> 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
Altman said "We can pay with equity, but let's frame it as an investment"
No cash exchanged
Do you mean to say they’ll never take the payment?
It's been his entire career. Guy has made billions of dollars from talking.
Frustratingly impressive.
Groups like this aren’t singular entities.
It could however, be pretty fucking shitty for the US/World economy.
He don’t care.
I like the phrase “vulture capital”
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?
When a true “leader” big or small emerges, every bit of capital will flock to it, leaving a burned out nest of ai company husks. But hey…maybe this time will be completely different. (And upon consideration, I think this is exactly why. All their deals are with the husks, while keeping their IP to leverage with the winner.)
Mickey mouse is now copyright free, pluto is in two weeks, then pretty much the whole roster by 2030 https://michelsonip.com/news/disney-characters-in-the-public...
The "modern" Mickey Mouse will be at the public domain in about five years.
> Mickey mouse is now copyright free
Scroll down on this page[0] and you'll see the different Mickeys and most of them are not under copyright. You got Steamboat Whillie + gloves but no Fantasia Mickey or later. Definitely no red-pants version.
Unsurprisingly Disney knows what they're doing and they have 95 years to modify a character's looks (and how the public imagines that character) before it enters public domain.
> pluto is in two weeks
[0] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/
[1] https://www.disneydining.com/disney-copyright-loss-pluto-202...
>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.
Let me introduce you to ponze scheme. He is feeding the hype, that's all that matters right now. More and more cash... The only real winner will be Nvidia when the bubble explode.
Sounds like Iger has his finger on the eject button. How much stock has he announced to be cashing out over 2026?
It’s ego and desperation for one last hurrah. Disney has a history of being a corporate governance nightmare - which Iger ironically contributed toward fixing. He’s undoing all that now.
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.
We already see this dynamic with the "vanity press" pay-to-play record labels / distributors like DistroKid: the vast majority of their catalog has never been played or was only played to test the initial upload. Huge numbers of tracks have a tiny number of views, with many literally never played. "Democratizing" content creation predictably does this, and it's frankly bizarre it wasn't anticipated.
Seems like Nintendo still has that long term thinking. Disney was just waiting for the right price.
What is this referring to?
The modern books?
You don't like the last Star Wars trilogy? Pay us a few hundred dollars and you can rewrite your own story, thank you very much this is where you put the credit card number.
It was INEVITABLE.
Not only that, they’re materially worse than real movies. Designer t-shirts still sell despite people being able to buy blank t-shirts and color them in with laundry markers.
Maybe, but that's the minority of demand. Most book sales are to people looking for something comfortable - think the near-infinite supply of practically interchangeable romance novels or detective stories.
With the right sensors, your sentiment will be apparent to the system and it will be able to tune on the fly.
And personally, I have absolutely no desire to modify movies that bothered me, story-wise, artistically, or editorially, with my own ideas. Likewise, I also don’t want to modify classic paintings to make the people fit my preferences for attractiveness. And I sure don’t want it done automatically.
Art is interesting because it comes from other people’s brains.
https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=EYdu543vJlAjdX5c
Another thought I had. Is there no desire to make a modern film that still intentionally looks like an old Pixar film. Less poly. Simpler lighting. No fancy physics effects. In the same way PS1 graphics are popular now.
On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
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.
For every extra company they get effectively exclusive usage with the more believable the strategy becomes. As it wouldn't be the first time that beating out competitors in enterprise distribution led to users making what they are used to using at work what they use personally.
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.
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.
≤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.
These shows are honestly fine. They all depict kids working together as a team, solving problems, and navigating socializing with each other. (And in the case of Paw Patrol, some environmentalism. And a few terrible puns.)
It's not like the Smurfs, Rocket Robin Hood, The Mighty Hercules, He-Man, Care Bears, etc. that I watched growing up were that much better.
Meanwhile Prime Video has shows that are basically cartoon cars going through a carwash for an hour. And YouTube has much, much worse junk like rapid-fire 60 second unboxing videos, and morons fake-reacting to various colours of slime.
Or in other words: a typical adult needs about one year of self study (or nearly 6 months of more focused intensive study) before they can fully understand a show like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
And maybe half that for substantial understanding. (3 months intensive, 6 months typical self study to reach A2+ / watch Bluey with substantial understanding but not complete understanding).
If I were to guess at Mickey Mouse clubhouse, it's damn near A1 or A0+, it's so repetive and slow that you can learn some words from it.
Yeah, that's a lot more boring than the 'advanced' shows like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
Also note that children are not aware of tools (ie hammers or screwdrivers) yet. So simple learning exercises to know that hammer hammers nail but not screws is the kind of thing needed at pre-school level.
I'd imagine that the appropriate age for Mickey Mouse clubhouse is under 3. Bluey/Peppa Pig are closer to 6 or 7+ year old material.
Or in foreign language levels: B1-ish / 2+ on the American scale.
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Seriously. Just switch the shows to a different language and the level gap becomes blatantly clear.
In perhaps more Techie terms: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse level of understanding is achievable with Duolingo. Peppa Pig / Bluey (and similar level shows) are so far beyond Duolingo that I bet most Duolingo users will NEVER be able to achieve Bluey-level understanding in a foreign language (and that deep textbook + 1000ish vocab study memorization needs to be done before Bluey can be understood).
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Maybe the vocab estimate is easiest to understand. Bluey feels like a show that uses 1000 words with mastery (and maybe 2000 hard words as learning exercises in the show).
Mickey Mouse clubhouse uses maybe 250 words with mastery and maybe uses the top1000 list as learning/teaching words.
How (and why??) does Mickey Mouse clubhouse make an ENTIRE song consisting of a single word? (hotdog?) Because it's written for people where 'Hot dog' is a difficult word and needs repetition.
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.
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+.
The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions. There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
Looking at the top videos on YouTube this week, 7 of the top 10 are all "Pop IP" content: Candy Crush the Movie, Miley Cyrus, "I wanna Channing All Over Your Tatum", Superman Drawn, Star Wars Elevator Prank, We are World of Warcraft, Red Bull.
People love and drown themselves in pop culture and corporate-owned IP. Whether that's music, games, anime - they love corporate-owned IP.
If this content gets pulled en masse, YouTube is fucked. YouTube has been getting all of this for free. That's something that could be done today, but it's just non-obvious. When you package that with the "creation enablement", it's a packaged good that can be licensed or sold enterprise-to-enterprise.
Disney is about to wet their toes. Nintendo has already been experimenting with it. The concept is right there in front of them, and as distribution channels and content creation merge into one uniform thing - it'll be obvious.
> The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
> The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element.
It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element.
People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Vivienne Medrano, Glitch Productions, Jaiden Dittfach, and many others have minted huge franchises on YouTube - views, merch, Amazon/Netflix deals, etc. The problem is that it takes them ages to animate each episode, whereas filming yourself on your smartphone is quick, easy, accessible, affordable, low-effort, low-material, and low-personnel.
Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
This is all changing.
Okay, free with ads is "free" to consumers. That will get swamped by tiktok. Subscription is premium. People won't pay for slop. Those are both covered.
>There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
Yes. But who's making a profit? You can only shuffle money for so long, and we're hitting the breaking point of that. Ads won't invest into platforms they suspect are filled with bots and don't give ROI. Companies won't invest once saying "AI" isn't a get rich quick scheme. Customers won't invest once they run out of money.
It works, until it doesn't. Then it's suddenly freefall and people will act like they didn't hear creaking for 5- 10 years.
>When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
YouTube isn't really known for "IP content". That debate ended in 2010 with Viacom. They in fact rampantly remove traces of IP content.
Meanwhile, they have a monopoly on video hosting and control payouts in an opaque way to millions of non-IP creators. unless you think it's the end of premium media as we know it, Disney is still going to host trailers on YouTube and Vevo will host music videos. There's no reason to go anywhere. Disney+ and YouTube can exist simultaneously.
>To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
Yeah, in complete agreement. Short term monies, long term damage. Media has a "lingering effect" where results on the prequel will pass into the sequel and vice versa. So you can still have a profitable but panned release simply because previous movie was that well received.
>It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element. People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Do you think that if we had the same amount of animation as we did live action content that they'd be consumed equally? I'm a huge animation fan and very skeptical.
Consider this phenomenon
https://erdavis.com/2021/06/14/do-women-who-pose-with-their-...
Even in art spaces, people will engage more with the presence of a human face. Females more, but even males get a noticeable boost You can chalk it up to lust or familiarity or anything else, but there seems there's some deeper issue at work than simply "there's more live action slop for now".
If we do get more animation slop, I think it will veer a lot more towards hyperrealism instead, for similar reasons. I always see it as uncanny, but it doesn't seem to hinder as much on others. It'll just be trying to mimic live action at the end of the day.
>Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
Sure. Animation is more engaging with kids. Kids aren't profitable, though. Their parents are. Unless its with ads, but advertising targeting kids has so much red tape.
I dont see a profitable model out of a media empire focusing on kids. Even Nintendo gets a lot of its money off of merchandising despite selling premium games with rare sales.
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.
Disney has basically always been like this. Overpriced goods powered by the brand alone.
https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-straight-to-video-seq...
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.
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.
They can either invest in mass classification and enforcement operations or gain some revenue share from it.
Perhaps this is a play to own and monetize that vector in the future.
We let "engagement" get way too far in the way of IP's that already won brand awareness. Ad views are NOT off putting a view from even the unprofitable streaming platform. Let alone a theater ticket. It's pretty much the opposite of Nintendo's model to keep everything premium for as long as possible.
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.
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 and they're delivering products people want.
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.
PM is probably the nicest guy on the network. I get why people hate him, but rarely does he talk shit about people.
If anything, SAS paved the way for PM.
That was why I said you’re biased. Or you just don’t know the network very well.
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.
It's just a funny coincidence.
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
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.
But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble pile.
Guy on the internet knows more about businesses than a 200 billion century-old corporation.
A classic.
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.
> 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?
It unspoken business model is giving an IP license to anyone that can breathe at make a rev share agreement or hefty sum - so, less than you think.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only people who don't think it's worthless are the people who would be worth a lot less if that were the case. Hug your loved ones and make peace with your gods, because the crash is going to be insane.
I 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.
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
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
The $1B turns into OpenAI stock. If Disney characters make OpenAI more valuable, that stock and its future dividends become more valuable.
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.
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?
You can literally make your own Marvel movie now! Legally!
This is almost certainly due to the photographic/human likenesses of actors being under an entirely separate license and royalty contract than pure IP from Disney.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wonder how they feel about this.
Disney really giving away the store here.
I suspect their ongoing concern is just their IP/brands/characters being misused. Spielberg is next
If this includes exclusivity deals it could be big.
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!
"Disney putting their characters into something called Sora with a confusing roadmap and lore nobody fully understands. We've come full circle"
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.
because that’s the only way this makes sense to me.
Sure, go ahead and downvote me.
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.
Wow so Sora Slop is coming to payed Disney+?
Apparently so.
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...
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.
This deal just guarantees we'll get to see some Mickey Mouse QAnon shit
Altman got Disney to pay OpenAI, via an investment, for Sora -- which was likely trained on and used to generate infringements of all kinds of their copyrighted material.
And then Disney sends Google a Cease & Desist for using its copyrighted material, not only restricting what people can do with Google's AI image generators, but which could potentially also force Google to retrain all their models without Disney content.
Very likely Disney will reach a licensing deal with Google, which would conveniently finance Disney's investment in OpenAI.
And all this on the heels of the coup where Altman simultaneously signed a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to lock up 40% of the world's DRAM supply, effectively cornering a key component for AI training hardware.
As I've said before: All these others are playing Capitalism. Altman out there playing Game of Thrones.
/popcorn
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?
---
That strikes me as rather risky on their part.
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.
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
Doesn't Sora basically lose money at an enormous rate?
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?
I actually think this is genius.
The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech.
Among the millions of slop videos generated, some might be the next Baby Shark, etc.
I've seen some Star Wars fan fiction created using AI that is truer to the original Star Wars than the most recent trilogy.
This is a chance for Disney to take the best of the user generated content, with high quality AI generated animation, and throw it on Disney+ to get free content for their streaming platform.
My guess is that's the gamble here. Worst-case scenario at the end of three years they just shut it down.
It's really the professionals who get paid to generate content for Disney that should be worried about this deal. This could be how AI causes them to lose their jobs.
Cost/token disagrees with you there...
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob...