> 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
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?
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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+.
> 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'.
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.
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.
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.
------
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).
------
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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...
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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
> 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
It's been his entire career. Guy has made billions of dollars from talking.
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.
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?
Seems like Nintendo still has that long term thinking. Disney was just waiting for the right price.
>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.
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.
Sounds like Iger has his finger on the eject button. How much stock has he announced to be cashing out over 2026?
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.
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 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.
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.
Disney has basically always been like this. Overpriced goods powered by the brand alone.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Dsy16hhOI
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.
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.)
This is the end game. Do you see it now?
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+.
≤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.
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.
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.
------
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).
------
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.
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.
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-straight-to-video-seq...
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
That's because people consider Disney an entertainment company whereas in fact its the biggest licensing company in the world.
Perhaps this is a play to own and monetize that vector in the future.
They can either invest in mass classification and enforcement operations or gain some revenue share from it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
They do it because it actually works.
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.
They'll optimise for whatever causes numbers to increase. Children just happen to sometimes be what makes that happen.
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.
Isn't that essentially the same thing now?
2025 Disney encourages children to gamble and gives Pat McAfee significant visibility.
https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-semitism-ra...
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.
Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.
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
Who asked for the content? Who elected the politicians?
**[Jiminy] crickets**
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.
Who said and where's the "false dichotomy" you allude to in the discussion above?
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.
Your bias is showing.
Perhaps I should have expected that the conversation would get pulled this way but it's not where I wanted it to go.
They might as well have some direct say in the matter with the big companies by creating relationships and profiting via licensing.
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.
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.
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.
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!
What exactly does “fanart” (no matter how distasteful and controversial) change?
Let people generate whatever fictional character they want.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's right up there with "Let kids communicate anonymously but not to perverts" and "Is this porn or educational?"
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...
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
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
I agree. Those characters are likely safe on Sora
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(Kingdom_Hearts)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)
It's just a funny coincidence.
I have faith that the Parks Imagineers will soon be installing Sora Stalls in and around every attraction in Disney World.
How is that circular?
I look forward to chatting with Pluto and Goofy and asking why one has to wear pants when both of them are dogs.
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.
> 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.
Guy on the internet knows more about businesses than a 200 billion century-old corporation.
A classic.
But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble pile.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
because that’s the only way this makes sense to me.
> 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.
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?
not for disney content. Disney can pick OpenAI as the winner for this by not signing deals and suing anyone else.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Is that the same thing as making bootleg graphics involving Disney characters?
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.
Is it charity to buy AAPL as well?
I really don't understand your perspective
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.”
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
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.
There’s no direct return.
They’ll get every dollar of that billion in mindshare over the next twenty years.
This feels like more funny accounting.
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.
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.
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.
you can't nerdsnipe me like that and NOT drop a link. :p
what's the channel?
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
Similar to the music industry piracy battle, it makes more sense to work with the big platforms than fight them.
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.
This may be the right move but it's by no means forced.
The $1B turns into OpenAI stock. If Disney characters make OpenAI more valuable, that stock and its future dividends become more valuable.
P.S. If you can't win them, join them ...
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?
I would argue AI going to be a good thing because more creative risks can be taken at lower sunk costs.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would think that whatever demand there is for that is already filled.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wonder how they feel about this.
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.
Disney really giving away the store here.
I suspect their ongoing concern is just their IP/brands/characters being misused. Spielberg is next
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.
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.
So all those creators that OpenAI plagiarised from, and are suing them, they just needed to pay them to get protection? Sounds easy!
If this includes exclusivity deals it could be big.
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.
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.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_a_copyright-fre...
Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that.
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.
Sure, go ahead and downvote me.
"Disney putting their characters into something called Sora with a confusing roadmap and lore nobody fully understands. We've come full circle"
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.
Wow so Sora Slop is coming to payed Disney+?
Apparently so.
Doesn't Sora basically lose money at an enormous rate?
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.
And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
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
That strikes me as rather risky on their part.
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
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?
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.
> Walt Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Alphabet's Google, CNBC reported on Thursday.
Are OpenAI even denying this?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob...