I look forward to making a few videos of my daughters favorite Disney princesses "talking" to her.
I actually straight up don't think they give a shit anymore.
I think decorum works in an environment where decorum is the norm, but we have entered a political moment where that is no longer the case. And I think that this kind of thing bleeds so heavily into culture that they no longer give a shit about having their characters next to it.
They have enough plausible deniability; they did not create the content. I think that's enough for them, in this moment.
When I became a parent I was really surprised at how much crap Disney puts out. My previous exposure had just been their blockbuster movies which showed a close attention to detail. But you scratch under the surface and it's an endless pile of awful quality clothing, crappy lunchboxes, that kind of thing. To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.
And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care. And I think it does have an impact: my kids tired of Clubhouse very quickly and have little connection to Mickey and friends. Compare that to say, Dreamworks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse which they loved.
Disney is propped up by its tentpole features but their bench is incredibly weak. There are only so many Blueys you can buy to make up the difference.
If I never hear the theme to "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" again, it will be too soon.
We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.
I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.
> And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character.
≤4-year-olds do not care: there's bright colours and motion, and some semblance of story. The point is not to give some kind of lesson, but to distract/entertain (and probably release dopamine). See also Paw Patrol, Spidey Amazing Friends, PJ Masks, etc. None of these seem to have made any attempt at having a 'layer' that appeals to adults.
In some ways I equate this animation style with the algorithmic social media system: meant for 'quick hits'.
> See also Paw Patrol, Spidey Amazing Friends, PJ Masks, etc.
These shows are honestly fine. They all depict kids working together as a team, solving problems, and navigating socializing with each other. (And in the case of Paw Patrol, some environmentalism. And a few terrible puns.)
It's not like the Smurfs, Rocket Robin Hood, The Mighty Hercules, He-Man, Care Bears, etc. that I watched growing up were that much better.
Meanwhile Prime Video has shows that are basically cartoon cars going through a carwash for an hour. And YouTube has much, much worse junk like rapid-fire 60 second unboxing videos, and morons fake-reacting to various colours of slime.
Bluey is just one show. Disney has an entire network and platform to fill with content. There's not a lot of producers making Bluey level content, yet the vacuum still needs to be filled. Bluey level content also costs more to create than the one step above AI slop to fill that void. Just like not every song on an album will be a banger, there will always be fluff/fill/padding.
On a foreign language scale, Bluey and Peppa Pig are around B1- or A2+.
Or in other words: a typical adult needs about one year of self study (or nearly 6 months of more focused intensive study) before they can fully understand a show like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
And maybe half that for substantial understanding. (3 months intensive, 6 months typical self study to reach A2+ / watch Bluey with substantial understanding but not complete understanding).
If I were to guess at Mickey Mouse clubhouse, it's damn near A1 or A0+, it's so repetive and slow that you can learn some words from it.
Yeah, that's a lot more boring than the 'advanced' shows like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
Also note that children are not aware of tools (ie hammers or screwdrivers) yet. So simple learning exercises to know that hammer hammers nail but not screws is the kind of thing needed at pre-school level.
I'd imagine that the appropriate age for Mickey Mouse clubhouse is under 3. Bluey/Peppa Pig are closer to 6 or 7+ year old material.
Or in foreign language levels: B1-ish / 2+ on the American scale.
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Seriously. Just switch the shows to a different language and the level gap becomes blatantly clear.
In perhaps more Techie terms: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse level of understanding is achievable with Duolingo. Peppa Pig / Bluey (and similar level shows) are so far beyond Duolingo that I bet most Duolingo users will NEVER be able to achieve Bluey-level understanding in a foreign language (and that deep textbook + 1000ish vocab study memorization needs to be done before Bluey can be understood).
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Maybe the vocab estimate is easiest to understand. Bluey feels like a show that uses 1000 words with mastery (and maybe 2000 hard words as learning exercises in the show).
Mickey Mouse clubhouse uses maybe 250 words with mastery and maybe uses the top1000 list as learning/teaching words.
How (and why??) does Mickey Mouse clubhouse make an ENTIRE song consisting of a single word? (hotdog?) Because it's written for people where 'Hot dog' is a difficult word and needs repetition.
Fluff/filler on a banger album will still be decent. And it may even be someone's favorite. The point is that quality is fairly consistent. Not that everything is "peak".
The only real bastion of hope in an ocean of slop is that demand for curwtion will be better than ever. People who want quality will tire of swimming and pay larger premiums for someone to pick out thr nuggets in the rough. Basicslly, the new HBO.
It's been there for at least 40 years or so. Like, direct to DVD shows how they'll crank things down for a quick buck. So this isn't surprising in the grand scheme of things.
But this past 5-10 years has indeed been quite the drastic dip. You'll have little bits of nuggets here and there because they still have some amazing artists (the '20's mickey mouse shorts are amazing). But you know we're in for a vast decline when they are starting to make even their premier content take shortcuts, play safe, and stifle creativity.
> Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling
I think it’s important to remember that you probably aren’t their target audience. Their audience expects to see simple characters with simple stories. The CG doesn’t need to be advanced, so having it fast to produce is the goal. It has to hold the interest of a toddler for 25 min without annoying the parents too much. Shiny and simple rendering is probably what they are going for. You can certainly argue about the educational qualities of the show, but I think entertaining was their primary goal for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
Also, this show hasn’t been made for years, has it? You’re looking at a show that was produced from 2006-2016. The oldest shows would be almost 20 year old CG. The newest is still nearly 10 years old. At the time it was fresh, the CG was pretty good, compared to similar kids shows.
My kids were young right in this window, and we watched a lot of Disney.
Disney definitely hit a CG valley though that you can see with some of their shows that switched from a 2D look to a more 3D rendering. Thankfully we aged out of those shows around 2015, so it has been a while. Disney has always been a content shop where quantity has its own quality, so I’m sure I’d have similar opinions as you if I was looking at the shows now. But at the time, it wasn’t bad.
I’m not sure how the OpenAI integration will work. I can see all sorts of red flags here.
Right now the deal is structured as Disney pays OpenAI. That's going to invert.
Once OpenAI pays Disney $3B/yr for Elsa, Disney is going to go to Google and say, "Gee, it sure would suck if you lost all your Disney content." Google will have to pay $5B/yr for Star Wars. And then TikTok, and then Meta... door to door licensing.
Nintendo, Marvel, all of the IP giants will start licensing their IPs to platforms.
This has never happened before, but we're at a significant and unprecedented changing of the tides.
IP holders weren't able to do this before because content creation was hard and the distribution channels were 1% creation, 99% distribution. One guy would make a fan animation and his output was a single 5 minute video once every other month. Now everyone has exposure to creation.
Now that the creation/consumption funnel inverts or becomes combined, the IP holders can charge a shit ton of money to these platforms. Everyone is a creator, and IP enablement is a massive money making opportunity.
In five years, Disney, Warner, and Nintendo will be making absolute bank on YouTube, TikTok, Meta platforms, Sora, etc.
They'll threaten to pull IP just like sports and linear TV channels did to cable back in the day.
This will look a lot like cable.
Also: the RIAA is doing exactly this with Suno and Udio. They've got them in a stranglehold and are forcing them to remove models that don't feature RIAA artists. And they'll charge a premium for you to use Taylor Swift®.
Anyone can make generic AI cats or bigfoot - it's pretty bland and doesn't speak to people. But everyone wants to make Storm Troopers and Elsa and Pikachu. Not only do teenagers willfully immerse themselves in IP, but they're far more likely to consume well-known IP than original content. Creators will target IP over OC. We already know this. We have decades of data at this point that mass audiences want mass media franchises.
The "normies" will eat this up and add fuel to the fire.
Disney revenues are $90B a year. I would not be surprised if they could pull a brand new $30B a year off of social media IP licensing alone. Same for Nintendo and the rest of the big media brands. (WBD has a lot more value than they're priced at.)
>Now that the creation/consumption funnel inverts or becomes combined, the IP holders can charge a shit ton of money to these platforms. Everyone is a creator, and IP enablement is a massive money making opportunity.
This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available. Trying to charge premiums for slop never works. Just ask McDonald's 2-3 years back. The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element. We already made it very cheap for people to make content. No amount of Mickey or Star wars is gonna undo the fact that people like looking at other people. Animation slop will find its audience, but it's not gonna overthrow TikTok with real(ish) people making people slop.
If Disney tries to pull out of Google, they will double down on Shorts. This won't work on most companies. It's a best a nice hook into Disney+.
> This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available.
The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions. There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
Looking at the top videos on YouTube this week, 7 of the top 10 are all "Pop IP" content: Candy Crush the Movie, Miley Cyrus, "I wanna Channing All Over Your Tatum", Superman Drawn, Star Wars Elevator Prank, We are World of Warcraft, Red Bull.
People love and drown themselves in pop culture and corporate-owned IP. Whether that's music, games, anime - they love corporate-owned IP.
If this content gets pulled en masse, YouTube is fucked. YouTube has been getting all of this for free. That's something that could be done today, but it's just non-obvious. When you package that with the "creation enablement", it's a packaged good that can be licensed or sold enterprise-to-enterprise.
Disney is about to wet their toes. Nintendo has already been experimenting with it. The concept is right there in front of them, and as distribution channels and content creation merge into one uniform thing - it'll be obvious.
> The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
> The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element.
It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element.
People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Vivienne Medrano, Glitch Productions, Jaiden Dittfach, and many others have minted huge franchises on YouTube - views, merch, Amazon/Netflix deals, etc. The problem is that it takes them ages to animate each episode, whereas filming yourself on your smartphone is quick, easy, accessible, affordable, low-effort, low-material, and low-personnel.
Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
>The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions.
Okay, free with ads is "free" to consumers. That will get swamped by tiktok. Subscription is premium. People won't pay for slop. Those are both covered.
>There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
Yes. But who's making a profit? You can only shuffle money for so long, and we're hitting the breaking point of that. Ads won't invest into platforms they suspect are filled with bots and don't give ROI. Companies won't invest once saying "AI" isn't a get rich quick scheme. Customers won't invest once they run out of money.
It works, until it doesn't. Then it's suddenly freefall and people will act like they didn't hear creaking for 5- 10 years.
>When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
YouTube isn't really known for "IP content". That debate ended in 2010 with Viacom. They in fact rampantly remove traces of IP content.
Meanwhile, they have a monopoly on video hosting and control payouts in an opaque way to millions of non-IP creators. unless you think it's the end of premium media as we know it, Disney is still going to host trailers on YouTube and Vevo will host music videos. There's no reason to go anywhere. Disney+ and YouTube can exist simultaneously.
>To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
Yeah, in complete agreement. Short term monies, long term damage. Media has a "lingering effect" where results on the prequel will pass into the sequel and vice versa. So you can still have a profitable but panned release simply because previous movie was that well received.
>It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element. People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Do you think that if we had the same amount of animation as we did live action content that they'd be consumed equally? I'm a huge animation fan and very skeptical.
Even in art spaces, people will engage more with the presence of a human face. Females more, but even males get a noticeable boost You can chalk it up to lust or familiarity or anything else, but there seems there's some deeper issue at work than simply "there's more live action slop for now".
If we do get more animation slop, I think it will veer a lot more towards hyperrealism instead, for similar reasons. I always see it as uncanny, but it doesn't seem to hinder as much on others. It'll just be trying to mimic live action at the end of the day.
>Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
Sure. Animation is more engaging with kids. Kids aren't profitable, though. Their parents are. Unless its with ads, but advertising targeting kids has so much red tape.
I dont see a profitable model out of a media empire focusing on kids. Even Nintendo gets a lot of its money off of merchandising despite selling premium games with rare sales.
The animation quality of mickey mouse clubhouse was appalling when I first had kids. They seem to have decided to care about that, as the animation on mickey mouse clubhouse + is a marked improvement.
> To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.
That explains the surprisingly mediocre Darth Vader toy I saw over the weekend, and the "the only Star Wars part of this trailer is the lightsaber"-ness on the ads for the new Star Wars game.
In the same way more people interact with the Tifa senate meme than played FF7 (any version), sure.
We let "engagement" get way too far in the way of IP's that already won brand awareness. Ad views are NOT off putting a view from even the unprofitable streaming platform. Let alone a theater ticket. It's pretty much the opposite of Nintendo's model to keep everything premium for as long as possible.
"there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged"
Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.
The other thing I'd point out is that people kind of seem to forget this, but it isn't a requirement that AI video be generated, then shoveled straight out without modification. Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness). You can use the blessed Disney video generator to generate something, then feed it into another less controlled AI system to modify it into something Disney wouldn't want. Or a video of a Disney character doing something innocent can be easily turned into something else; it's not hard to ask the AI systems to put something "against a green screen", or with a bit more sophistication, something that can be motion tracked with some success and extracted.
"A front camera shot of Cinderella crouching down, repeatedly putting a cucumber in and out of her mouth. She is against a green screen." - where ever that video is going, Disney isn't going to like it. And that's just a particularly obvious example, not the totality of all the possibilities.
Just putting controls on the AI video output itself isn't going to be enough for Disney.
> Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.... Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness).
I still wonder what motivates the people behind that sort of thing. It'd be easy to understand if it were just porn, but what's been described to me is just... bizarre.
I always figured it was an engagement optimization thing—there were people mass producing content using popular characters and just throwing tons of stuff at the wall, and the ones that veered unsettling/bizarre wound up getting lots of engagement so they kept doubling down on it. That kind of feedback loop is certainly responsible for many other curious traits of online content that is circulated in algorithmically-curated feeds.
The tighter the loop between content creation (e.g. when you can generate unlimited content essentially for free) and the ability to measure its success (engagement), the more social media becomes a sort of genetic algorithm for optimizing content to be the most addictive possible at the expense of any other attribute.
There won't be one single reason. For some it is a dark sense of humour perhaps twisted a little too far off track, that perhaps they should keep in their own head or at least just between very close friends. For some it is simply money without caring that it might upset people: get enough engagement and ad impressions and it is worthwhile if you can ignore the moral aspect. Money might not be the objective at all, there are people who just want the attention, or the appearance of attention, and fake internet points (youtube views and such) sate their need at least temporarily. For some it is simply deliberate griefing, for all the reasons that is a thing generally. Or some mix of the above. None of it healthy IMO, but explainable.
In a few cases it is a dark in-joke between a small set of people that just happened to have used a public host for distribution, that unexpectedly went more viral.
There are people in this world who will do anything for money. They will destroy your children mentally if it makes them a single dollar, they will traumatize them and cause lasting damage. We have created a world in which these people have free access to our children.
Generative AI and getting everyone on the planet online is going to contribute massively to this. You’re already seeing a massive rise in sextortion scams, pig butchering scams, scams of all kinds.
Whatever the reason is (maybe online doesn’t feel “real” to people or something), a person with an internet connection where $100 is a great monthly income will do anything to make that money, even if that means endangering someone else’s children or mentally scarring them. Combined with poor enforcement in places like Nigeria and India, we’re already in the midst of a scam epidemic.
I'd like to give those people the benefit of the doubt, and state that I believe they don't start out intentionally trying to damage children. They're simply trying to maximise their own earnings, and don't give a shit about what collateral damage occurs in response to their actions, as long as earnings go up.
They'll optimise for whatever causes numbers to increase. Children just happen to sometimes be what makes that happen.
They aren't trying to pervert the children. This isn't some cabal.
It's just money.
It's just people trying to get children's eyeballs to collect minuscule ad revenue.
It's the same as the people who abuse their kids for a Youtube channel, or the russian companies that put out 10 """DIY""" shorts a day which are just fake.
Youtube rewards constant churning content creation, so that's what is done
Yes, spiderman and Elsa on YouTube is a prime example. It's just slop for kids, they're not even in the same universe. But kids like spiderman, and they also like Elsa, so... here we are.
It's probably a lot of kids just being silly. Sure there are plenty of adult trolls, but whenever I see people bewildered at unruly online behavior, I think it's because they cannot see the age/maturity level of the troll. I can absolutely see why people would find this funny.
Well, bizarre is the point. Surely you do understand that this is the content to gather kids views, because there is a ton of kids on the internet, and they can be monetized. I don't know what kind of research they do on their audience and if they purposefully want to traumatize kids as much as possible, but I suppose all this shit does capture kid's attention more than just Disney characters fucking.
Disney is the same company as it was 20 years ago. In fact, it's the same company as it was 100 years ago. They only care about profit. They do just enough brand management to preserve the profit motive.
To be fair to Walt Disney, he cared about a lot beyond profit and believed in advancing technology and society in a way modern corporate leaders absolutely do not. He was no saint but he's a far cry from modern CEO's.
To be fair, Walt Disney partnered with his brother Roy Disney, and they co-founded and ran the Walt Disney Company (and the iterations before it). These iterations of the Disney Company were never just Walt Disney.
Yes, but if you watch any documentaries about early Disney and listen to those people talk everything was about Walt's vision even after death they would ask "What would Walt want or do?" He was a figure whose influence and vision is on another level in American History (both good and bad) and early Disney was Walt no matter who was in charge on paper or even if Walt was still alive. That only started to change under Eisner. Roy was the one who kept Walt grounded so ambition shrunk but they stayed the course Walt set.
Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.
I think that, given the times, we might rate him a little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at par with the norms of his time, which we could now look back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in society.
He also normalized and romanticized the American Expansion and displacement of Native Americans. He's a very complicated and flawed figured who irrevocably changed the course of this nation. Even Walt recognized that Walt Disney the man and Walt Disney the icon were two different people, and he was flawed in ways as a man the icon who appeared weekly in everyone's living room was not.
Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.
This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.
Yes, perhaps if we deflated Disney’s moral rot by a diversified basket of other morally-rotted goods, I suppose we’d be able to conclude that Disney is perhaps the same company.
Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.
I firmly disagree and think this shallow take dishonors a pretty great man. While not perfect, Disney gave us the bedrock of American children's culture which has been a soft tool for the US for generations. Not to mention technology and other advancements. I'm not a Disney nut, but the man was one-of-a-kind and an impressive industrialist who instilled a great culture of innovation and a deep love of children and play. All things I value.
Yep, Disney was also a leading producer of racist tropes and content during Jim Crow. Historical clips of Mickey Mouse characters putting on minstrel shows with blackface alongside other racist stereotypes like crows can easily be found online[0]. Not to mention Song of the South[1], a film Disney produced based on Uncle Remus stories following slaves who happily live on a Georgia plantation. Disney has, of course, done their best to scrub these entries from history, but they played a major role in depicting racist tropes to kids for decades.
We all acknowledge that Walt Disney was a flawed person, I don't think anybody here disagrees. To me, what sets him apart from other corporate leaders isn't Walt's moral character, but rather his ambition to influence the direction of humanities development, both culturally and technologically. He was about a lot more than just making number go up.
One could argue that the company reoriented itself so purely towards children's art and kitsch because they needed to get themselves into a market segment where they could completely sanitize their output of these kinds of embarrassments.
I read your comment as saying that we should blame the people who create the demand for Disney's products, and the voters who elect the politicians, instead of Disney and the politicians. Not so?
The context is messy, but my comment's in the context of rejecting blame on Disney alone for "losing their way" when they have had the same way (read: $$$) as before and they're delivering products people want.
Fwiw I think the all US presidents since Clinton were elected on a non interventionist/pacifist campaign. Blaming the voters when every one of them (less so with Biden) violated those promises is a bit unfair, if you still believe in democracy.
Almost every one of them was elected again, often by wider margins (the only exception losing to another one of them) after deatroying any illusion innthat direction you might argue was produced by their campaign positions, so I don't think you can absolved the American electorate here, even if one agrees that their campaign before taking office met your description.
Bush sure wasn't anti-interventionist for the second term after entering the Iraq War 2.0. Even Obama campaigned to persist the "necessary" Afghanistan war.
I don't recall George W. Bush ever actually promising to stay out of wars and interventions. It's been standard for the two parties to criticize each-other on grounds of doing interventionism badly or going too far towards one extreme regarding foreign policy, but nobody has run as a real pacifist or isolationist because they would lose in a landslide. It especially doesn't help that pacifism and isolationism are associated with activist fringes in both parties who often lean into crank theories or make friends publicly with adversarial states.
Blaming the voters seems completely sensible when they reelected W in 2004. The man's Vice President was Dick freakin' Cheney. You can't seriously tell me the people voted for pacifism and got screwed over.
I don’t have an opinion on him, despite the suggestiveness of my comment. He’s more illustrative of a spirit that Disney at a time did not have an appetite for.
Stephen A Smith has done as much to harm ESPN's brand than any other figure. Please don't assume my biases from whom I failed to mention – I could have used SAS instead of Pat and my point would have been the same.
Perhaps I should have expected that the conversation would get pulled this way but it's not where I wanted it to go.
But this was also just a short-lived political environment as well, where companies pretended to care about the current thing because it was politically expedient. How long did it take for them to do a 180? I mean they didn't believe in any of that stuff even a little.
It's definitely not a war you're going to win simply via copyright claims to the big chat interfaces. This stuff will happen regardless. Especially as more open high quality LLMs role out.
They might as well have some direct say in the matter with the big companies by creating relationships and profiting via licensing.
They will be DMCA'ing the social media posts which is nothing new.
The big models will and already have copyright filters on, people are just working around them which will always be a battle. They also don't host the videos they create themselves on OpenAI/Grok.
As I said in my comment these videos are not all going to be via the mainline Grok/ChatGPT interfaces and alternative video generators will eventually become widely accessible to the public.
It won't move the needle if users have access to unfiltered Wan, Comfy, local, etc. as that's unlikely to be how most users will create content.
The majority of creation will happen directly through the powerful platforms themselves - YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Sora. This is the first time where platforms will be able to embed extremely powerful creation tools directly into the platform, and this will undoubtedly begin to take over for the majority of content produced.
Platforms and IP rights holders won't police the 1% of external user uploads. They'll negotiate deals with the platforms in bulk. If they don't license Elsa, Marvel, Pokemon, etc. then the platform wholesale will lose access to the IPs.
Platforms will have to pay. These are probably billion dollar deals. YouTube getting Pokemon exclusively for the next three years? Easily billions. Why even chase random internet users when you can just collect the gigantic platform check from one deal?
It'll look kind of like the cable tv / network model with occasional renegotiations. Or gaming consoles and exclusives. Or networks and sports.
Pretty sure Youtube is constantly being sued for copyright violation by now.
The question is what will happen when "the platform" is a model downloaded on torrent sites and just generates movies from a prompt. On the plus side: excellent compression ratio. On the down side: discussion with your kids about how at the end Snow White did not transform into a gigantic mech and blew up the Evil Queen with rockets. Must be your old memory, dad!
It only works until Mickey Mouse shows up on your Tiktok feed lynching an African American and doing a sieg heil salute. Are you sure Disney wants that or would not care about that??
There are clearly plenty of people who feel the same way as you, and for those people what I’m about to ask might have such an obvious answer that it could feel like I’m being rhetorical or feigning ignorance to provoke an emotional response, but it’s truly honest:
Why should Disney care?
To which you might say “because people care”, so:
Why should people care?
Back when I was a spud I used futuristic text-to-speech synthesis to make my computer say “Eye am Bill Gaytes my farts go FERT FERT FERT” - Should Bill Gates be offended? What about the people who like him? What about the Intel processor I used to create it? Or the company behind the TTS software? Would anyone think they’re involved and endorsed it? I guess the real question is: are we catering the world to people who can’t make that distinction?
People care because it's entirely unconscious. Even if you choose not to care, you can't, because you've already seen it.
The way advertisement works is that it's brain hacking - it's just associations. Over time your brain associates a brand with a product or products, and then simply by having this association in your brain you're more likely to buy the product.
This also works for negative advertisement.
Think about it. Suppose you did see mickey mouse saluting Hitler, or maybe you saw mickey mouse stick a jar up his little rat ass.
When you see mickey mouse, undoubtedly, even if just for a second, your mind will think about what you saw before. You might discount it immediately, but the damage is done. You still feel that emotion, even if only for a split second, and you have been influenced by it.
Appropriate example, more than some may realize. Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler were good friends. Walt would send him a real of cartoons every month. Adolf and his senior leaders would watch it at the resort in the Alps. One may still be able to find the silent films that one of his mistresses filmed showing them watching cartoons on the projector with his senior leaders. Adolf was big into art and appreciated the work Disney created. There was a project about 15 or so years ago to use computing power to figure out what Adolf was saying based on his muscle movements since she was filming from behind him at an angle. I can't remember what the project was called. I saw it on a TV program.
The advertising mechanism you outlined proves too much. Every parody, every satirical cartoon, every unflattering depiction creates profit risking associations? The idea that negative association might originate from AI generated Mickey doing something vile does not seem categorically distinct from the hand drawn rule 34 that has existed for decades, or from South Park episodes, or from bathroom stall drawings. Memories, sure, but I’m not sure the details of the studies support the idea that seeing childish or satirical works that are obviously not created or supported by the IP holder will have that kind of negative cognitive association. Actual acts done by the company, or willing associations with unsavory acts - absolutely. But there’s a wide distinction between taking a cartoon episode out of syndication because Epstein was a guest character voice, and fretting over a 3rd grader typing “Daffy but with boobs and stuff” into photoshop-o-matic.com. The question is whether fleeting cognitive residue constitutes actionable damage or simply the background noise of living among other minds who create things.
Kids making their computers say profane things about famous people or even making crude jokes at the expense of the disabled themselves created “negative associations” with the technology, and potentially with the companies producing it (if the effect is somehow unaffected by context), but the developers did not restrict access and blind people gained a tool that fundamentally altered their ability to navigate the world.
Now? Parents of a terminally ill child who cannot afford a trip could place their daughter in a photo with Elsa. Therapists working with autistic children who connect only with specific Disney characters could generate personalized social stories and visual supports. Teachers in underfunded schools could create engaging materials without licensing fees. Placing a real person alongside Mickey Mouse, or just making a Disney character give a thumbs up and “Happy Birthday, Billy”, required Disney's permission, professional artistic skill, and significant money. That gatekeeping is dissolving and I can’t imagine the positive impact it could have in people’s lives…apparently assuming Billy doesn’t get access to the prompt input first and ruin it for everyone.
This used to be a "zing", but don't think it is anymore. Try to make a new profile somewhere and select a few topics of interest. You will get suggested the most engaging "relevant" content. For me, I made a cycling Instagram and my feed instantly got filled with girls showing of cleavage in lycra with cycling hashtags.
...have you ever thought about the way you're using the app, then? Because I, personally, get nothing else other than dumb memes and posts from people I follow.
Look, I've gotten cartel beheadings and beatings on a YouTube search query for Jack Russell terriers.
Don't throw shade. If you haven't gotten "How the fuck did that get there?", consider yourself lucky I guess. Best I can figure, terriers have some unintentional shared vector space with much more unpleasant content.
This is a good point. Instead of policing what trolls will use it for, the same AI should be able to detect racist content and prevent it from spreading
Given that only one of the dogs can talk, you're set to get only one answer. Though I suspect that the ability to talk bestows bodily shame, based on this anecdotal evidence.
Not necessarily AI with 'hard guidelines' AI tools that pass output to a filter with 'hard guidelines' is definitely feasible.
Take the input as normal, pass it into Sora 2 and execute it as you would, pass the output through a filtering process that adheres to hard guidelines.
Of course, when talking about images, what is a 'hard guideline' here? Do you take the output and pass it through AI to identify if there's x y or z categorys of content here and then reject it?
Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
That said, there are a lot of other models out there that care about neither licensing nor alignment. So those will allow you to make racist content. Then you can do whatever you like with that generated content.
A lot of IP owners will learn that there is more than one way to skin a cat. It's easier than people think to turn children's characters, like say, Hermoine, into a raging racist. And there's very little technically speaking that they can do to stop it.
But yes, on OpenAI specific properties, they can definitely stop it dead in its tracks. They can even get better at stopping it over time. In fact, the more users try to generate it, the better the system will get at stopping it.
I'm sure that's what Disney's lawyers specified in the contracts and what their execs expect. However, judging by how LLM controls have gone in the past, I'm fully expecting to see a slew of awful content featuring Disney's characters in the days after this launches. OpenAI also probably won't ever be able to actually stop people from generating harmful content with the characters, but the volume of awful stuff will probably eventually slow down as people get bored and move onto the next controversial thing.
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
Yes, because AI's so far have been oh so resilient to jailbreaks and oh so great at picking out the potentially "not aligned with corporate values" content...
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
Don’t believe for a minute that whatever filters it uses will be sensitive enough to the way racist content is constructed to stop people from doing just that.
Given the creativity of the jailbreaking community I will be very impressed if OpenAI manage to reliably prevent Sora from creating disagreeable content with Disney characters.
I don't think that you will ever be able to generate Disney characters with the Sora app. Sora is both a model and an app. Instead I think that there will be a heavily guardrailed specialized app where you can do some highly restricted things for the opportunity for the content to show up on Disney+. Think of it as "Disney art! Powered by Sora".
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
It's not racist, it's an historically accurate depiction of 1930s Germany under the authority of a significant leader who may or may not be controversial today
Once you make the content it's just content, no? How the hell are you going to ban racism? A lot of racism is "dog whistle" stuff anyway -- it's designed to convey a message to people who already know what is being suggested while seeming innocuous to any enforceable standards of decency... The racists will surely have no trouble bending the models to produce Disney content that is in practice used to promote and celebrate racism.
> There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for.
And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
My impulse is to agree, and I'm almost wondering whether Disney figured that they'd have more restraining influence by getting in legitimately than by having generative AI companies wink and look away from rampant trademark violations because Disney won't pay them to care.
I assume that they mean that OpenAI will now be obligated to pay a lot of that money back to Disney as some kind of licensing fee. No idea if it's true, but that's the only way his comment makes sense.
There is a lot of YouTube content that is basically people playing with toys like Paw Patrol and having them interact in doll houses. I'm not a fan of this for my kids, and there will be a ton more of it. And yes, there will be political slop as well.
On the other hand there was a video about what happened to Mickey and Goofy in Vietnam... I'm probably okay with an updated version of that.
The “lewd texting with LLM” will be a tool for writing actual pornography, and in workflows for image and video pornography, even if the image and video generation doesn’t happen on OpenAI’s platform (in fact, people are using ChatGPT and other major AI engines as tools in that already, but loosening the filters were facilitate that even more on OpenAI’s platform.)
OpenAI knows that, and the people interested in that capability know that, even if many of the other people seeing the marketing about it don't.
> The “lewd texting with LLM” will be a tool for writing actual pornography
Sure, but does that mean "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn"? A bit like saying W3C is getting into porn because the web is used for porn, together with other things. Even when I try to think of parent's comment in the most charitable way, I don't think that's what they meant.
Personally I prefer if my tools stay as tools, and let me do professional work with them regardless of what that profession is.
> Sure, but does that mean "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn"?
Yes, it literally means they have indicated to the customer base that is looking into making porn.
It may not mean they have indicated it to some other audiences.
> A bit like saying W3C is getting into porn because the web is used for porn, together with other things.
No, its a bit like saying the W3C is getting into porn if the W3C had announced changes in the platform whose main market appeal was to people making porn, but announced it in a way that glossed over and minimized that.
If, on the other hand, the web had a steady state of being used for porn, you wouldn't say the W3C is getting into anything, you’d just say “the internet is for porn” (which has, of course, rather famously been said, and even sung.)
The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts, story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.
> The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts, story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.
Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable function is to facilitate porn production is only the case for the OpenAI action and you have presented nothing analogous for the entities you are trying to hold up as comparable.
> Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable function is to facilitate porn production
Where exactly did this happen though? And how am I supposed to prove a negative? It's up to you to present evidence that this is something OpenAI actively promote as a use case for their tools, something I personally haven't seen, but I'm open to changing what I think is happening if proof can be presented that this is the case.
This might end well for Disney. This provides a different marketing angle to bring in younger people to Disney. The filters will block a lot of the sexual violence content. The original cartoons are deemed racist by some so this won't open a door already opened.
But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble pile.
If just the news of the deal boosts Disney stock enough to pay for the deal, then yes. Or if it boosts OpenAI valuation because they now have Disney IP enough to pay off on Disney's investment, it is basically Disney producing content indirectly.
Who cares? Online trolls make inappropriate videos with characters. Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it.
It's so exhausting that companies are overly cautious about everything and let a tiny niche of internet culture drive these decisions. If you get obscene material in your social media feeds, you will continue to see this kind of stuff except maybe with some Disney IP. If not, it will have no impact to your life.
But practical things that affect 99% of people like you mentioned will be better, like your child wants to hear Mickey wish him happy birthday. So I applaud this.
I agree with you completely but I'm absolutely shocked that Disney would agree to this. They are extremely protective of how their IP is used. Famously so.
Sad I had to scroll this far to find a comment that wasn't pro-censorship of Fan Art because a character they saw on the internet offended someone's Protestant values.
“In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>”
-2 months because they need to spend $2b to make this revenue. Investors should look for a bump of another -8 forward P/E. Huge upside (negative) potential.
This has been an ongoing issue the past couple of years for Disney at their parks and cruise ships.
People are spotting obvious AI slop artwork places and it’s so poorly done.
Disney used to have artist integrity, what a sad path to drag everyone down.
I guess it’s back to the good out Japanese studios who are forcing craft and skill still from artists (the world is full of talent, at least, for now).
Disney has been a wannabe tech company for the longest of times. They started the streaming Wars with Disney+ and have had massive spend on AI already. There is virtually no creative or artistic talent left in the company.
Isn't Disney on of the oldest tech companies of all time?
The engineering that goes into their parks is insane, and they have been consistently pushing live experiences. The logistics that goes on in the background to let as many people as possible have a good experience is also insane.
And that's just Disneyland. There's a guy on youtube who makes fascinating hour-long documentaries about every aspect of Disneyland.
If you’re a Disney+ subscriber, be sure to watch The Imagineering Story miniseries. Fun fact, it was directed by Leslie Iwerks, who’s the granddaughter of Ubbe Iwerks, the co-creator of Mickey Mouse alongside Walt Disney.
Pixar was acquired by the current CEO of Disney. The same guy that purchased all the other large brands and saw them wither away. Heck, half of the Disney board comes from biotech companies.
Disney likes to use their past image of animation and artistry and the current way the company works couldn't stray father from it.
When music piracy was facilitated by corporate entities like Napster, the rights holders sued them out of existence, after which piracy evolved into a highly distributed problem that was too costly to prosecute (you can’t sue everyone using BitTorrent one by one). Yes, eventually the music rights holders did facilitate commercial distribution, starting with the iTunes Store, and it was successful because they satisfied the market’s key demand that customers be able to buy one song as a time for 99c, as opposed to the whole album, which would often cost upwards of $10. Also, they didn’t let customers modify the songs or make derivative works.
Generating Disney-derived content with AI, on the other hand, requires massive resources that most individuals don’t possess, thus making corporate entities all but essential players in the game. (This may change in a few years as technology improves, but we shall see.) And we’re talking about derivative works here, not mere copies.
Buying GPUs and RAM is a bit of a barrier right now, but renting a cloud instance at Modal and running a model off hugging face is relatively affordable
Maybe the negotiations established that the rights were worth $X, but Disney wanted $X + 1 billion worth of stock?
While many startups will take anyone's money, it can be hard to invest in some. And the most desirable are the hardest. So maybe Disney was using the IP negotiations to open the door?
Are they losing control though? OpenAI did sign a contract with them and that presumably gives them some power. Maybe less than the power they had over, for example netflix, but still more than nothing.
There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for.
Comments all act like Disney is giving them $1B, but they are essentially producing unlimited Disney IP content through OpenAI, and get any value boost on their ownership investment, and get the Disney stock bounce from the deal coverage. I don't really like the deal on the face value of what we know, but will admit there is huge potentially upside and it's very cheap relative to a lot of other company AI "strategies"
Others have pointed out the problems of trolls generating racist or otherwise controversial content using Disney characters and this being short-sighted by Disney, but I think this could just be another case of "no such thing as bad PR".
People will undoubtedly generate reprehensible things using these characters, and I think that's exactly what Disney wants because it's an easy way to make their characters go viral.
It's strange though because if you know anything about Disney and how the manage the characters in media and at the parks, they are extremely protective of the brand and image of the characters. Imagineers have very strict rules around virtual character meet and greets and etc.
Allowing their characters to be used in AI generated content blows that all out of the water unless there are some extremely tight guard rails.
They are a half step from flooding the market with Disney Princess porn.
Yes, that is certainly true, but I think there is a certain monetary value attached to that virality that Disney now wants to cash in on, which is something they haven't done before.
There's also the outward plausible deniability of "well we couldn't have known that people would break the guard rails". I can't imagine any other explanation. This decision must have gone through a lot of channels and they must be aware what these characters will be used for.
Rule 34 suggests there is demand, yes. The various rule 34 commision artists suggests there is supply.
I was mostly making a joke, as the idea of this deal causing a load of Disney princess porn to pop up and causing a sudden surge in people into that is hilarious to me.
I guess there is an expectation of a lack of control when it’s made through AI, versus an image that is from their owned parks. Even without AI, people have been putting Disney characters in unsavory contextes, and I don’t think anyone ever thought, “Wow, I can’t believe Disney sanctioned that picture of a princess doing whatever.”
Yes, but Disney legal is incredibly aggressive with any unauthorized use of characters. They have made day care's repaint walls with character murals. They have an army that chases that stuff down.
Which is why it's so weird that they are seemingly doing a 180 if it involves "AI".
The biggest actual impact of the AI craze has been the extent to which mere mention of it is causing businesses to upend themselves and break with decades of historical behavior.
This isn’t good for anyone that prefers media that someone put soul into. People thought Disney lost their mojo over the past few years… be prepared for almost every Disney movie to have that straight-to-video vibe from now on.
The collapse in production costs from AI video is going to change the volume and quality of what gets made. We’re headed for a world where studios and small teams alike can produce work that would have required a Game of Thrones budget not long ago. The pipeline for high end series and films is about to get a lot bigger, and the pace of experimentation is going to jump
This is like assuming that more high quality code will be available because the barrier to making and deploying software is lower. Look at the npm repository.
There is more to high-end software than churning out code fast. And there is more to high-end series and movie making than high quality visuals.
It might have required a GoT level budget to make, but it wont look as good a GoT. Just a few days ago McDonalds learned that (again) in the Netherlands
I think 90% of the McDonald's backlash was specifically related to the tone/content of the ad (anti-holiday, you're better off in McDonald's _than with your family_!), not the actual quality of the video.
We are heading towards a world where during the moment a company wins a bid to serve you an ad and it actually serves you an ad it generates a custom ad made just for you that will have video, etc. that is most likely to get you to engage in whatever the ad is attempting you to engage in.
I wonder if the next gen ad blocking strategy will involve convincing ad generators that I respond _really_ well to plain text ads with a font color of #FEFEFE on a #FFFFFF background.
Walt Disney has been turning in his grave for over 20 years since disney's fall from being a creative visionary to simply trying to regurgitate existing IP as a cash grab.
> As part of this new, three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, including costumes, props, vehicles, and iconic environments. In addition, ChatGPT Images will be able to turn a few words by the user into fully generated images in seconds, drawing from the same intellectual property. The agreement does not include any talent likenesses or voices.
Is there a list of allowed characters? Or are we just supposed to "spin the wheel" and deal with whatever results are returned? Or will these characters be selected instead of using natural language?
I wonder if this will weaken Disney's suit against Midjourney.
A tenant of seeking damages in a copyright complaint is the loss of control over how the intellectual property is used, and the potential damage done to the intellectual property by those who are not the rights holder. However this agreement demonstrates that they're not only willing to give up control (and allow content to be created without their vetting), but that they'd even financially contribute the acceleration of such through a very large initial investment with a carve out to contribute even more down the road.
I was aiming to write a counterpoint here, but so far many are quickly debunked by Disney being the company that is the financial backer of the agreement.
This deal establishes a clear dichotomy: Disney/OpenAI as the "Walled Garden" of premium IP vs. the "Open Bazaar" of mass distribution.
Google is now backed into a corner. To keep YouTube relevant against this alliance, they can't rely on tech alone—they need comparable IP. I expect them to immediately start courting Sony Pictures or Universal to fill that gap.
It’s essentially a battle between "Exclusivity" and "Scale".
With numbers like this, it feels like OpenAI is selling at this point the value of an IPO if everyone consolidates around OpenAI more than on the competitive value of its product.
For every extra company they get effectively exclusive usage with the more believable the strategy becomes. As it wouldn't be the first time that beating out competitors in enterprise distribution led to users making what they are used to using at work what they use personally.
Article makes it sound like Disney is just now rolling out ai for their employees but they’ve had access to it for a long time now. Disney has also been hiring for various AI positions for a bit.
This is the most circular of the circular funding deals. All the bubble signs are blaring it’s just a game of chicken now until the crash. I just don’t know if it is months or years.
It literally depends on who it is benefitting. If I run a small clothing company ad I want to print Mickey Mouse tshirts becasue it will make me money, I need to pay license fees to Disney to use their IP.
On the other hand if I am the biggest clothing manufacturer in the world and my tshirts are worn organically by loads of influencers, Disney might contact me and ask me to make a tshirt of their character so that they are getting exposure to a certain demographic on a certain platform. This way round it is advertising and so it benefits disney, and so instead of me paying to license their characters, they pay me to advertise them.
Well, no. Disney does not pay Hasbro or Mattel to use their characters. It does not pay clothing producers. So no, you dont have to pay people to use your IP because it's just advertising. Disney's IP is their core product.
You can make the argument they should let Sora use it to advertise. But that's not necessarily how it works. And for good reason - fan content doesnt necessarily benefit Disney in a measurable, controlled way. Furthermore, the IP is the thing they themselves are trying to sell you.
Sam Altman must be an unbelievable salesman. Iger is tired and is looking for a way out. He's quit once already, but got dragged back because of Chapek.
I spoke with several folks in the C-suite Disney leadership a year ago about AI - Disney is learning and trying literally everything they can to capitalize on AI. Every division is experimenting, including ABC and ESPN. I spoke with the Pixar folks - of course they're using it too. They want to see what works.
They're internally partnering and trying out lots of companies and tools. It's been a mandate for a long time. Well before it was kosher in greater Hollywood. Before Coca Cola's first AI Christmas video last year. Disney was an early believer.
I've heard through the grapevine (companies talking to investors) that Disney has been working with multiple foundation video model companies. One of them was trying to animate parts of the live action Moana film, supposedly. Not the one you've read about in the news that got rejected. A much better funded one. Not sure if it made it into the film - I suppose we'll find out soon.
Do recall, also, that Disney has publicly rebuffed OpenAI's proposals twice in the past. Something changed, and my guess is the Netflix/WBD deal.
If you read the release, it explicitly does not include the likenesses of human actors. Only animated and illustrated characters are included. (Although, that does cover animated/illustrated versions of characters that are typically portrayed by human actors...)
This is almost certainly due to the photographic/human likenesses of actors being under an entirely separate license and royalty contract than pure IP from Disney.
So the big fatso corporations all rally behind AI.
I don't like this. I don't dispute that AI has some useful use cases,
but there are tons of time-wasters, such as fake videos generated on
youtube. So when they now autogenerate everything, the quality will
further go downwards but they will claim it will go upwards. Well,
what may go up are the net profits. I don't think the quality will
really go upwards. They also kind of create a monopoly here. Only
other big corporations can break in - and they won't because it is
easier to share the profits in the same market in a guaranteed manner.
Quite amazing that this can happen. Who needs courts anymore when the
base system can be gamified?
Then there is also the censorship situation. If you keep on censoring stuff, you lose out information. I see this on youtube where Google censors cuss words. This leads to rubbish bleeps every some seconds. Who wants to hear that? It's so pointless.
I see a lot of Google adverts for AI that seems to be “look, you can translate your photo into a sci-fi world”.
Which is cool, I guess. But it doesn’t feel like a very valuable thing to an end user. That kind of thing is mostly valuable because it’s hard. If anyone can do it, nobody cares any more.
I am really excited about AI in some use cases. Using the latest models for agentic software development is truly magic. But “make a funny video of yourself as Mickey Mouse” just seems kind of naff.
I opened this article expecting to read that OpenAI was somehow delivering cash or in-kind payment to Disney as a means of appeasing the copyright beast.
Colour me surprised to see that it's Disney that are handing out the cash in this arrangement.
However with further reading the answer seems clearer: Disney will certainly be using OpenAI's video technology to reduce their production costs, and for the amount of content Disney create this agreement seems mutually beneficial.
Not that I expect any rational thought from Disney, but the race to the bottom has started. If anyone can make a video with Disney characters, their value goes to zero.
Maybe there is something more behind this deal that is not reported? For example, Disney is waiting for OpenAI bankruptcy and then wants to get it for cheap while having its foot in the door?
For everyone concerned about the AI systems being trained on copyrighted material: this was always the end-game of that argument. Once the technology was proven out to be useful, someone with a huge IP portfolio was going to slam that portfolio directly into the training data to get their own copyright-unencumbered AI.
Because the tool can generate output faster than human employees alone can (and they control the "legitimate" gate by which other people can use those characters in the tool).
The consequence being that for everyone complaining that AI is disrupting artists right now: these will, in hindsight, be the halcyon years. Even if we assume the copyright arguments hold water in court and AIs trained on other people's copyrighted material are ruled poison-fruit machines, the end result isn't the end of synthesizing-AIs... It's synthesizing-AIs only being owned by people with a big enough data portfolio to train them. Techno-anarchy replaced with techno-corporatocracy, and the smaller-volume artists still lose on being unable to out-produce their competition in an art market.
Andy Warhol disagreed. But in general: it's not a bulk or commodity business like, say, toilet paper, but an artist that creates five thousand works a year can definitely out-sell an artist that creates five.
To the extent that art intersects capitalism, that matters (even if the second artist is charging thousands per work; when your price is too high, people can't buy, so the artist charging dozens or hundreds per work but making 5,000 a year can sell to all the people who can't afford five-works-a-year).
Presumably, being able to use Sora to generate some pictures or videos involving Disney characters does not mean being able to actually distribute those pictures or videos, right? Those are still copyrighted characters.
The deal look unbalanced. Could it be that 1. Disney wants/needs to use Gen AI and 2. Disney cannot use a model that was trained to prevent their IP? Therefore they have to pick one partner and unblock their IP for this model?
As a place to park some cash, sure. But if I were running Disney there would be no character deal and I would need some kind of proprietary technology license that keeps certain AI improvements out of the hands of my competitors.
Lot of the anti AI crowd hoped Disney would side with them and Disney IP appearing in models would be the thing to bring it all down, thinking copyright overreach was the lesser evil to use to get their way.
Wouldn't that be a losing battle given the open source nature of the technologies that power these things? I feel like you'd end up in a somewhat similar situation to torrenting back in the day, you punish a handful of folks but ultimately play whackamole. There are a few things I could imaging them thinking, one might be if they give the IP to the most cutting edge business with the best distribution and they can keep some semblance of control + the market would be flooded mostly with "legitimate" "approved" "safe" stuff, openai may also be promising them tools to identify IP infringement on other platforms?
It's an equity investment, and yes they're agreeing to a committment to protecting the rights of the creators.
> Disney and OpenAI affirm a shared commitment to responsible use of AI that protects the safety of users and the rights of creators.
>Alongside the licensing agreement, Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees.
>As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
Putting aside feelings on AI, and also putting aside worst case scenarios of the kind of content (which will happen regardless of what they promise), I think this is a terrible move for the brand.
Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders. The value of your brand reduces dramatically , and you reduce excitement for new releases.
This is the company that had to walk back its plans to saturate streaming and theaters with their content because they ruined the hype for Star Wars and Marvel content. Two of the most beloved franchises!
This is just going to make that worse when ever social media feed will be blanketed by even more slop.
Unless the gambit is that they expect merch sales to go up, or they have a way to guarantee a cut of any used content. I’m sure there are some IP infringement lawyers who have basically secured a life time of work with this announcement.
> Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders.
That really depends on how the culture of media consumption changes. It's very different than the world of movie theaters and TV. Most people are using social media to consume the majority of their content. This at least helps constantly inject their characters into the mainstream culture, when they can no longer dominate TV/cinema and streaming platforms already saturate their characters with high volume.
The biggest risk IMO is if the short content being produced is more entertaining than what they officially produce or it turns into a mini-culture they don't have influence over, and they struggle to profit off the old stuff.
They will essentially be competing with their own IP.
AI will in a few years generate entire movies, including Star Wars ones. I can see at least one remake of A New Hope coming in the next years with all the original cast after their characteristics are licensed for use with AI. The huge amount of money saved makes just impossible for the studios to ignore the technology.
Today the reaction would be mostly negative, but at the pace technology is improving and with new generations getting used to find AI in everything I think it's just a matter of time before making movies with AI becomes the norm and the traditional way will become restricted to film lovers. Not that I necessarily like all that; I just find hard to think they're ignoring the opportunity.
Not a shareholder, but on first try, it won't do it because it recognizes Iger's name. And clearly the deal is fresh because it balked at Mickey Mouse too. But it has no trouble with just, "mouse": https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_693ae0d25bbc819188f6758fce3f90c...
I'm not a shareholder but buying equity in OpenAI seems to be a much better deal (for Disney) than making OpenAI just pay royalties, no? Seems like everyone wins, unless you think OpenAI will never amount to anything and it's all a bubble.
If you destroy your brand value in the process? This is an entertainment company... The entire value of this company is the characters and the right to make new stories with them.
Does anyone envision a scenario where OpenAI or Anthropic (or google) disappears?
I can understand the investment bubble in new infra. But even that, I’m not so sure. Right now, demand is so far outstripping supply, which is why we’re having so many conversations about energy or chips.
But yes that’s the bubble people keep talking about.
OpenAI is my least favorite AI company and Disney is (recently) among my least favorite entertainment conglomerates. Sounds like a match made in heaven. Good luck with the investment.
The endgame of every single one of them is replacement of labor, it's the only way the level of investment makes sense. Whether each org profits from it directly or indirectly is immaterial.
Seems @sama has stumbled onto a pretty good business strategy - unleash something that massively infringes on copyright into the world, then take it back and add “guardrails” and then ~~extort~~ sell it back to the person you infringed on their copyright in the first place.
absolutely disgusting behavior
I can't put into words how much I despise @sama, it would probably get me banned from every corner of the internet.
I think it depends on what they use it for. For fantasy stuff like cartoons, aliens and (not fantasy) dinosaurs it may be ok, and I guess they could train on old hand-animated cartoons to retain that charm (and cartoon tropes like running in place but not moving) if they wanted to. If they use it to generate photo-realistic humans then it's going to be uncanny valley and just feel fake.
It would be interesting to see best effort at an AI dinosaur walking - a sauropod using the trained motion of an elephant perhaps, which may well be more animal-like than CGI attempts to do the same.
> Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora short form videos available to stream on Disney+.
I actually think this is genius.
The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech.
Among the millions of slop videos generated, some might be the next Baby Shark, etc.
I've seen some Star Wars fan fiction created using AI that is truer to the original Star Wars than the most recent trilogy.
This is a chance for Disney to take the best of the user generated content, with high quality AI generated animation, and throw it on Disney+ to get free content for their streaming platform.
My guess is that's the gamble here. Worst-case scenario at the end of three years they just shut it down.
It's really the professionals who get paid to generate content for Disney that should be worried about this deal. This could be how AI causes them to lose their jobs.
It is so infuriating to get content block on ChatGPT for pretty much any fairy tale that has had a Disney related adaptation.
Try getting a Grimm's 19th century Snow White illustrations. You can not because the Disney crap supersedes it.
In fact you can not get a Snow White illustration of any kind on ChatGPT.
I can not figure out any prompts that would draw using public domain knowledge.
Same goes for a pirate fighting a flying boy - no good.
New one this week was when I tried to draw a border around my daughter's picture of a Poppy from Trolls(That's Dreamworks but same problem).
The actual copyrighted Poppy appeared in the border half way down the generation and then of course content block appeared.
What is hilarious though that ChatGPT will profusely apologize and provide extremely detailed instructions in setting up local Stable Diffusion as an alternative...
That was my first thought. When I saw 'Disney' and 'OpenAI' in a headline together I assumed the money was flowing the other way around. Certainly other rights holders like the NYTimes are looking for the cash to flow the opposite direction (they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting). Unless this investment somehow is structured so that Disney gets stock which will potentially be worth orders of magnitude more later...
There's probably already terabytes and terabytes of disney porn out there. It's not clear to me why this would make much of a difference on that front.
OpenAI is using a page from 2010's Facebook playbook. They know their valuation is hyper inflated, so they are using those crazy valuations to buy stuff with equity (just like Facebook bought WhatsApp with private stock with crazy valuations).
> just like Facebook bought WhatsApp with private stock with crazy valuations
FB bought Instagram April 9, 2012 with ~ 30% cash and 70% stock, and then IPO'd May 18, 2012. That's probably what you mean. FB bought WhatsApp Feb 19, 2014 with ~ 25% cash and 75% public stock that was roughly 2x the IPO price. The private valuation might be crazy, but it's increased with public trading, so I dunno.
Disney making a tech investment. Just the history of Disney and tech should make you roll your eyes: Starwave, Infoseek, Maker Studio, Playdom (I think Bamtech helped with Disney+, so maybe won't count that)
For anyone confused by this, what you're probably forgetting is that children make no distinction between slop and high quality content. You know all those bad 3D knock-off YouTube videos of that everyone was in a moral panic about a few years ago? Disney wasn't upset those were damaging their brand. They were upset that they weren't making any money from them. But they just found a way to undercut all the sweatshops in Bangladesh pumping that stuff out: recruit children to make videos for children.
Altman got Disney to pay OpenAI, via an investment, for Sora -- which was likely trained on and used to generate infringements of all kinds of their copyrighted material.
And then Disney sends Google a Cease & Desist for using its copyrighted material, not only restricting what people can do with Google's AI image generators, but which could potentially also force Google to retrain all their models without Disney content.
Very likely Disney will reach a licensing deal with Google, which would conveniently finance Disney's investment in OpenAI.
And all this on the heels of the coup where Altman simultaneously signed a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to lock up 40% of the world's DRAM supply, effectively cornering a key component for AI training hardware.
As I've said before: All these others are playing Capitalism. Altman out there playing Game of Thrones.
Perhaps.... functionality will only be available to paid accounts/integrations.
OpenAI will be contractually bound to report offensive content, Disney Lawyers will get the direct contact details via the paid account to know the user and sue.
Not a lawyer but I'd be interested to know if you can sue an end user who uses AI ... In the past you could for using tools, but if AI has autonomy based solely on a prompt that might even open up free speech defenses
Purely conjecture on my part I might add! I have no affiliation to either company, but I know Disney likes to sue so if they are paying so much money... and putting their IP at risk... what's in it for them?
I keep wondering about one thing: maybe Disney isn’t paying for the technology at all — maybe they’re paying for a spot in the future. If generative video becomes as common as social media, AI models will be the new TV channels, and whoever controls the prime shelf space wins. In that sense, this billion isn’t a fee for Sora it’s the price of having Disney’s front row booth in a new world of storytelling. So the real question isn’t why is Disney paying? but who’s going to own the shelves in this new story marketplace?
buried the lede:
> As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
I say this with no snark or disdain: Sam has mastered the art of the flywheel.
Re licensed ai videos, if anyone wants to see the perspective the C-suites are being sold on, check out this episode of Belloni's The Town, in which they discuss the vision for AI + IP https://overcast.fm/+AA4DU9JreIE
Disney said "Our IP is $1B for a 3yr license, or we sue"
Altman said "We can pay with equity, but let's frame it as an investment"
No cash exchanged
Disney is actually paying $1B so it makes no sense. OpenAI gets the IP plus $1B.
Disney gets to invest $1B pre-IPO, in what might become an even more valuable company (or crash and burn, we'll see).
Maybe the only good thing AI will do is take down Disney when it crashes. One can only hope.
I'm actually curious, how do we know for a fact that this is the case?
Could you elaborate?
Do you mean to say they’ll never take the payment?
What are the terms? It is not at all clear from the announcement. "part of this three-year licensing agreement", it _could_ mean the license cost is $1 billion, which Disney in turn invests in OpenAI in return for equity, and they're calling it "investment" (that's what's hypothesized above, but I don't think we know). Disney surely gets something for the license other than the privilege of buying $1 billion in OpenAI stock at their most recent valuation price.
Disney gets the opportunity to tell the board and investors that they are now partnered with a leading AI company. In effect, Disney is now an AI company as well. They haven't really done anything, but if anyone asks they can just say "of course we're at the forefront of the entertainment industry. We're already leveraging AI in our partnerships"
Yeah - they save face.
No cash because Disney's IP has no intrinsic value to begin with.
Disney loves the idea of giving investors an angle to bet on AI
This is probably very similar to what happened!
>I say this with no snark or disdain: Sam has mastered the art of the flywheel.
It's been his entire career. Guy has made billions of dollars from talking.
Kept failing upwards after Loopt.
Frustratingly impressive.
Never forget the double polo.
Isn't that the case for most ultra-rich CEOs? All of the CEOs of Microsoft apparently started off either building product or helping develop the business into something profitable. But at some point it doesn't really matter if you have the skills to be an individual contributor, a team leader, or even a vice president. The role of CEO mostly is to keep investors happy & secondarily to put the right people in the company together to make things happen.
Has he made billions? He's obviously done well but I'm not sure he has been able to capture any value from openai except for publicity, and what else does he have? A few $10m from loopt and ycombinator?
>Has he made billions? He's obviously done well but I'm not sure he has been able to capture any value from openai except for publicity, and what else does he have?
Forbes has him at $2.2bn, mostly from Reddit and Stripe https://www.forbes.com/profile/sam-altman/
Yeah, he’s a sociopath
He's taking from Disney and Microsoft though so I see no moral issues.
Who does Disney and Microsoft get their money from?
Groups like this aren’t singular entities.
Americans mostly. Both abuse copyright law to profit off of works done by creators/inventors of the past. Neither contribute much to humanity these days.
What if he’s wrong? He doesn’t care.
It could however, be pretty fucking shitty for the US/World economy.
He don’t care.
What if who's wrong? Sam? If right means turning a profit, he's most certainly wrong. It would be a very stupid investment to give money to him but it turns out there no shortage of dumb money. Can't blame the guy for taking money people are literally throwing at him. If you know anything about the guy he has no interest in business or profit. He just wants to create AGI. Mostly out of curiosity it seems.
I can't really see how Altman is a sociopath? I think his current vision greatly exceeds the technical capabilities that OpenAI can ever build. OpenAI seems to have produced some genuinely interesting products on the other hand. But they aren't profitable at present and I don't see it happening.
Altman talks to the talk of a CEO who is going to build a company that can change the world. It's what investors want to hear. He seems to make as many attempts as possible to actually execute on that. I think most of those plans are unlikely to be as successful as desired. But this isn't Theranos level fraud, where what they are trying to build is obviously impossible.
> I say this with no snark or disdain
Given the context, I think snark and disdain are called for.
Did we forget about Enron? Or are we deliberately retconning it? Many such cases.
Lmao your user name.
I like the phrase “vulture capital”
I never thought this could happen, especially after the "Ghibli scandal". OpenAI has pulled a majestic business move. They got to allow people to generate Disney characters without issue AND will give 1 billion dollars to OpenAI?
Now the internet will be flooded by Disney character's videos, and since they don't have to pretend they didn't train on their intellectual property anymore I'm really curious to see where this will bring us.
We should rethink copyright btw.
>Now the internet will be flooded by Disney character's videos
How is Disney okay with this anyway? They've sent their lawyers after daycare centers who dared to paint a picture of a Disney character on their walls. Why are they suddenly going to ignore me prompting a video of Winnie the Pooh hitting the bong?
Disney, is well aware of the writing on the wall that copyright is going to continue to become increasingly harder to enforce, as generative ai distances itself from brute mimicry, and because infringers can generate new versions faster that takedown notices can be filed. Their alternative is to either be steamrolled, or leverage their IP while it has worth in order to latch on to the AI market. Plus, they give a solid explanation: it is free advertising when there are guardrails on how the characters can behave/say/portray (which is the advantage of the deal — I assume a similar one with Google, Microsoft or Apple will be forthcoming too).
When a true “leader” big or small emerges, every bit of capital will flock to it, leaving a burned out nest of ai company husks. But hey…maybe this time will be completely different. (And upon consideration, I think this is exactly why. All their deals are with the husks, while keeping their IP to leverage with the winner.)
> infringers can generate new versions faster that takedown notices can be filed
This was the case with youtube, and it was touch and go if they were going to be forced to close in the early days.
It'll be interesting to see whether OpenAI is able to enforce the guardrails that Disney would want...
They have to consider China. Right now Z-Image Turbo lets you render stills of any popular cartoon character you like, at frankly-disturbing levels of quality, doing almost anything you like. That's a relatively-tiny 6G-parameter model. If and when a WAN 2.2-level video model is released with a comparable lack of censorship, that will be the end of Disney's monopoly on pretty much any character IP.
Also, notice how Disney jumped all over Gemini's case before the ink was dry on the OpenAI partnership agreement. My guess is that Altman is just using Disney to attack his competitors, basically the 'two' part of a one-two punch that began by buying up a large portion of the world's RAM capacity for no valid business reason.
I think this is a great take.
Dysneys characters are entering the public domain, they can either cash out now or not at all.
Mickey mouse is now copyright free, pluto is in two weeks, then pretty much the whole roster by 2030 https://michelsonip.com/news/disney-characters-in-the-public...
Mickey Mouse's character design as of 1930 is in the public domain. But if you ask an AI image model for "Mickey Mouse", you'll probably get something based on more recent versions of the character which are still copyrighted.
Mickey Mouse with red shorts and at least yellow gloves is already in the public domain: https://old.reddit.com/r/publicdomain/comments/18w4lnf/since...
The "modern" Mickey Mouse will be at the public domain in about five years.
Like I said, wait four years and all the main characters most recognised incarnations will be in the public domain.
Or we’ll get more articles about how Disney lobbied for even longer and stricter copyright nonsense.
Scroll down on this page[0] and you'll see the different Mickeys and most of them are not under copyright. You got Steamboat Whillie + gloves but no Fantasia Mickey or later. Definitely no red-pants version.
Unsurprisingly Disney knows what they're doing and they have 95 years to modify a character's looks (and how the public imagines that character) before it enters public domain.
Not the Pluto you're thinking of...[1][0] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/
[1] https://www.disneydining.com/disney-copyright-loss-pluto-202...
Or they could make, you know, new stuff people want to watch?
Because they didn't get any money from the daycare and they will get money from OpenAI when you make your Sora video. That's all there is to it.
I have a feeling that the long-term economics of this don't really work. OpenAI is burning money and Altman has already gone out in public saying how Sora-generated content is being made in large volumes for little audience.
>People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
If OpenAI is going to pay Disney money for Winnie the Pooh smoking crack, I get the feeling that the money is going to come not from Sora profits but from companies that invested in OpenAI. Companies like Disney. Not that Sora is going to generate any profit if I can generate a video for free and I then post it on Discord instead.
> I have a feeling that the long-term economics of this don't really work. OpenAI is burning money and Altman has already gone out in public saying how Sora-generated content is being made in large volumes for little audience.
Let me introduce you to ponze scheme. He is feeding the hype, that's all that matters right now. More and more cash... The only real winner will be Nvidia when the bubble explode.
Yes, that's what makes Disney investing in OpenAI as part of this so confusing to me. Sign a licensing deal that means OpenAI pays you every time someone uses your character? Absolutely. Who cares if they're burning cash, as long as you get your payday it's all good. But investing in the company means their cash burning is your problem too. I don't know why you'd do it.
The only explanation is if they think they can juice their stock by 2 billion and then whoever is on the ship jumps before the crash.
Sounds like Iger has his finger on the eject button. How much stock has he announced to be cashing out over 2026?
It’s not that.
It’s ego and desperation for one last hurrah. Disney has a history of being a corporate governance nightmare - which Iger ironically contributed toward fixing. He’s undoing all that now.
>People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
That was the issue even the biggest Ai fans pointed out from day one. People aren't gonna post their videos on Sora. They are gonna make it on Sora and post on TikTok. A watermark won't change that reality (and I don't think ClosedAI is worried about brand recognition and taking a hit for that).
Likenthr rest of the scene, it's so utterly tone deaf.
It's not just that: generative AI tools make it so easy to make content that you run into discoverability problems. The pool of available content becomes huge but without a way to market or otherwise differentiate yourself, no one will likely stumble across it.
We already see this dynamic with the "vanity press" pay-to-play record labels / distributors like DistroKid: the vast majority of their catalog has never been played or was only played to test the initial upload. Huge numbers of tracks have a tiny number of views, with many literally never played. "Democratizing" content creation predictably does this, and it's frankly bizarre it wasn't anticipated.
The brand rot will be disgusting here. I thought "family" companies like Nintendo and Disney hit so hard, against their best interests, because they didn't want the next pregnant Elsa or Nazi Mario to cause a storm on their carefully tailored brands.
Seems like Nintendo still has that long term thinking. Disney was just waiting for the right price.
I mean, Disney can do basically whatever it wants and nothing will change. If my gay, Muslim friends are still willing to patronize the parks, despite their very real disagreement with how Disney conducts its business, then what hope is there for the exhausted, overworked mom whose child won't stop wailing about watching Frozen? This will absolutely tarnish the brand, and yet people will still consume Disney slop.
> If my gay, Muslim friends are still willing to patronize the parks, despite their very real disagreement with how Disney conducts its business
What is this referring to?
Disney has a long history of donating large dollars to ultra-conservative legislators and presidential hopefuls (they also donate to liberal candidates as well). As for the Muslim portion, it’s most likely due to Disney donating $2 million to Israeli Non-profits and condemning terrorism while making no statements or donations to the Palestinian people’s or groups that attempt to provide to the Palestinian people Israel was bombing in the closing months of 2023. The BDS movement has and keeps Disney on their list of boycott targets to this day.
As an aside: Winnie the Pooh is public domain, so he can do drugs if he wants. But he shouldn't wear a red shirt while he does.
Oh that's not red, it's crimson
Wait - where is that wrinkle from?
The modern books?
They smell blood in the water and just bought their next gen studios for $1B
Sora is a heavily censored model so presumably they believe they can stop that sort of content being generated.
> How is Disney okay with this anyway?
They rather have control over who, when, how can create AI with Disney property, than let people figure it out themselves.
They say that if you were to parachute Sam onto North Sentinel Island and come back in five years to check on him, he'd be their king.
After having stolen all their eyeballs?
In the land of the blind, the man with a I is king!
They’re not. It will take them so long to negotiate the terms of using important IP that Sora will become obsolete.
IMHO the smart people saw the "Ghibli scandal" and thought "omg this is the feature of IP".
You don't like the last Star Wars trilogy? Pay us a few hundred dollars and you can rewrite your own story, thank you very much this is where you put the credit card number.
It was INEVITABLE.
I’m pretty sure people don’t want that for the same reason people buy books instead of writing things they want to read. It’s not just to save the effort— stories are good because they surprise, challenge, and inspire us. I think the idea of the “everyone can make the exact movies they want to see” thing conceptually makes sense at first blush, but I just don’t think people want something that matches their assumptions entirely.
Not only that, they’re materially worse than real movies. Designer t-shirts still sell despite people being able to buy blank t-shirts and color them in with laundry markers.
If it's smart it won't be what you planned, but it'll almost always be what you like. If you thought the Vader scene at the end of Rogue One was stupid fanservice, it leans one way; if you went "FINALLY! YES!" it leans another. Lather rinse repeat across many potential inputs.
With the right sensors, your sentiment will be apparent to the system and it will be able to tune on the fly.
I think curated interactive environments like games are a much more realistic application of those distant technologies than automatically modified Hollywood movies on the fly.
And personally, I have absolutely no desire to modify movies that bothered me, story-wise, artistically, or editorially, with my own ideas. Likewise, I also don’t want to modify classic paintings to make the people fit my preferences for attractiveness. And I sure don’t want it done automatically.
Art is interesting because it comes from other people’s brains.
Art doesn’t smoothly fit in, it imposes.
Clearly there’s a market for Netflix background noise, but no one’s going to theme parks for that.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.
> It’s not just to save the effort— stories are good because they surprise, challenge, and inspire us.
Maybe, but that's the minority of demand. Most book sales are to people looking for something comfortable - think the near-infinite supply of practically interchangeable romance novels or detective stories.
Comfortable is different than known. How often do people use LLMs to generate fiction for them to read?
I hear a lot of people already roleplay with LLMs which is pretty much that.
No, it’s not the same as generating yourself a static piece of literature to read. It’s the difference between having an hours-long conversation and listening to an hours-long monologue. They are neither conceptually nor practically the same activity. It’s much closer to playing a video game.
Yes, we should abolish it. Great that you drew a shitty drawing, why would that mean I can’t draw a mouse anymore?
It’s archaic. The only thing we need now is identification. Oh, this is actually produced by Disney? Great. Oh, this is some Chinese knockoff? I might not want to consume it then.
I watched an interesting video about how the look of cinema has changed dramatically with the advent of green screen sets, CG, VFX, and a move away from large scale on-location scenes. This feels like we're inching towards a new era of cinema that has lost its charm in being real. Maybe I'm just getting old and this is what everyone seems to like (or can't relate to the charm of older cinema from the 90s).
https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=EYdu543vJlAjdX5c
Another thought I had. Is there no desire to make a modern film that still intentionally looks like an old Pixar film. Less poly. Simpler lighting. No fancy physics effects. In the same way PS1 graphics are popular now.
To add to that (extremely thought-provoking) video, I do think that the Marvel model of "pre-viz everything to death, the edit's already done before filming begins" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgvgi3ShcmY - can lose a lot of spontaneity. Perhaps the fading luster to Marvel films overall will bring us back from this place.
On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
There a ton of indie video games that march to the beat of that drum. “Oldschool” graphics, more about gameplay/story. I imagine there is a market for this.
Inching? We are in it already and it’s only getting worse.
I read this as "Disney approached OpenAI and threatened to sue them into oblivion --> OpenAI negotiated that Disney will use OpenAI internally for free, and will buy $1B of equity to have an ownership stake in the company".
Disney comes out pretty good from this one; they're going to have a ton of people using the service to create all sorts of stuff that will—on the whole—increase brand awareness and engagement with Disney.
OpenAI comes out pretty good from this, with a customer who's probably not paying much (if anything), $1B additional runway, but reduced ownership of the company.
I think Disney is the winner here.
>they're going to have a ton of people using the service to create all sorts of stuff that will—on the whole—increase brand awareness and engagement with Disney.
In the same way making a bunch of porn of a character increases brand awareness and engagement with an IP, sure.
OpenAI got away scot free here in avoiding a billion dollar lawsuit. Disney is gonna further melt away a century dynasty of art and culture. They're both gonna lose long term but I guess they both win for next quarter.
I don't really understand why Disney is paying $1B for this. Shouldn't OpenAI be paying Disney to avoid getting sued?
Disney will either get a multiple on their return on investment, or OpenAI will die anyways and their IP issue with it.
It’s also setting a precedent that IP usage requires a contract. Never mind that the contract is bonkers!
Mickey mouse body slamming the Queen of England for laughs risks sullying their brand
AI has driven the corporate suites of these companies insane.
> As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
I don't know what kind of hypnosis tricks Sam Altman pulls on these people but the fact that Disney is giving money to OpenAI as part of a deal to give over the rights to its characters is absolutely baffling.
OpenAI and ChatGPT have been pioneering but they're absolutely going to be commoditized. IMO there is at least a 50:50 chance OpenAI equity is going to be next to worthless in the future. That Disney would give over so much value and so much cash for it... insane.
Afaict it might be another circular deal? They buy equity (at what evaluation?) and options, and license some IP (is this the billion flowing straight back?) to OpenAI (not to SORA users?) for very restricted use cases, with a commitment from OpenAI to support Disney's copyright racketeering.
Disney only exists now to exploit the IP it has bought. They just want to join the circle of OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft et al making meaningless deals with each other.
If OpenAI has exclusive rights to AI generation for Disney and other IP rights holders, that would create the kind of moat they've been missing so far.
All the more reason it's insane for Disney to be the one giving money!
Disney is buying equity from OpenAI. You frame it as "giving OpenAI money" because you hold a (quite insane) assumption that OpenAI's equity is worth nothing.
> Disney is buying equity from OpenAI.
Can you buy equity from OpenAI without also giving OpenAI a license to use your IP? Even if the equity is worth $1 billion, how much is Disney's IP license worth?
>"how much is Disney's IP license worth"
It unspoken business model is giving an IP license to anyone that can breathe at make a rev share agreement or hefty sum - so, less than you think.
These kinds of equity deals tend to include MFN clauses around inference pricing. Ik Anthropic did something similar a couple years ago.
> commoditized
not for disney content. Disney can pick OpenAI as the winner for this by not signing deals and suing anyone else.
Thats a business agreement not a moat. And you might have rights to generate the characters but they still need to do something. You only have to look at the repeated Disney flops to see they themselves have no ideas.
And if you're the only company with that business agreement. As long as you still have it, it's a...moat.
Well that’s the thing with moats - they don’t just disappear one day.
These kinds of parternships also throw in free inference with MFN clauses, which make a mutual moat.
A moat doesn't have to be a feature, and equity stakes have been fairly successful moats (eg. Much of AWS's ML services being powered by Anthropic models due to their equity stake in Anthropic).
A moat is a permanent feature protecting a castle against attack. That’s the metaphor. If it’s not their own device intrinsically protecting them then it’s not a moat in my book.
That is not how we use the term "moat" in this context, because competitors eventually converge on offerings within 1-2 years.
I don't need some stuck up HNer telling me about stuff I deal with in my day-to-day job.
Edit: can't reply
> a business deal that can be transferred to a new partner the second it expires is much more temporary
Generally, these kinds of equity deals include an MFN clause.
> That is not how we use the term "moat" in this context, because competitors eventually converge on offerings within 1-2 years.
Then I guess we need a new term because that's not how I interpret the term moat either. To me, ChatGPT chat history is a moat. It allows them to differentiate their product and competitors cannot copy it. If someone switches to a new AI service they will have to build their chat history from scratch.
By comparison a business deal that can be transferred to a new partner the second it expires is much more temporary.
> To me, ChatGPT chat history is a moat.
Every service has a chat history. You are talking about stickiness, which is (roughly) the same for every product.
ChatGPT wins a bit with stickiness because their AI personalizes itself to you over time, in a way that others don't quite do.
A moat is something unique. It can't really be a moat if all services offer it.
No business moat is permanent.
As if that would stop folks from using competitors to make knockoff Disney content.
But Sam Altman has already said that they need to be able to ignore copyright laws because the Chinese are going to ignore them too. How is access to Disney IP a moat if everyone involved (except Disney) gives no shits about copyright?
Looks like he changed his mind.
I do wonder if this $1B is effectively protection money to stop OpenAI from bulldozing any more copyright laws.
How is buying equity "giving money"?
Is it charity to buy AAPL as well?
I really don't understand your perspective
Buying already existing shares of a public company is very different from buying just-created shares of a private one.
You literally are just handing them money for a piece of paper that says “lol you now own x% of whatever this thing turns out to be worth in the future.”
Shares are always "x% of whatever this thing turns out to be worth in the future". It can be something, it can be nothing.
Disney is giving them money in the hopes that the AI market (bubble?) keeps growing and the value of OpenAI grows with it. And importantly, Disney wants to shift to AI generated slo... content so partnering with a top player with a proven product is a safe choice. Disney licenses its IP to OpenAI, OpenAI can then provide tools that generate said content Disney-style.
> Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees
Right, but the distinction is that if I go buy a few thousand shares of DIS today, I'm not handing money to the Disney company, rather I'm handing it to the previous owners of those shares. The total pool of them is fixed, so it's all basically zero sum. At most my purchase might signal (in a microscopic way) to the market that there's demand, and push up the price, which benefits Disney.
It's very different when a privately held company creates new shares to sell, because then the money used to purchase those shares really does go right back to the company.
They think OpenAI equity will be worthless so it's "giving money." Obviously Disney disagrees.
If Disney could throw concepts at their properties like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or Paw Patrol or any of their other CG shovel content (which my kid loves, of course) and have a new episode every day of the year, they would, and this lets them do that without employing the staff to make that happen. If all it took was a writer to put a pitch together and Sora to turn out an episode, that'd be a steal for $1B.
OpenAI equity is worthless now. It's a company that absolutely cannot turn a profit, not with how much they're spending. And with a CEO that regularly lies about... everything (I'm sorry, you can't just spin up hundreds of gigawatts of power generation, especially not in the US, but also because the only company that makes gas turbines has a seven-year backlog).
The only people who don't think it's worthless are the people who would be worth a lot less if that were the case. Hug your loved ones and make peace with your gods, because the crash is going to be insane.
> but they're absolutely going to be commoditized
I've been thinking the same since GPT3 too, and since ChatGPT, and since Claude and... But here I am, still paying for ChatGPT Pro because it's literally has the best model you can get access to for a fixed price each month, and none of the others so far come close. I still use Anthropic's and Google's models to compare/validate against, because I assumed at one point they'd surpass OpenAI, but so far they haven't. This all makes me believe less and less each day that it'll actually be commoditized.
I think OpenAI having the best model still isn't enough. The AI marketplace isn't really in a race to the top, it's in a race to the mass market middle. If Gemini is good enough for the majority of people to complete the majority of tasks they want to then market effects and bundling can get an already dominant company like Google to take over the market. And that's without considering the integration possibilities, e.g. Gmail and Google Docs.
That doesn't mean everyone will use Gemini. As a software engineer I prefer Claude Code and will pay good money for it. I'm sure there will be plenty of other specialisms that will have preferred models. But OpenAI's valuations are based on the idea that it's going to be everywhere, for everything, all the time. And I'm skeptical. ChatGPT Pro is a $200 a month product. That's not a mass market proposition.
> good enough for the majority of people to complete the majority of tasks
It will never be this. There is always the expectation of being able to do more things.
"Log into my work email and deal with all of them whilst I have a bath".
"Start a company for me to earn some extra weekend cash by washing peoples driveways. Find and hire some people to do the actual washing"
"Find a nice house for me by a lake, negotiate a good price and buy it (get a mortgage if necessary) then book all the removals services and find me a new job nearby".
If 3 or 4 competitors can all provide a mostly identical product, isn't that a commodity? That is essentially the case right now, with the different companies playing around with UI, integrations and business model.
If all models were equal then sure. But for professionals who use these to solve complex problems and need correctness above all? The models and weights are not equal and interchangeable.
I use them every day for coding and Gemini 3 pro, Opus 4.5, and GPT 5.1 (haven’t tried 5.2 yet) are basically identical in terms of ability. Opus 4.5 has a slight edge in my personal experience so far.
> But for professionals who use these to solve complex problems and need correctness above all?
Is that the same thing as making bootleg graphics involving Disney characters?
No? What kind of unrelated "gotcha" is this?
That’s what they just gave OpenAI the license to do.
That's interesting. I think besides the hard facts (like numnber of possible tokens before throtteling happens) the perceived quality differs from use case to use case. In that sense, ChatGPT is my daily driver, in terms of helping with coding problems or debugging Claude feels far superior to me. And when it comes to ideation and creativity (product idea validation, etc.) Gemini surpasses both of the other in my opinion.
But what could possibly be the secret sauce? Whatever it is, eventually enough engineers will move between orgs to get that stuff cross-pollinated.
Certainly there’s little to suggest that it has much to do with Altman’s leadership or a culture of engineering excellence/care that has been specifically fostered at OpenAI in a way that isn’t present at Facebook or especially at Google.
And how much are you paying? I pay $20 a month, but I doubt OpenAI makes money on me; they probably lose a lot.
Pro is the $200/month plan
Why does Bayer spend what it spends putting its brand in front of you?
There’s no direct return.
They’ll get every dollar of that billion in mindshare over the next twenty years.
_Disney_ needs to buy mindshare? From the company that’s happy to steal it anyway?
This feels like more funny accounting.
I wouldn’t rule either|both out.
None of the companies you see on TV need to buy mindshare - because they did yesterday, and will again tomorrow - so why not save today’s spend?
Out of sight, out of mind: especially as media consumption towards individual creators.
At what point does OpenAI become akin to AIG and 'too big to fail'?
> OpenAI and ChatGPT have been pioneering but they're absolutely going to be commoditized.
I am not sure that it is very interesting that LLM apis are a commodity. It's not even a situation where it is _going_ to be a commodity, it already is. But so is compute and file storage, and AWS, Google and Microsoft etc have all built quite successful businesses on top of selling it at scale. I don't see why LLM api's won't be wildly profitable for the big providers for quite a long time, once the build out situation has stabilized. Especially since it is quite difficult for small companies to run their own LLMs without setting money on fire.
In any case, OpenAI is building products on top of those LLMs, and chatgpt is quite sticky because of your conversation history, etc.
This will not end well for Disney, there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged. This feels like another circular investment where Disney is hoping to make money back I'm sure. On the other hand, assuming they do the freemium stuff, I look forward to making a few videos of my daughters favorite Disney princesses "talking" to her.
I actually straight up don't think they give a shit anymore.
I think decorum works in an environment where decorum is the norm, but we have entered a political moment where that is no longer the case. And I think that this kind of thing bleeds so heavily into culture that they no longer give a shit about having their characters next to it.
They have enough plausible deniability; they did not create the content. I think that's enough for them, in this moment.
When I became a parent I was really surprised at how much crap Disney puts out. My previous exposure had just been their blockbuster movies which showed a close attention to detail. But you scratch under the surface and it's an endless pile of awful quality clothing, crappy lunchboxes, that kind of thing. To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.
And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care. And I think it does have an impact: my kids tired of Clubhouse very quickly and have little connection to Mickey and friends. Compare that to say, Dreamworks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse which they loved.
Disney is propped up by its tentpole features but their bench is incredibly weak. There are only so many Blueys you can buy to make up the difference.
If I never hear the theme to "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" again, it will be too soon.
We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.
I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.
> And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character.
≤4-year-olds do not care: there's bright colours and motion, and some semblance of story. The point is not to give some kind of lesson, but to distract/entertain (and probably release dopamine). See also Paw Patrol, Spidey Amazing Friends, PJ Masks, etc. None of these seem to have made any attempt at having a 'layer' that appeals to adults.
In some ways I equate this animation style with the algorithmic social media system: meant for 'quick hits'.
Contrast with (e.g.) Bluey.
This is because parents don't watch with their kids anymore, just hand over the tablet.
> See also Paw Patrol, Spidey Amazing Friends, PJ Masks, etc.
These shows are honestly fine. They all depict kids working together as a team, solving problems, and navigating socializing with each other. (And in the case of Paw Patrol, some environmentalism. And a few terrible puns.)
It's not like the Smurfs, Rocket Robin Hood, The Mighty Hercules, He-Man, Care Bears, etc. that I watched growing up were that much better.
Meanwhile Prime Video has shows that are basically cartoon cars going through a carwash for an hour. And YouTube has much, much worse junk like rapid-fire 60 second unboxing videos, and morons fake-reacting to various colours of slime.
Ye strange to pick on Paw Patrol of all bad shows there are for kids. I think it is fine.
How about like the show with the antropomorphed airplanes delivering packets to kids.
Bluey is just one show. Disney has an entire network and platform to fill with content. There's not a lot of producers making Bluey level content, yet the vacuum still needs to be filled. Bluey level content also costs more to create than the one step above AI slop to fill that void. Just like not every song on an album will be a banger, there will always be fluff/fill/padding.
It’s in too short supply. That level of humor, thoughtfulness, just human care put me into a show parents and kids can relate to.
On a foreign language scale, Bluey and Peppa Pig are around B1- or A2+.
Or in other words: a typical adult needs about one year of self study (or nearly 6 months of more focused intensive study) before they can fully understand a show like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
And maybe half that for substantial understanding. (3 months intensive, 6 months typical self study to reach A2+ / watch Bluey with substantial understanding but not complete understanding).
If I were to guess at Mickey Mouse clubhouse, it's damn near A1 or A0+, it's so repetive and slow that you can learn some words from it.
Yeah, that's a lot more boring than the 'advanced' shows like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
Also note that children are not aware of tools (ie hammers or screwdrivers) yet. So simple learning exercises to know that hammer hammers nail but not screws is the kind of thing needed at pre-school level.
I'd imagine that the appropriate age for Mickey Mouse clubhouse is under 3. Bluey/Peppa Pig are closer to 6 or 7+ year old material.
Or in foreign language levels: B1-ish / 2+ on the American scale.
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Seriously. Just switch the shows to a different language and the level gap becomes blatantly clear.
In perhaps more Techie terms: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse level of understanding is achievable with Duolingo. Peppa Pig / Bluey (and similar level shows) are so far beyond Duolingo that I bet most Duolingo users will NEVER be able to achieve Bluey-level understanding in a foreign language (and that deep textbook + 1000ish vocab study memorization needs to be done before Bluey can be understood).
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Maybe the vocab estimate is easiest to understand. Bluey feels like a show that uses 1000 words with mastery (and maybe 2000 hard words as learning exercises in the show).
Mickey Mouse clubhouse uses maybe 250 words with mastery and maybe uses the top1000 list as learning/teaching words.
How (and why??) does Mickey Mouse clubhouse make an ENTIRE song consisting of a single word? (hotdog?) Because it's written for people where 'Hot dog' is a difficult word and needs repetition.
Fluff/filler on a banger album will still be decent. And it may even be someone's favorite. The point is that quality is fairly consistent. Not that everything is "peak".
The only real bastion of hope in an ocean of slop is that demand for curwtion will be better than ever. People who want quality will tire of swimming and pay larger premiums for someone to pick out thr nuggets in the rough. Basicslly, the new HBO.
It's been there for at least 40 years or so. Like, direct to DVD shows how they'll crank things down for a quick buck. So this isn't surprising in the grand scheme of things.
But this past 5-10 years has indeed been quite the drastic dip. You'll have little bits of nuggets here and there because they still have some amazing artists (the '20's mickey mouse shorts are amazing). But you know we're in for a vast decline when they are starting to make even their premier content take shortcuts, play safe, and stifle creativity.
> Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling
I think it’s important to remember that you probably aren’t their target audience. Their audience expects to see simple characters with simple stories. The CG doesn’t need to be advanced, so having it fast to produce is the goal. It has to hold the interest of a toddler for 25 min without annoying the parents too much. Shiny and simple rendering is probably what they are going for. You can certainly argue about the educational qualities of the show, but I think entertaining was their primary goal for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
Also, this show hasn’t been made for years, has it? You’re looking at a show that was produced from 2006-2016. The oldest shows would be almost 20 year old CG. The newest is still nearly 10 years old. At the time it was fresh, the CG was pretty good, compared to similar kids shows.
My kids were young right in this window, and we watched a lot of Disney.
Disney definitely hit a CG valley though that you can see with some of their shows that switched from a 2D look to a more 3D rendering. Thankfully we aged out of those shows around 2015, so it has been a while. Disney has always been a content shop where quantity has its own quality, so I’m sure I’d have similar opinions as you if I was looking at the shows now. But at the time, it wasn’t bad.
I’m not sure how the OpenAI integration will work. I can see all sorts of red flags here.
They brought it back this year as Mickey Mouse Clubhouse+. Same vibe, the animation is more polished but still simplistic.
I think y'all are thinking about this wrong.
Right now the deal is structured as Disney pays OpenAI. That's going to invert.
Once OpenAI pays Disney $3B/yr for Elsa, Disney is going to go to Google and say, "Gee, it sure would suck if you lost all your Disney content." Google will have to pay $5B/yr for Star Wars. And then TikTok, and then Meta... door to door licensing.
Nintendo, Marvel, all of the IP giants will start licensing their IPs to platforms.
This has never happened before, but we're at a significant and unprecedented changing of the tides.
IP holders weren't able to do this before because content creation was hard and the distribution channels were 1% creation, 99% distribution. One guy would make a fan animation and his output was a single 5 minute video once every other month. Now everyone has exposure to creation.
Now that the creation/consumption funnel inverts or becomes combined, the IP holders can charge a shit ton of money to these platforms. Everyone is a creator, and IP enablement is a massive money making opportunity.
In five years, Disney, Warner, and Nintendo will be making absolute bank on YouTube, TikTok, Meta platforms, Sora, etc.
They'll threaten to pull IP just like sports and linear TV channels did to cable back in the day.
This will look a lot like cable.
Also: the RIAA is doing exactly this with Suno and Udio. They've got them in a stranglehold and are forcing them to remove models that don't feature RIAA artists. And they'll charge a premium for you to use Taylor Swift®.
Anyone can make generic AI cats or bigfoot - it's pretty bland and doesn't speak to people. But everyone wants to make Storm Troopers and Elsa and Pikachu. Not only do teenagers willfully immerse themselves in IP, but they're far more likely to consume well-known IP than original content. Creators will target IP over OC. We already know this. We have decades of data at this point that mass audiences want mass media franchises.
The "normies" will eat this up and add fuel to the fire.
Disney revenues are $90B a year. I would not be surprised if they could pull a brand new $30B a year off of social media IP licensing alone. Same for Nintendo and the rest of the big media brands. (WBD has a lot more value than they're priced at.)
This is the end game. Do you see it now?
>Now that the creation/consumption funnel inverts or becomes combined, the IP holders can charge a shit ton of money to these platforms. Everyone is a creator, and IP enablement is a massive money making opportunity.
This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available. Trying to charge premiums for slop never works. Just ask McDonald's 2-3 years back. The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element. We already made it very cheap for people to make content. No amount of Mickey or Star wars is gonna undo the fact that people like looking at other people. Animation slop will find its audience, but it's not gonna overthrow TikTok with real(ish) people making people slop.
If Disney tries to pull out of Google, they will double down on Shorts. This won't work on most companies. It's a best a nice hook into Disney+.
> This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available.
The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions. There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
Looking at the top videos on YouTube this week, 7 of the top 10 are all "Pop IP" content: Candy Crush the Movie, Miley Cyrus, "I wanna Channing All Over Your Tatum", Superman Drawn, Star Wars Elevator Prank, We are World of Warcraft, Red Bull.
People love and drown themselves in pop culture and corporate-owned IP. Whether that's music, games, anime - they love corporate-owned IP.
If this content gets pulled en masse, YouTube is fucked. YouTube has been getting all of this for free. That's something that could be done today, but it's just non-obvious. When you package that with the "creation enablement", it's a packaged good that can be licensed or sold enterprise-to-enterprise.
Disney is about to wet their toes. Nintendo has already been experimenting with it. The concept is right there in front of them, and as distribution channels and content creation merge into one uniform thing - it'll be obvious.
> The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
> The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element.
It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element.
People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Vivienne Medrano, Glitch Productions, Jaiden Dittfach, and many others have minted huge franchises on YouTube - views, merch, Amazon/Netflix deals, etc. The problem is that it takes them ages to animate each episode, whereas filming yourself on your smartphone is quick, easy, accessible, affordable, low-effort, low-material, and low-personnel.
Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
This is all changing.
>The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions.
Okay, free with ads is "free" to consumers. That will get swamped by tiktok. Subscription is premium. People won't pay for slop. Those are both covered.
>There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
Yes. But who's making a profit? You can only shuffle money for so long, and we're hitting the breaking point of that. Ads won't invest into platforms they suspect are filled with bots and don't give ROI. Companies won't invest once saying "AI" isn't a get rich quick scheme. Customers won't invest once they run out of money.
It works, until it doesn't. Then it's suddenly freefall and people will act like they didn't hear creaking for 5- 10 years.
>When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
YouTube isn't really known for "IP content". That debate ended in 2010 with Viacom. They in fact rampantly remove traces of IP content.
Meanwhile, they have a monopoly on video hosting and control payouts in an opaque way to millions of non-IP creators. unless you think it's the end of premium media as we know it, Disney is still going to host trailers on YouTube and Vevo will host music videos. There's no reason to go anywhere. Disney+ and YouTube can exist simultaneously.
>To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
Yeah, in complete agreement. Short term monies, long term damage. Media has a "lingering effect" where results on the prequel will pass into the sequel and vice versa. So you can still have a profitable but panned release simply because previous movie was that well received.
>It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element. People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Do you think that if we had the same amount of animation as we did live action content that they'd be consumed equally? I'm a huge animation fan and very skeptical.
Consider this phenomenon
https://erdavis.com/2021/06/14/do-women-who-pose-with-their-...
Even in art spaces, people will engage more with the presence of a human face. Females more, but even males get a noticeable boost You can chalk it up to lust or familiarity or anything else, but there seems there's some deeper issue at work than simply "there's more live action slop for now".
If we do get more animation slop, I think it will veer a lot more towards hyperrealism instead, for similar reasons. I always see it as uncanny, but it doesn't seem to hinder as much on others. It'll just be trying to mimic live action at the end of the day.
>Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
Sure. Animation is more engaging with kids. Kids aren't profitable, though. Their parents are. Unless its with ads, but advertising targeting kids has so much red tape.
I dont see a profitable model out of a media empire focusing on kids. Even Nintendo gets a lot of its money off of merchandising despite selling premium games with rare sales.
The animation quality of mickey mouse clubhouse was appalling when I first had kids. They seem to have decided to care about that, as the animation on mickey mouse clubhouse + is a marked improvement.
Krusty the clown was a parody of Disney and the simpsons authors nailed it. [1]
Disney has basically always been like this. Overpriced goods powered by the brand alone.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Dsy16hhOI
Fun fact: Krusty now owned by Disney.
Fond-ish memories of Disney's direct-to-vhs push in the 90s
https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-straight-to-video-seq...
> To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.
That explains the surprisingly mediocre Darth Vader toy I saw over the weekend, and the "the only Star Wars part of this trailer is the lightsaber"-ness on the ads for the new Star Wars game.
> To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.
That's because people consider Disney an entertainment company whereas in fact its the biggest licensing company in the world.
Apropos of nothing, I watched some Gabby's Dollhouse with some children recently, and that show is absolutely unhinged. Cats everywhere.
> Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling
Yes, this show is absolute dogshit, pure slop and yet it ended in 2016. The dialog is completely braindead, episodes barely make sense.
The ancient Mickey Mouse cartoons are so good! Just a few I loved which are still very funny and I bet a few people remember:
- 1940: Mr. Mouse Takes a Trip ("Tickets please!")
- 1959: Donald in Mathmagic Land
Yeah, basically Disney invested a billion dollar in Pregnant Elsa Spider-Man Beach Castle.
They may be viewing this as an inevitable outcome with open models/fly-by-night providers/providers in more liberal copy-right jurisdictions.
They can either invest in mass classification and enforcement operations or gain some revenue share from it.
True, those videos were probably going to happen regardless. At least this way Diseny gets to give OpenAI a billion dollars at the same time.
They are likely making informed decisions. Disney/Pixar are players, not bystanders.
You need to realize more children in the world interact with Disney IP through Pregnant Elsa Spider-Man than through actual Disney real IP.
Perhaps this is a play to own and monetize that vector in the future.
In the same way more people interact with the Tifa senate meme than played FF7 (any version), sure.
We let "engagement" get way too far in the way of IP's that already won brand awareness. Ad views are NOT off putting a view from even the unprofitable streaming platform. Let alone a theater ticket. It's pretty much the opposite of Nintendo's model to keep everything premium for as long as possible.
_In America_.
Disney is meant to be a global company. If offensive videos happen this will backfire in many regions.
I agree. It would be hilarious if we weren’t all strapped to the hood of the same car.
Besides, the character they built their empire on is in the public domain now.
No he’s not. Disney still owns the trademark on the signature mouse. What’s in the public domain is Steamboat Willy.
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"there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged"
Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.
The other thing I'd point out is that people kind of seem to forget this, but it isn't a requirement that AI video be generated, then shoveled straight out without modification. Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness). You can use the blessed Disney video generator to generate something, then feed it into another less controlled AI system to modify it into something Disney wouldn't want. Or a video of a Disney character doing something innocent can be easily turned into something else; it's not hard to ask the AI systems to put something "against a green screen", or with a bit more sophistication, something that can be motion tracked with some success and extracted.
"A front camera shot of Cinderella crouching down, repeatedly putting a cucumber in and out of her mouth. She is against a green screen." - where ever that video is going, Disney isn't going to like it. And that's just a particularly obvious example, not the totality of all the possibilities.
Just putting controls on the AI video output itself isn't going to be enough for Disney.
> Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.... Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness).
I still wonder what motivates the people behind that sort of thing. It'd be easy to understand if it were just porn, but what's been described to me is just... bizarre.
I always figured it was an engagement optimization thing—there were people mass producing content using popular characters and just throwing tons of stuff at the wall, and the ones that veered unsettling/bizarre wound up getting lots of engagement so they kept doubling down on it. That kind of feedback loop is certainly responsible for many other curious traits of online content that is circulated in algorithmically-curated feeds.
The tighter the loop between content creation (e.g. when you can generate unlimited content essentially for free) and the ability to measure its success (engagement), the more social media becomes a sort of genetic algorithm for optimizing content to be the most addictive possible at the expense of any other attribute.
There won't be one single reason. For some it is a dark sense of humour perhaps twisted a little too far off track, that perhaps they should keep in their own head or at least just between very close friends. For some it is simply money without caring that it might upset people: get enough engagement and ad impressions and it is worthwhile if you can ignore the moral aspect. Money might not be the objective at all, there are people who just want the attention, or the appearance of attention, and fake internet points (youtube views and such) sate their need at least temporarily. For some it is simply deliberate griefing, for all the reasons that is a thing generally. Or some mix of the above. None of it healthy IMO, but explainable.
In a few cases it is a dark in-joke between a small set of people that just happened to have used a public host for distribution, that unexpectedly went more viral.
There are people in this world who will do anything for money. They will destroy your children mentally if it makes them a single dollar, they will traumatize them and cause lasting damage. We have created a world in which these people have free access to our children.
Generative AI and getting everyone on the planet online is going to contribute massively to this. You’re already seeing a massive rise in sextortion scams, pig butchering scams, scams of all kinds.
Whatever the reason is (maybe online doesn’t feel “real” to people or something), a person with an internet connection where $100 is a great monthly income will do anything to make that money, even if that means endangering someone else’s children or mentally scarring them. Combined with poor enforcement in places like Nigeria and India, we’re already in the midst of a scam epidemic.
I'd like to give those people the benefit of the doubt, and state that I believe they don't start out intentionally trying to damage children. They're simply trying to maximise their own earnings, and don't give a shit about what collateral damage occurs in response to their actions, as long as earnings go up.
They'll optimise for whatever causes numbers to increase. Children just happen to sometimes be what makes that happen.
Toddlers like those characters and aren't likely to skip ads. Good for revenue.
There's an instinct in many of us to destroy and pervert, and it can lead to very dark places.
This is silly.
They aren't trying to pervert the children. This isn't some cabal.
It's just money.
It's just people trying to get children's eyeballs to collect minuscule ad revenue.
It's the same as the people who abuse their kids for a Youtube channel, or the russian companies that put out 10 """DIY""" shorts a day which are just fake.
Youtube rewards constant churning content creation, so that's what is done
Yes, spiderman and Elsa on YouTube is a prime example. It's just slop for kids, they're not even in the same universe. But kids like spiderman, and they also like Elsa, so... here we are.
They do it because it actually works.
It's probably a lot of kids just being silly. Sure there are plenty of adult trolls, but whenever I see people bewildered at unruly online behavior, I think it's because they cannot see the age/maturity level of the troll. I can absolutely see why people would find this funny.
Well, bizarre is the point. Surely you do understand that this is the content to gather kids views, because there is a ton of kids on the internet, and they can be monetized. I don't know what kind of research they do on their audience and if they purposefully want to traumatize kids as much as possible, but I suppose all this shit does capture kid's attention more than just Disney characters fucking.
Don't use a cucumber if you're going to be subtracting the green screen
I think the idea is you want the cucumber also removed so it can be replaced with something else…
i assumed it was the egg plant, guess i'm getting old
Oh my.
I feel like we’re corrupting an innocent mind by explaining this to you.
They want the cucumber to be removed too buddy. Don’t worry about it OK.
Sora has good enough controls it is basically impossible to make it do a dirty video like that.
> Also Google "Elsagate" <snip> Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.
Isn't that essentially the same thing now?
Disney is not the same company it was 20 years ago.
2025 Disney encourages children to gamble and gives Pat McAfee significant visibility.
Disney is the same company as it was 20 years ago. In fact, it's the same company as it was 100 years ago. They only care about profit. They do just enough brand management to preserve the profit motive.
To be fair to Walt Disney, he cared about a lot beyond profit and believed in advancing technology and society in a way modern corporate leaders absolutely do not. He was no saint but he's a far cry from modern CEO's.
To be fair, Walt Disney partnered with his brother Roy Disney, and they co-founded and ran the Walt Disney Company (and the iterations before it). These iterations of the Disney Company were never just Walt Disney.
Yes, but if you watch any documentaries about early Disney and listen to those people talk everything was about Walt's vision even after death they would ask "What would Walt want or do?" He was a figure whose influence and vision is on another level in American History (both good and bad) and early Disney was Walt no matter who was in charge on paper or even if Walt was still alive. That only started to change under Eisner. Roy was the one who kept Walt grounded so ambition shrunk but they stayed the course Walt set.
Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.
We lost that when it was found that losing that was even more profitable.
I think that, given the times, we might rate him a little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at par with the norms of his time, which we could now look back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in society.
https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-semitism-ra...
He also normalized and romanticized the American Expansion and displacement of Native Americans. He's a very complicated and flawed figured who irrevocably changed the course of this nation. Even Walt recognized that Walt Disney the man and Walt Disney the icon were two different people, and he was flawed in ways as a man the icon who appeared weekly in everyone's living room was not.
Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.
This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.
Yes, perhaps if we deflated Disney’s moral rot by a diversified basket of other morally-rotted goods, I suppose we’d be able to conclude that Disney is perhaps the same company.
Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.
I firmly disagree and think this shallow take dishonors a pretty great man. While not perfect, Disney gave us the bedrock of American children's culture which has been a soft tool for the US for generations. Not to mention technology and other advancements. I'm not a Disney nut, but the man was one-of-a-kind and an impressive industrialist who instilled a great culture of innovation and a deep love of children and play. All things I value.
> While not perfect
Yep, Disney was also a leading producer of racist tropes and content during Jim Crow. Historical clips of Mickey Mouse characters putting on minstrel shows with blackface alongside other racist stereotypes like crows can easily be found online[0]. Not to mention Song of the South[1], a film Disney produced based on Uncle Remus stories following slaves who happily live on a Georgia plantation. Disney has, of course, done their best to scrub these entries from history, but they played a major role in depicting racist tropes to kids for decades.
0: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b5j4T9E8PuE
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South
We all acknowledge that Walt Disney was a flawed person, I don't think anybody here disagrees. To me, what sets him apart from other corporate leaders isn't Walt's moral character, but rather his ambition to influence the direction of humanities development, both culturally and technologically. He was about a lot more than just making number go up.
One could argue that the company reoriented itself so purely towards children's art and kitsch because they needed to get themselves into a market segment where they could completely sanitize their output of these kinds of embarrassments.
Don't forget the Native Americans in Peter Pan!
Amen. Blaming Disney for bad content is like blaming politicians.
Who asked for the content? Who elected the politicians?
**[Jiminy] crickets**
We can acknowledge that people are terrible, while also wanting people not to cater to the lowest common denominator.
You appear to be lost.
Who said and where's the "false dichotomy" you allude to in the discussion above?
I read your comment as saying that we should blame the people who create the demand for Disney's products, and the voters who elect the politicians, instead of Disney and the politicians. Not so?
No, comparative blame is fair for all parties.
The context is messy, but my comment's in the context of rejecting blame on Disney alone for "losing their way" when they have had the same way (read: $$$) as before and they're delivering products people want.
Garbage in, garbage out, as someone wise once said
Fwiw I think the all US presidents since Clinton were elected on a non interventionist/pacifist campaign. Blaming the voters when every one of them (less so with Biden) violated those promises is a bit unfair, if you still believe in democracy.
Almost every one of them was elected again, often by wider margins (the only exception losing to another one of them) after deatroying any illusion innthat direction you might argue was produced by their campaign positions, so I don't think you can absolved the American electorate here, even if one agrees that their campaign before taking office met your description.
The parent's claim is effortlessly debunked.
Bush sure wasn't anti-interventionist for the second term after entering the Iraq War 2.0. Even Obama campaigned to persist the "necessary" Afghanistan war.
I don't recall George W. Bush ever actually promising to stay out of wars and interventions. It's been standard for the two parties to criticize each-other on grounds of doing interventionism badly or going too far towards one extreme regarding foreign policy, but nobody has run as a real pacifist or isolationist because they would lose in a landslide. It especially doesn't help that pacifism and isolationism are associated with activist fringes in both parties who often lean into crank theories or make friends publicly with adversarial states.
Blaming the voters seems completely sensible when they reelected W in 2004. The man's Vice President was Dick freakin' Cheney. You can't seriously tell me the people voted for pacifism and got screwed over.
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But their robotics division though
What has Pat Mcafee got to do with anything, is he somehow a controversial figure now?
I think its just that people either love him or hate him and it seems like OP is part of the latter group
I don’t have an opinion on him, despite the suggestiveness of my comment. He’s more illustrative of a spirit that Disney at a time did not have an appetite for.
Pat Mcafee catching strays (He has had his show for ~6 years) but Screamin' A Smith gets a pass?
Your bias is showing.
Stephen A Smith has done as much to harm ESPN's brand than any other figure. Please don't assume my biases from whom I failed to mention – I could have used SAS instead of Pat and my point would have been the same.
Perhaps I should have expected that the conversation would get pulled this way but it's not where I wanted it to go.
Sorry, my point was SAS has been on the network for at least what, 15 years? And he isn’t knowledgeable about anything but the NBA.
PM is probably the nicest guy on the network. I get why people hate him, but rarely does he talk shit about people.
If anything, SAS paved the way for PM.
That was why I said you’re biased. Or you just don’t know the network very well.
But this was also just a short-lived political environment as well, where companies pretended to care about the current thing because it was politically expedient. How long did it take for them to do a 180? I mean they didn't believe in any of that stuff even a little.
Grok create already lets you make 6 second videos, though sometimes you have to say "Italian plumber" or "famous princesses".
It's definitely not a war you're going to win simply via copyright claims to the big chat interfaces. This stuff will happen regardless. Especially as more open high quality LLMs role out.
They might as well have some direct say in the matter with the big companies by creating relationships and profiting via licensing.
The AI IP lines are being drawn now.
The IP holders will sue or DMCA the platforms, not the users.
First Grok, then eventually YouTube.
Then they'll charge licensing fees.
Are also: RIAA wrt Suno, Udio.
They will be DMCA'ing the social media posts which is nothing new.
The big models will and already have copyright filters on, people are just working around them which will always be a battle. They also don't host the videos they create themselves on OpenAI/Grok.
As I said in my comment these videos are not all going to be via the mainline Grok/ChatGPT interfaces and alternative video generators will eventually become widely accessible to the public.
It won't move the needle if users have access to unfiltered Wan, Comfy, local, etc. as that's unlikely to be how most users will create content.
The majority of creation will happen directly through the powerful platforms themselves - YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Sora. This is the first time where platforms will be able to embed extremely powerful creation tools directly into the platform, and this will undoubtedly begin to take over for the majority of content produced.
Platforms and IP rights holders won't police the 1% of external user uploads. They'll negotiate deals with the platforms in bulk. If they don't license Elsa, Marvel, Pokemon, etc. then the platform wholesale will lose access to the IPs.
Platforms will have to pay. These are probably billion dollar deals. YouTube getting Pokemon exclusively for the next three years? Easily billions. Why even chase random internet users when you can just collect the gigantic platform check from one deal?
It'll look kind of like the cable tv / network model with occasional renegotiations. Or gaming consoles and exclusives. Or networks and sports.
Pretty sure Youtube is constantly being sued for copyright violation by now.
The question is what will happen when "the platform" is a model downloaded on torrent sites and just generates movies from a prompt. On the plus side: excellent compression ratio. On the down side: discussion with your kids about how at the end Snow White did not transform into a gigantic mech and blew up the Evil Queen with rockets. Must be your old memory, dad!
I understand that Disney might care about this, but I don't see why they should.
What exactly does “fanart” (no matter how distasteful and controversial) change?
Let people generate whatever fictional character they want.
It only works until Mickey Mouse shows up on your Tiktok feed lynching an African American and doing a sieg heil salute. Are you sure Disney wants that or would not care about that??
There are clearly plenty of people who feel the same way as you, and for those people what I’m about to ask might have such an obvious answer that it could feel like I’m being rhetorical or feigning ignorance to provoke an emotional response, but it’s truly honest:
Why should Disney care?
To which you might say “because people care”, so:
Why should people care?
Back when I was a spud I used futuristic text-to-speech synthesis to make my computer say “Eye am Bill Gaytes my farts go FERT FERT FERT” - Should Bill Gates be offended? What about the people who like him? What about the Intel processor I used to create it? Or the company behind the TTS software? Would anyone think they’re involved and endorsed it? I guess the real question is: are we catering the world to people who can’t make that distinction?
People care because it's entirely unconscious. Even if you choose not to care, you can't, because you've already seen it.
The way advertisement works is that it's brain hacking - it's just associations. Over time your brain associates a brand with a product or products, and then simply by having this association in your brain you're more likely to buy the product.
This also works for negative advertisement.
Think about it. Suppose you did see mickey mouse saluting Hitler, or maybe you saw mickey mouse stick a jar up his little rat ass.
When you see mickey mouse, undoubtedly, even if just for a second, your mind will think about what you saw before. You might discount it immediately, but the damage is done. You still feel that emotion, even if only for a split second, and you have been influenced by it.
Suppose you did see mickey mouse saluting Hitler
Appropriate example, more than some may realize. Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler were good friends. Walt would send him a real of cartoons every month. Adolf and his senior leaders would watch it at the resort in the Alps. One may still be able to find the silent films that one of his mistresses filmed showing them watching cartoons on the projector with his senior leaders. Adolf was big into art and appreciated the work Disney created. There was a project about 15 or so years ago to use computing power to figure out what Adolf was saying based on his muscle movements since she was filming from behind him at an angle. I can't remember what the project was called. I saw it on a TV program.
The advertising mechanism you outlined proves too much. Every parody, every satirical cartoon, every unflattering depiction creates profit risking associations? The idea that negative association might originate from AI generated Mickey doing something vile does not seem categorically distinct from the hand drawn rule 34 that has existed for decades, or from South Park episodes, or from bathroom stall drawings. Memories, sure, but I’m not sure the details of the studies support the idea that seeing childish or satirical works that are obviously not created or supported by the IP holder will have that kind of negative cognitive association. Actual acts done by the company, or willing associations with unsavory acts - absolutely. But there’s a wide distinction between taking a cartoon episode out of syndication because Epstein was a guest character voice, and fretting over a 3rd grader typing “Daffy but with boobs and stuff” into photoshop-o-matic.com. The question is whether fleeting cognitive residue constitutes actionable damage or simply the background noise of living among other minds who create things.
Kids making their computers say profane things about famous people or even making crude jokes at the expense of the disabled themselves created “negative associations” with the technology, and potentially with the companies producing it (if the effect is somehow unaffected by context), but the developers did not restrict access and blind people gained a tool that fundamentally altered their ability to navigate the world.
Now? Parents of a terminally ill child who cannot afford a trip could place their daughter in a photo with Elsa. Therapists working with autistic children who connect only with specific Disney characters could generate personalized social stories and visual supports. Teachers in underfunded schools could create engaging materials without licensing fees. Placing a real person alongside Mickey Mouse, or just making a Disney character give a thumbs up and “Happy Birthday, Billy”, required Disney's permission, professional artistic skill, and significant money. That gatekeeping is dissolving and I can’t imagine the positive impact it could have in people’s lives…apparently assuming Billy doesn’t get access to the prompt input first and ruin it for everyone.
The question is why it shows up on your Tiktok feed.
This used to be a "zing", but don't think it is anymore. Try to make a new profile somewhere and select a few topics of interest. You will get suggested the most engaging "relevant" content. For me, I made a cycling Instagram and my feed instantly got filled with girls showing of cleavage in lycra with cycling hashtags.
It was not meant as an attack on GP; it was meant as exactly this opportunity to question "the algorithm".
I swear to god Instagram is like the patriarchy speedrun.
If it finds out you're a woman, within mere minutes it's 100% "you're fat" "try this diet" "you've GOT to buy this viral dress on shein!!"
And if you're a man, it's boobs, ass, objectification, and products to make you feel more like a man.
The sheer velocity at which Instagram will shovel you into capitalist-patriachy++ is shocking.
...have you ever thought about the way you're using the app, then? Because I, personally, get nothing else other than dumb memes and posts from people I follow.
When I say this happens in mere minutes and to everyone I know, I mean it.
For the record, I don't use Instagram because it's basically always been toxic. It's one of the fastest ways to feel bad about your body and life.
No, stop with the stupid shaming. The point was that the algorithm pushes certain content on people, no matter what they actually want to see.
And I said that I do not have this issue and my current account is relatively fresh, having been made in May of this year.
I thought it was well known and generally accepted that the social medial companies push controversial click/rage bait to keep people “engaged”?
Look, I've gotten cartel beheadings and beatings on a YouTube search query for Jack Russell terriers.
Don't throw shade. If you haven't gotten "How the fuck did that get there?", consider yourself lucky I guess. Best I can figure, terriers have some unintentional shared vector space with much more unpleasant content.
terriers/terrorists
This is a good point. Instead of policing what trolls will use it for, the same AI should be able to detect racist content and prevent it from spreading
People saying this have not worked with Sora before. I challenge you to generate anything even close to that.
Tiktok has AI moderation tools that you are highly underestimating.
The people making these are good at more subtle forms of hate with coded language and indirect references.
the people making AI moderation tools are also good, and in my opinion more skilled than the abusers
So what? Similar videos and pictures have existed since the dawn of web.
Yes, AI enables people to produce these in higher fidelity, but I don't see how it is any different to Dolan MS Paint comics.
No one is going to think that Mickey doing lynching is official art, nor will they think that Mickey is a real person who has done that.
I look forward to making a few videos of my daughters favorite Disney princesses "talking" to her.
I look forward to chatting with Pluto and Goofy and asking why one has to wear pants when both of them are dogs.
Given that only one of the dogs can talk, you're set to get only one answer. Though I suspect that the ability to talk bestows bodily shame, based on this anecdotal evidence.
Sora?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(Kingdom_Hearts)
It's also the text-to-video model from OpenAI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)
I had the same thought. Finally, Sora will be teaming up with all your favorite Disney characters! Didn't that happen already?
It's just a funny coincidence.
I guess it will depend on how good their security is, because I'm assuming Disney is entering this deal with hard guidelines on what will be allowed.
AI with hard guidelines? I don't think that will work.
Not necessarily AI with 'hard guidelines' AI tools that pass output to a filter with 'hard guidelines' is definitely feasible.
Take the input as normal, pass it into Sora 2 and execute it as you would, pass the output through a filtering process that adheres to hard guidelines.
Of course, when talking about images, what is a 'hard guideline' here? Do you take the output and pass it through AI to identify if there's x y or z categorys of content here and then reject it?
"Hard guidelines" is making me think of the Pirate Code from Disney's Pirates of The Caribbean.
This.
Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
That said, there are a lot of other models out there that care about neither licensing nor alignment. So those will allow you to make racist content. Then you can do whatever you like with that generated content.
A lot of IP owners will learn that there is more than one way to skin a cat. It's easier than people think to turn children's characters, like say, Hermoine, into a raging racist. And there's very little technically speaking that they can do to stop it.
But yes, on OpenAI specific properties, they can definitely stop it dead in its tracks. They can even get better at stopping it over time. In fact, the more users try to generate it, the better the system will get at stopping it.
I'm sure that's what Disney's lawyers specified in the contracts and what their execs expect. However, judging by how LLM controls have gone in the past, I'm fully expecting to see a slew of awful content featuring Disney's characters in the days after this launches. OpenAI also probably won't ever be able to actually stop people from generating harmful content with the characters, but the volume of awful stuff will probably eventually slow down as people get bored and move onto the next controversial thing.
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
Yes, because AI's so far have been oh so resilient to jailbreaks and oh so great at picking out the potentially "not aligned with corporate values" content...
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
Don’t believe for a minute that whatever filters it uses will be sensitive enough to the way racist content is constructed to stop people from doing just that.
"Don't let the user do racist shit" is literally AGI Hard territory of problem solving.
It's right up there with "Let kids communicate anonymously but not to perverts" and "Is this porn or educational?"
How can you prevent it from making that content? People will find a way to combine certain words together to make it happen.
Given the creativity of the jailbreaking community I will be very impressed if OpenAI manage to reliably prevent Sora from creating disagreeable content with Disney characters.
If they’re jail breaking it, they should already be able to get it to create Disney characters without this deal.
Almost like this is not about the value of the deal, but the payoff to both sides from the headlines?
I don't think that you will ever be able to generate Disney characters with the Sora app. Sora is both a model and an app. Instead I think that there will be a heavily guardrailed specialized app where you can do some highly restricted things for the opportunity for the content to show up on Disney+. Think of it as "Disney art! Powered by Sora".
How are they going to stop it?
A certain combination of nonstandard characters will make an AI character drop an n-word no problem
I guess they could chuck the output through whisper or something to see if it transcribes back to anything dodgy?
LLM security feels very ball of sand held together with duct tape haha
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
It's not racist, it's an historically accurate depiction of 1930s Germany under the authority of a significant leader who may or may not be controversial today
Once you make the content it's just content, no? How the hell are you going to ban racism? A lot of racism is "dog whistle" stuff anyway -- it's designed to convey a message to people who already know what is being suggested while seeming innocuous to any enforceable standards of decency... The racists will surely have no trouble bending the models to produce Disney content that is in practice used to promote and celebrate racism.
Based on what I’ve seen on Sora, it’s likely possible but only for a day or a few hours. They’ve been getting better and faster at censoring.
I agree. Those characters are likely safe on Sora
That's still whack-a-mole though, just because they're rolling out new virus definitions quicker doesn't do anything to prevent zero day exploits
Great, so censorship by attrition.
reposting what i said in the other thread:
> There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for. And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
>This will not end well for Disney
I have faith that the Parks Imagineers will soon be installing Sora Stalls in and around every attraction in Disney World.
My impulse is to agree, and I'm almost wondering whether Disney figured that they'd have more restraining influence by getting in legitimately than by having generative AI companies wink and look away from rampant trademark violations because Disney won't pay them to care.
>This feels like another circular investment where Disney is hoping to make money back I'm sure.
How is that circular?
I assume that they mean that OpenAI will now be obligated to pay a lot of that money back to Disney as some kind of licensing fee. No idea if it's true, but that's the only way his comment makes sense.
If I were Disney I would want up front cash from OpenAI at this point.
The carousel of ~progress~ financing continues to turn....
Maybe the point is for it to not end well, like instead of waiting around they’re taking the helm and driving it into the ground early.
The upside is personalized content that kids will love; the downside is the internet doing what it always does
>This will not end well for Disney [...]
Guy on the internet knows more about businesses than a 200 billion century-old corporation.
A classic.
People are already doing whatever clips they want to using open source models.
There is a lot of YouTube content that is basically people playing with toys like Paw Patrol and having them interact in doll houses. I'm not a fan of this for my kids, and there will be a ton more of it. And yes, there will be political slop as well.
On the other hand there was a video about what happened to Mickey and Goofy in Vietnam... I'm probably okay with an updated version of that.
And, don't forget to figure in that OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn.
Is this about when Sam mentioned they want to continue/start letting people do lewd texting with LLMs? Or are you talking about actual pornography?
The “lewd texting with LLM” will be a tool for writing actual pornography, and in workflows for image and video pornography, even if the image and video generation doesn’t happen on OpenAI’s platform (in fact, people are using ChatGPT and other major AI engines as tools in that already, but loosening the filters were facilitate that even more on OpenAI’s platform.)
OpenAI knows that, and the people interested in that capability know that, even if many of the other people seeing the marketing about it don't.
> The “lewd texting with LLM” will be a tool for writing actual pornography
Sure, but does that mean "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn"? A bit like saying W3C is getting into porn because the web is used for porn, together with other things. Even when I try to think of parent's comment in the most charitable way, I don't think that's what they meant.
Personally I prefer if my tools stay as tools, and let me do professional work with them regardless of what that profession is.
> Sure, but does that mean "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn"?
Yes, it literally means they have indicated to the customer base that is looking into making porn.
It may not mean they have indicated it to some other audiences.
> A bit like saying W3C is getting into porn because the web is used for porn, together with other things.
No, its a bit like saying the W3C is getting into porn if the W3C had announced changes in the platform whose main market appeal was to people making porn, but announced it in a way that glossed over and minimized that.
If, on the other hand, the web had a steady state of being used for porn, you wouldn't say the W3C is getting into anything, you’d just say “the internet is for porn” (which has, of course, rather famously been said, and even sung.)
The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts, story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.
> The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts, story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.
Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable function is to facilitate porn production is only the case for the OpenAI action and you have presented nothing analogous for the entities you are trying to hold up as comparable.
> Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable function is to facilitate porn production
Where exactly did this happen though? And how am I supposed to prove a negative? It's up to you to present evidence that this is something OpenAI actively promote as a use case for their tools, something I personally haven't seen, but I'm open to changing what I think is happening if proof can be presented that this is the case.
It's hard to tell.
How did they indicate?
This might end well for Disney. This provides a different marketing angle to bring in younger people to Disney. The filters will block a lot of the sexual violence content. The original cartoons are deemed racist by some so this won't open a door already opened.
But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble pile.
Is it circular, though? Is an AI company giving Disney $1B?
If just the news of the deal boosts Disney stock enough to pay for the deal, then yes. Or if it boosts OpenAI valuation because they now have Disney IP enough to pay off on Disney's investment, it is basically Disney producing content indirectly.
The "original cartoons" are super tame compared to the heinous shit you can easily find on Sora.
Why is this a problem with Disney?
Who cares? Online trolls make inappropriate videos with characters. Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it.
It's so exhausting that companies are overly cautious about everything and let a tiny niche of internet culture drive these decisions. If you get obscene material in your social media feeds, you will continue to see this kind of stuff except maybe with some Disney IP. If not, it will have no impact to your life.
But practical things that affect 99% of people like you mentioned will be better, like your child wants to hear Mickey wish him happy birthday. So I applaud this.
I agree with you completely but I'm absolutely shocked that Disney would agree to this. They are extremely protective of how their IP is used. Famously so.
Not anymore. Just like every other business on the planet it is being run by people focused solely on wealth extraction now
Thank you.
Sad I had to scroll this far to find a comment that wasn't pro-censorship of Fan Art because a character they saw on the internet offended someone's Protestant values.
“In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/
$1B, how many hours of runway does that buy.
-2 months because they need to spend $2b to make this revenue. Investors should look for a bump of another -8 forward P/E. Huge upside (negative) potential.
it will defer the next price increase of disney+ by 47.3 days
The cancer spreads.
This has been an ongoing issue the past couple of years for Disney at their parks and cruise ships.
People are spotting obvious AI slop artwork places and it’s so poorly done.
Disney used to have artist integrity, what a sad path to drag everyone down.
I guess it’s back to the good out Japanese studios who are forcing craft and skill still from artists (the world is full of talent, at least, for now).
The Marvel slop that the human creators have been putting out hasn't inspired much confidence in wetware either
Are we certain that it was wetware?
Exactly - Disney sees this as a cheaper way to produce the same slop.
Probably worse slop, but now no human will be paid. What a marvelous future we've invented for ourselves.
To be fair the humans working at Disney had their chance and blew it.
It's our own fault. Apparently we find Jake Paul screaming "I'M GEEKED" into the camera highly entertaining.
I would argue AI going to be a good thing because more creative risks can be taken at lower sunk costs.
Judging by how bad recent Marvel movies were, I wouldn't be surprised if fans plop out far better quality.
Not an AI slop (I think?), but looks an order of magnitude better than any Marvel crap released in the last 3 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9b7BOJyE9A
What mad world are we living in where Disney — Disney — is paying someone to lose control over its IP?
Disney has been a wannabe tech company for the longest of times. They started the streaming Wars with Disney+ and have had massive spend on AI already. There is virtually no creative or artistic talent left in the company.
Isn't Disney on of the oldest tech companies of all time?
The engineering that goes into their parks is insane, and they have been consistently pushing live experiences. The logistics that goes on in the background to let as many people as possible have a good experience is also insane.
And that's just Disneyland. There's a guy on youtube who makes fascinating hour-long documentaries about every aspect of Disneyland.
> There's a guy on youtube who makes fascinating hour-long documentaries about every aspect of Disneyland.
you can't nerdsnipe me like that and NOT drop a link. :p
what's the channel?
Not your parent, but I'd expect they mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defunctland
His recent videos on Imagineering's animatronics and "Living Characters" was incredible.
Not OP but if you do wanna see some good youtube that shows what Disney knows about computering, the Disney research hub is super fun: https://www.youtube.com/@DisneyResearchHub/videos
I remember when I first saw Stickman in 2018 I thought it would be amazing if they continued it all the way out, they went pretty far with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFtNcGnroa8 to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGOY4KaLLNw
If you’re a Disney+ subscriber, be sure to watch The Imagineering Story miniseries. Fun fact, it was directed by Leslie Iwerks, who’s the granddaughter of Ubbe Iwerks, the co-creator of Mickey Mouse alongside Walt Disney.
As I recall, Randy Pausch had a lot of positive things to say about Disney Imagineering.
Toy Story was essentially a tech demo for Pixar. And they worked alongside Apple to make the Squeak Smalltalk programming language.
Pixar was bought by Disney years after it was already a movie powerhouse. Toy Story was released in 1995; Disney acquired Pixar in 2006.
Pixar was acquired by the current CEO of Disney. The same guy that purchased all the other large brands and saw them wither away. Heck, half of the Disney board comes from biotech companies.
Disney likes to use their past image of animation and artistry and the current way the company works couldn't stray father from it.
Disney isn't "paying someone," they're expecting to make money. They're investing.
The $1B turns into OpenAI stock. If Disney characters make OpenAI more valuable, that stock and its future dividends become more valuable.
The alternative is they make no money and people still produce them using other video gen tools without the copyright filters.
Similar to the music industry piracy battle, it makes more sense to work with the big platforms than fight them.
I don’t see the similarity here.
When music piracy was facilitated by corporate entities like Napster, the rights holders sued them out of existence, after which piracy evolved into a highly distributed problem that was too costly to prosecute (you can’t sue everyone using BitTorrent one by one). Yes, eventually the music rights holders did facilitate commercial distribution, starting with the iTunes Store, and it was successful because they satisfied the market’s key demand that customers be able to buy one song as a time for 99c, as opposed to the whole album, which would often cost upwards of $10. Also, they didn’t let customers modify the songs or make derivative works.
Generating Disney-derived content with AI, on the other hand, requires massive resources that most individuals don’t possess, thus making corporate entities all but essential players in the game. (This may change in a few years as technology improves, but we shall see.) And we’re talking about derivative works here, not mere copies.
Buying GPUs and RAM is a bit of a barrier right now, but renting a cloud instance at Modal and running a model off hugging face is relatively affordable
What open-weight model comes close to the quality of Sora 2 and can run on hardware mere mortals can afford?
There are many alternatives. Another is they sue the shit out of Open AI until you basically can't generate anything related to mice or monarchies.
This may be the right move but it's by no means forced.
I think they're getting some equity in return for the investment. If it goes up, Disney makes out. If it doesn't, well, ...
Why not equity in exchange for rights? The crazy thing is they're surrendering both rights and cash.
Maybe the negotiations established that the rights were worth $X, but Disney wanted $X + 1 billion worth of stock?
While many startups will take anyone's money, it can be hard to invest in some. And the most desirable are the hardest. So maybe Disney was using the IP negotiations to open the door?
Are they losing control though? OpenAI did sign a contract with them and that presumably gives them some power. Maybe less than the power they had over, for example netflix, but still more than nothing.
P.S. If you can't win them, join them ...
Disney monetizing the loss of control that was happening anyway
I think I'm the only one kind of stoked about this. My kiddos are going to LOVE making short films with their favorite Disney Princesses.
Yeah, but Disney will make you pay extra for it, that's for sure.
You're not. You're the only HN commenter who's excited
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There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for.
And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
Comments all act like Disney is giving them $1B, but they are essentially producing unlimited Disney IP content through OpenAI, and get any value boost on their ownership investment, and get the Disney stock bounce from the deal coverage. I don't really like the deal on the face value of what we know, but will admit there is huge potentially upside and it's very cheap relative to a lot of other company AI "strategies"
Others have pointed out the problems of trolls generating racist or otherwise controversial content using Disney characters and this being short-sighted by Disney, but I think this could just be another case of "no such thing as bad PR".
People will undoubtedly generate reprehensible things using these characters, and I think that's exactly what Disney wants because it's an easy way to make their characters go viral.
It's strange though because if you know anything about Disney and how the manage the characters in media and at the parks, they are extremely protective of the brand and image of the characters. Imagineers have very strict rules around virtual character meet and greets and etc.
Allowing their characters to be used in AI generated content blows that all out of the water unless there are some extremely tight guard rails.
They are a half step from flooding the market with Disney Princess porn.
Yes, that is certainly true, but I think there is a certain monetary value attached to that virality that Disney now wants to cash in on, which is something they haven't done before.
There's also the outward plausible deniability of "well we couldn't have known that people would break the guard rails". I can't imagine any other explanation. This decision must have gone through a lot of channels and they must be aware what these characters will be used for.
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> They are a half step from flooding the market with Disney Princess porn.
I would think that whatever demand there is for that is already filled.
rule 34 would strongly suggest that is not the case.
Rule 34 suggests there is demand, yes. The various rule 34 commision artists suggests there is supply.
I was mostly making a joke, as the idea of this deal causing a load of Disney princess porn to pop up and causing a sudden surge in people into that is hilarious to me.
I guess there is an expectation of a lack of control when it’s made through AI, versus an image that is from their owned parks. Even without AI, people have been putting Disney characters in unsavory contextes, and I don’t think anyone ever thought, “Wow, I can’t believe Disney sanctioned that picture of a princess doing whatever.”
Yes, but Disney legal is incredibly aggressive with any unauthorized use of characters. They have made day care's repaint walls with character murals. They have an army that chases that stuff down.
Which is why it's so weird that they are seemingly doing a 180 if it involves "AI".
The biggest actual impact of the AI craze has been the extent to which mere mention of it is causing businesses to upend themselves and break with decades of historical behavior.
*contexts
Their characters are way past virality
They’re way past being relevant and that is the problem they are solving… getting mindshare again.
This is “impressive” negotiation from Altman. Can’t imagine this being good for Disney.
This isn’t good for anyone that prefers media that someone put soul into. People thought Disney lost their mojo over the past few years… be prepared for almost every Disney movie to have that straight-to-video vibe from now on.
In the meanwhile...
Google should demand another $1bn from Disney to crush the lawsuit
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/disney-hits-google-with-ce...
The collapse in production costs from AI video is going to change the volume and quality of what gets made. We’re headed for a world where studios and small teams alike can produce work that would have required a Game of Thrones budget not long ago. The pipeline for high end series and films is about to get a lot bigger, and the pace of experimentation is going to jump
>The pipeline for high end series and films
This is like assuming that more high quality code will be available because the barrier to making and deploying software is lower. Look at the npm repository.
There is more to high-end software than churning out code fast. And there is more to high-end series and movie making than high quality visuals.
It might have required a GoT level budget to make, but it wont look as good a GoT. Just a few days ago McDonalds learned that (again) in the Netherlands
I think 90% of the McDonald's backlash was specifically related to the tone/content of the ad (anti-holiday, you're better off in McDonald's _than with your family_!), not the actual quality of the video.
I don't know, the ad also looks like shit
We are heading towards a world where during the moment a company wins a bid to serve you an ad and it actually serves you an ad it generates a custom ad made just for you that will have video, etc. that is most likely to get you to engage in whatever the ad is attempting you to engage in.
I wonder if the next gen ad blocking strategy will involve convincing ad generators that I respond _really_ well to plain text ads with a font color of #FEFEFE on a #FFFFFF background.
Walt Disney would be tossing and turning in his grave as his legacy is destroyed by these arseholes
Walt Disney has been turning in his grave for over 20 years since disney's fall from being a creative visionary to simply trying to regurgitate existing IP as a cash grab.
> As part of this new, three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, including costumes, props, vehicles, and iconic environments. In addition, ChatGPT Images will be able to turn a few words by the user into fully generated images in seconds, drawing from the same intellectual property. The agreement does not include any talent likenesses or voices.
Is there a list of allowed characters? Or are we just supposed to "spin the wheel" and deal with whatever results are returned? Or will these characters be selected instead of using natural language?
I wonder if this will weaken Disney's suit against Midjourney.
A tenant of seeking damages in a copyright complaint is the loss of control over how the intellectual property is used, and the potential damage done to the intellectual property by those who are not the rights holder. However this agreement demonstrates that they're not only willing to give up control (and allow content to be created without their vetting), but that they'd even financially contribute the acceleration of such through a very large initial investment with a carve out to contribute even more down the road.
I was aiming to write a counterpoint here, but so far many are quickly debunked by Disney being the company that is the financial backer of the agreement.
While it's not explicitly stated, I'm sure what is actually happening here is:
Disney buys OpenAI equity.
OpenAI uses the cash to pay Disney licensing fees, and buying hardware for Disney's use.
Whether it's bubble is up to the reader's interpretation.
This deal establishes a clear dichotomy: Disney/OpenAI as the "Walled Garden" of premium IP vs. the "Open Bazaar" of mass distribution.
Google is now backed into a corner. To keep YouTube relevant against this alliance, they can't rely on tech alone—they need comparable IP. I expect them to immediately start courting Sony Pictures or Universal to fill that gap.
It’s essentially a battle between "Exclusivity" and "Scale".
This sounds like old TV exec logic. Disney IP is not “premium” any more thanks to relentless overuse in their garbage movies and shows.
My teenage kids watch YT and TikTok (which gets highly relevant UGC daily) and couldn’t care less about Mickey Mouse or Kylo Ren.
With numbers like this, it feels like OpenAI is selling at this point the value of an IPO if everyone consolidates around OpenAI more than on the competitive value of its product.
For every extra company they get effectively exclusive usage with the more believable the strategy becomes. As it wouldn't be the first time that beating out competitors in enterprise distribution led to users making what they are used to using at work what they use personally.
Article makes it sound like Disney is just now rolling out ai for their employees but they’ve had access to it for a long time now. Disney has also been hiring for various AI positions for a bit.
This is the most circular of the circular funding deals. All the bubble signs are blaring it’s just a game of chicken now until the crash. I just don’t know if it is months or years.
Surely OpenAI should be paying Disney for the rights to their content. What an upside down period we are living in.
It literally depends on who it is benefitting. If I run a small clothing company ad I want to print Mickey Mouse tshirts becasue it will make me money, I need to pay license fees to Disney to use their IP.
On the other hand if I am the biggest clothing manufacturer in the world and my tshirts are worn organically by loads of influencers, Disney might contact me and ask me to make a tshirt of their character so that they are getting exposure to a certain demographic on a certain platform. This way round it is advertising and so it benefits disney, and so instead of me paying to license their characters, they pay me to advertise them.
You pay for advertisement and product placement.
Not the other way around.
We live in an atenttion economy, if Disney content is not in your face on all mediums (which now include AI slop), they lose money.
>You pay for advertisement and product placement.
Well, no. Disney does not pay Hasbro or Mattel to use their characters. It does not pay clothing producers. So no, you dont have to pay people to use your IP because it's just advertising. Disney's IP is their core product.
You can make the argument they should let Sora use it to advertise. But that's not necessarily how it works. And for good reason - fan content doesnt necessarily benefit Disney in a measurable, controlled way. Furthermore, the IP is the thing they themselves are trying to sell you.
The RIAA got it their way with Suno and Udio.
Sam Altman must be an unbelievable salesman. Iger is tired and is looking for a way out. He's quit once already, but got dragged back because of Chapek.
I spoke with several folks in the C-suite Disney leadership a year ago about AI - Disney is learning and trying literally everything they can to capitalize on AI. Every division is experimenting, including ABC and ESPN. I spoke with the Pixar folks - of course they're using it too. They want to see what works.
They're internally partnering and trying out lots of companies and tools. It's been a mandate for a long time. Well before it was kosher in greater Hollywood. Before Coca Cola's first AI Christmas video last year. Disney was an early believer.
I've heard through the grapevine (companies talking to investors) that Disney has been working with multiple foundation video model companies. One of them was trying to animate parts of the live action Moana film, supposedly. Not the one you've read about in the news that got rejected. A much better funded one. Not sure if it made it into the film - I suppose we'll find out soon.
Do recall, also, that Disney has publicly rebuffed OpenAI's proposals twice in the past. Something changed, and my guess is the Netflix/WBD deal.
You're being downvoted because people don't like the future you are painting :)
Not sure people gonna consume more Disney content because there will suddenly be better way to make more AI slop of it...
I see a lot of "mickey mouse" but if this is Disney IP, then it includes Star Wars and Marvel, no?
You can literally make your own Marvel movie now! Legally!
If you read the release, it explicitly does not include the likenesses of human actors. Only animated and illustrated characters are included. (Although, that does cover animated/illustrated versions of characters that are typically portrayed by human actors...)
This is almost certainly due to the photographic/human likenesses of actors being under an entirely separate license and royalty contract than pure IP from Disney.
Interesting; what about say... ironman? Humanoid, has someone inside. Darth Vader, C3PO, or Chewbacca? Or say the Mandalorian?
So the big fatso corporations all rally behind AI.
I don't like this. I don't dispute that AI has some useful use cases, but there are tons of time-wasters, such as fake videos generated on youtube. So when they now autogenerate everything, the quality will further go downwards but they will claim it will go upwards. Well, what may go up are the net profits. I don't think the quality will really go upwards. They also kind of create a monopoly here. Only other big corporations can break in - and they won't because it is easier to share the profits in the same market in a guaranteed manner. Quite amazing that this can happen. Who needs courts anymore when the base system can be gamified?
Then there is also the censorship situation. If you keep on censoring stuff, you lose out information. I see this on youtube where Google censors cuss words. This leads to rubbish bleeps every some seconds. Who wants to hear that? It's so pointless.
I see a lot of Google adverts for AI that seems to be “look, you can translate your photo into a sci-fi world”.
Which is cool, I guess. But it doesn’t feel like a very valuable thing to an end user. That kind of thing is mostly valuable because it’s hard. If anyone can do it, nobody cares any more.
I am really excited about AI in some use cases. Using the latest models for agentic software development is truly magic. But “make a funny video of yourself as Mickey Mouse” just seems kind of naff.
I'm genuinely stunned they're giving OAI money.
Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231585
I opened this article expecting to read that OpenAI was somehow delivering cash or in-kind payment to Disney as a means of appeasing the copyright beast.
Colour me surprised to see that it's Disney that are handing out the cash in this arrangement.
However with further reading the answer seems clearer: Disney will certainly be using OpenAI's video technology to reduce their production costs, and for the amount of content Disney create this agreement seems mutually beneficial.
Not that I expect any rational thought from Disney, but the race to the bottom has started. If anyone can make a video with Disney characters, their value goes to zero.
Maybe there is something more behind this deal that is not reported? For example, Disney is waiting for OpenAI bankruptcy and then wants to get it for cheap while having its foot in the door?
Related: https://www.reuters.com/business/disney-sends-cease-and-desi...
> Walt Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Alphabet's Google, CNBC reported on Thursday.
For everyone concerned about the AI systems being trained on copyrighted material: this was always the end-game of that argument. Once the technology was proven out to be useful, someone with a huge IP portfolio was going to slam that portfolio directly into the training data to get their own copyright-unencumbered AI.
Copyright unencumbered... For their own characters?? Why would they need clearance to generate things trained on their data.
Because the tool can generate output faster than human employees alone can (and they control the "legitimate" gate by which other people can use those characters in the tool).
The consequence being that for everyone complaining that AI is disrupting artists right now: these will, in hindsight, be the halcyon years. Even if we assume the copyright arguments hold water in court and AIs trained on other people's copyrighted material are ruled poison-fruit machines, the end result isn't the end of synthesizing-AIs... It's synthesizing-AIs only being owned by people with a big enough data portfolio to train them. Techno-anarchy replaced with techno-corporatocracy, and the smaller-volume artists still lose on being unable to out-produce their competition in an art market.
Art isn't a volume business though.
Andy Warhol disagreed. But in general: it's not a bulk or commodity business like, say, toilet paper, but an artist that creates five thousand works a year can definitely out-sell an artist that creates five.
To the extent that art intersects capitalism, that matters (even if the second artist is charging thousands per work; when your price is too high, people can't buy, so the artist charging dozens or hundreds per work but making 5,000 a year can sell to all the people who can't afford five-works-a-year).
Presumably, being able to use Sora to generate some pictures or videos involving Disney characters does not mean being able to actually distribute those pictures or videos, right? Those are still copyrighted characters.
The deal look unbalanced. Could it be that 1. Disney wants/needs to use Gen AI and 2. Disney cannot use a model that was trained to prevent their IP? Therefore they have to pick one partner and unblock their IP for this model?
As a place to park some cash, sure. But if I were running Disney there would be no character deal and I would need some kind of proprietary technology license that keeps certain AI improvements out of the hands of my competitors.
Disney really giving away the store here.
Not surprising in the least. If AI content can be monetized, I would imagine the struggling Hollywood set to be champing at the bit to participate.
I suspect their ongoing concern is just their IP/brands/characters being misused. Spielberg is next
Iger and Altman on CNBC at 10:30.
Oh the memes
Lot of the anti AI crowd hoped Disney would side with them and Disney IP appearing in models would be the thing to bring it all down, thinking copyright overreach was the lesser evil to use to get their way.
Wonder how they feel about this.
Wouldn't that be a losing battle given the open source nature of the technologies that power these things? I feel like you'd end up in a somewhat similar situation to torrenting back in the day, you punish a handful of folks but ultimately play whackamole. There are a few things I could imaging them thinking, one might be if they give the IP to the most cutting edge business with the best distribution and they can keep some semblance of control + the market would be flooded mostly with "legitimate" "approved" "safe" stuff, openai may also be promising them tools to identify IP infringement on other platforms?
Is this their YouTube goes legit moment? i.e. Disney get paid (by indirect means so far) for characters on OpenAI but not (yet) Gemini?
If this includes exclusivity deals it could be big.
Sounds like the opposite, all disney characters become memes and Sora becomes known only for that
My household might be an anomaly but my kids know and prefer YouTubers more to Disney characters.
$1B sounds huge, I don't understand what Disney has to gain. Is this only to have some control over the videos generated on Sora with their IP?
From https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
It's an equity investment, and yes they're agreeing to a committment to protecting the rights of the creators.
> Disney and OpenAI affirm a shared commitment to responsible use of AI that protects the safety of users and the rights of creators. >Alongside the licensing agreement, Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees. >As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
> protects ... the rights of creators
So all those creators that OpenAI plagiarised from, and are suing them, they just needed to pay them to get protection? Sounds easy!
$1B is nothing for OpenAI or Disney
This seems like a net negative for Disney and is what, like a month more of runway for OpenAI?
Doesn't Sora basically lose money at an enormous rate?
Hopefully I'll have enough time to make a proper sequel to 'Wreck it Ralph' before it gets shut down due to the obvious risks.
Putting aside feelings on AI, and also putting aside worst case scenarios of the kind of content (which will happen regardless of what they promise), I think this is a terrible move for the brand.
Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders. The value of your brand reduces dramatically , and you reduce excitement for new releases.
This is the company that had to walk back its plans to saturate streaming and theaters with their content because they ruined the hype for Star Wars and Marvel content. Two of the most beloved franchises!
This is just going to make that worse when ever social media feed will be blanketed by even more slop.
Unless the gambit is that they expect merch sales to go up, or they have a way to guarantee a cut of any used content. I’m sure there are some IP infringement lawyers who have basically secured a life time of work with this announcement.
> Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders.
That really depends on how the culture of media consumption changes. It's very different than the world of movie theaters and TV. Most people are using social media to consume the majority of their content. This at least helps constantly inject their characters into the mainstream culture, when they can no longer dominate TV/cinema and streaming platforms already saturate their characters with high volume.
The biggest risk IMO is if the short content being produced is more entertaining than what they officially produce or it turns into a mini-culture they don't have influence over, and they struggle to profit off the old stuff.
They will essentially be competing with their own IP.
This feels like the moment big media finally decided that if they can't stop generative AI, they might as well monetize it
Disney witnessed AI boosting Studio Ghibli’s cultural impact and relevance and decided to invest big in OpenAI, not surprising.
I wonder how the various creative guilds will respond. Seems like they are stabbing their team in the back on this one.
Congrats Disney. You just sold out every actual animator you pretended to care about.
Sure, go ahead and downvote me.
Im just a consooomer and upvoting you. Nobody wants more slop...
I suspect most consumers feel the same way. Zealous AI boosters— they are extremely over represented here— do not.
Are they trying to make AI outputs copywritreable? If so, the deal is dispicable.
There's a Kingdom Hearts joke in there somewhere, but I don't know enough of the lore to make it.
I tried on my own but couldn't beat Claude for punch:
"Disney putting their characters into something called Sora with a confusing roadmap and lore nobody fully understands. We've come full circle"
Will ChatGPT generate the Star Wars scripts from now on?
[Ahem… And can it make them interesting?]
AI will in a few years generate entire movies, including Star Wars ones. I can see at least one remake of A New Hope coming in the next years with all the original cast after their characteristics are licensed for use with AI. The huge amount of money saved makes just impossible for the studios to ignore the technology.
> The huge amount of money saved makes just impossible for the studios to ignore the technology.
It will be interesting to see the knock-on reaction to the quality of the output vs the money saved.
Today the reaction would be mostly negative, but at the pace technology is improving and with new generations getting used to find AI in everything I think it's just a matter of time before making movies with AI becomes the norm and the traditional way will become restricted to film lovers. Not that I necessarily like all that; I just find hard to think they're ignoring the opportunity.
Disney shareholders, feel free to make images of Iger, Mickey, and Br'er Rabbit lighting piles on money on fire.
The original depiction of Mickey Mouse is legally public domain anyway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_a_copyright-fre...
Not a shareholder, but on first try, it won't do it because it recognizes Iger's name. And clearly the deal is fresh because it balked at Mickey Mouse too. But it has no trouble with just, "mouse": https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_693ae0d25bbc819188f6758fce3f90c...
Ask it to do Steamboat Willy? Now in the public domain
I'm not a shareholder but buying equity in OpenAI seems to be a much better deal (for Disney) than making OpenAI just pay royalties, no? Seems like everyone wins, unless you think OpenAI will never amount to anything and it's all a bubble.
If you destroy your brand value in the process? This is an entertainment company... The entire value of this company is the characters and the right to make new stories with them.
Cash from royalties doesn't disappear like equity value would, in the event of a bubble pop.
Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that.
Royalty payments from a company that can't pay them aren't useful either.
What does a bubble pop look like to people?
Does anyone envision a scenario where OpenAI or Anthropic (or google) disappears?
I can understand the investment bubble in new infra. But even that, I’m not so sure. Right now, demand is so far outstripping supply, which is why we’re having so many conversations about energy or chips.
But yes that’s the bubble people keep talking about.
where does the royalty cash come from when the bubble pops?
It stops, but you still have what you got before that point. You're "cashing out" on an ongoing basis.
OpenAI is my least favorite AI company and Disney is (recently) among my least favorite entertainment conglomerates. Sounds like a match made in heaven. Good luck with the investment.
openai prbly is my most favorite because everyone else is obsessed with job replacement as the final goal
Sam Altman is probably among the fakest people on the planet. OpenAI's product offerings also seem to have been trounced by their competition.
The endgame of every single one of them is replacement of labor, it's the only way the level of investment makes sense. Whether each org profits from it directly or indirectly is immaterial.
why not sell ads and products?
>> Disney and OpenAI affirm a shared commitment to responsible use of AI that protects the safety of users and the rights of creators.
Wow so Sora Slop is coming to payed Disney+?
Quite possibly, it was mentioned a while ago and blew up after Dana Terrace, creator of The Owl House, made some very strong statements about it https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/owl-house-cr...
> Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora short form videos available to stream on Disney+.
Apparently so.
There’s unpaid Disney+?
That's a great way for OpenAI to keep Disney's lawyers away.
Is this some kind of pre-AI crash long game? Does that make any sense?
Seems @sama has stumbled onto a pretty good business strategy - unleash something that massively infringes on copyright into the world, then take it back and add “guardrails” and then ~~extort~~ sell it back to the person you infringed on their copyright in the first place.
absolutely disgusting behavior
I can't put into words how much I despise @sama, it would probably get me banned from every corner of the internet.
Also... f*ck Disney for falling for this.
does disney think a future is coming where the company who owns the model may be able to claim copyright on anything it’s model creates?
because that’s the only way this makes sense to me.
Soras not even the main character, it's Roxas
So we're soon going to see Sora-generated Disney movies?
Im sure its going to be used by many movies. Just like CGI. And just like CGI some people will complain.
I'd like to pre-register my complaint! :-)
I think it depends on what they use it for. For fantasy stuff like cartoons, aliens and (not fantasy) dinosaurs it may be ok, and I guess they could train on old hand-animated cartoons to retain that charm (and cartoon tropes like running in place but not moving) if they wanted to. If they use it to generate photo-realistic humans then it's going to be uncanny valley and just feel fake.
It would be interesting to see best effort at an AI dinosaur walking - a sauropod using the trained motion of an elephant perhaps, which may well be more animal-like than CGI attempts to do the same.
> Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora short form videos available to stream on Disney+.
I actually think this is genius.
The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech.
Among the millions of slop videos generated, some might be the next Baby Shark, etc.
I've seen some Star Wars fan fiction created using AI that is truer to the original Star Wars than the most recent trilogy.
This is a chance for Disney to take the best of the user generated content, with high quality AI generated animation, and throw it on Disney+ to get free content for their streaming platform.
My guess is that's the gamble here. Worst-case scenario at the end of three years they just shut it down.
It's really the professionals who get paid to generate content for Disney that should be worried about this deal. This could be how AI causes them to lose their jobs.
> The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech.
Cost/token disagrees with you there...
Awesome! Can't wait to see what people create.
Nothing of value is my prediction.
How about picture gen though on Dall-E?
It is so infuriating to get content block on ChatGPT for pretty much any fairy tale that has had a Disney related adaptation.
Try getting a Grimm's 19th century Snow White illustrations. You can not because the Disney crap supersedes it.
In fact you can not get a Snow White illustration of any kind on ChatGPT.
I can not figure out any prompts that would draw using public domain knowledge.
Same goes for a pirate fighting a flying boy - no good.
New one this week was when I tried to draw a border around my daughter's picture of a Poppy from Trolls(That's Dreamworks but same problem).
The actual copyrighted Poppy appeared in the border half way down the generation and then of course content block appeared.
What is hilarious though that ChatGPT will profusely apologize and provide extremely detailed instructions in setting up local Stable Diffusion as an alternative...
we're cooked
Shouldn't OpenAI be paying Disney?
That was my first thought. When I saw 'Disney' and 'OpenAI' in a headline together I assumed the money was flowing the other way around. Certainly other rights holders like the NYTimes are looking for the cash to flow the opposite direction (they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting). Unless this investment somehow is structured so that Disney gets stock which will potentially be worth orders of magnitude more later...
> they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting
Are OpenAI even denying this?
Iger and Altman on CNBC at 10:30.
My immediate thought: when does the copyright on Mickey expire? Didn’t it happen already?
It did but with the old, original Micky. That mouse looked pretty different: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/mickey-mouse-poster-1...
Bob Iger: Disney’s OpenAI Deal “Does Not In Any Way” Threaten Creatives
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob...
1B down the toilet
Well I guess the best outcome is that the AI bubble bursts. Gonna be way worse if it is actually legit...
The technology is still immature.
I mean no one here would be surprised if Disney and OpenAI have trouble preventing misuse -- say, Disney-branded Hentai.[a]
Can Disney and OpenAI reliably prevent misuse?
---
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai
There's probably already terabytes and terabytes of disney porn out there. It's not clear to me why this would make much of a difference on that front.
Instead of "out there," it would be on an official Disney/OpenAI venue.
That strikes me as rather risky on their part.
First take: ew more ai generated slop
Second take: well I guess the blame lays with us for consuming it and reinforcing its creation
Third take: content creation becomes cheaper, allowing for more creative risks to be taken
Fourth take: this is a net-good because we see new creative ideas being attempted at low sunk cost
OpenAI is using a page from 2010's Facebook playbook. They know their valuation is hyper inflated, so they are using those crazy valuations to buy stuff with equity (just like Facebook bought WhatsApp with private stock with crazy valuations).
> just like Facebook bought WhatsApp with private stock with crazy valuations
FB bought Instagram April 9, 2012 with ~ 30% cash and 70% stock, and then IPO'd May 18, 2012. That's probably what you mean. FB bought WhatsApp Feb 19, 2014 with ~ 25% cash and 75% public stock that was roughly 2x the IPO price. The private valuation might be crazy, but it's increased with public trading, so I dunno.
They should have licensed the technology to automate the process of making live-action remakes...
This deal just guarantees we'll get to see some Mickey Mouse QAnon shit
Disney making a tech investment. Just the history of Disney and tech should make you roll your eyes: Starwave, Infoseek, Maker Studio, Playdom (I think Bamtech helped with Disney+, so maybe won't count that)
Extortion
For anyone confused by this, what you're probably forgetting is that children make no distinction between slop and high quality content. You know all those bad 3D knock-off YouTube videos of that everyone was in a moral panic about a few years ago? Disney wasn't upset those were damaging their brand. They were upset that they weren't making any money from them. But they just found a way to undercut all the sweatshops in Bangladesh pumping that stuff out: recruit children to make videos for children.
Wait, so let me get this straight.
Altman got Disney to pay OpenAI, via an investment, for Sora -- which was likely trained on and used to generate infringements of all kinds of their copyrighted material.
And then Disney sends Google a Cease & Desist for using its copyrighted material, not only restricting what people can do with Google's AI image generators, but which could potentially also force Google to retrain all their models without Disney content.
Very likely Disney will reach a licensing deal with Google, which would conveniently finance Disney's investment in OpenAI.
And all this on the heels of the coup where Altman simultaneously signed a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to lock up 40% of the world's DRAM supply, effectively cornering a key component for AI training hardware.
As I've said before: All these others are playing Capitalism. Altman out there playing Game of Thrones.
/popcorn
That's some serious FOMO.
Disney is pretty much over so why not
Have no fear! The free market of AI slop is here!
Oof.
Slop, but agreed upon slop.
wtf are we doing, man?
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Perhaps.... functionality will only be available to paid accounts/integrations. OpenAI will be contractually bound to report offensive content, Disney Lawyers will get the direct contact details via the paid account to know the user and sue.
Not a lawyer but I'd be interested to know if you can sue an end user who uses AI ... In the past you could for using tools, but if AI has autonomy based solely on a prompt that might even open up free speech defenses
Purely conjecture on my part I might add! I have no affiliation to either company, but I know Disney likes to sue so if they are paying so much money... and putting their IP at risk... what's in it for them?
I keep wondering about one thing: maybe Disney isn’t paying for the technology at all — maybe they’re paying for a spot in the future. If generative video becomes as common as social media, AI models will be the new TV channels, and whoever controls the prime shelf space wins. In that sense, this billion isn’t a fee for Sora it’s the price of having Disney’s front row booth in a new world of storytelling. So the real question isn’t why is Disney paying? but who’s going to own the shelves in this new story marketplace?