OpenAI’s latest text-to-video generating app, Sora 2, exploded onto the scene late last week, quickly devolving into a mind-numbing mess of AI slop.
Before OpenAI stemmed the flood with crudely implemented guardrails, users immediately started generating footage featuring copyrighted materials, from SpongeBob SquarePants cooking up meth to CEO Sam Altman grilling a photorealistic Pikachu.
The spread of copyrighted material on the app sparked a debate surrounding the mass infringement of protected intellectual property, which has already led to major Hollywood studios coming after OpenAI’s competitors.
But despite the app’s messy launch, Altman has remained adamant that rightsholders are already lining up to have their IP featured on the platform.
During a newly-released chat with the a16z podcast‘s cofounder Ben Horowitz and general partner Erik Torenberg, Altman said that “in the case of Sora, we’ve heard from a lot of concerned rightsholders and also a lot of rightsholders who are like ‘My concern is you won’t put my character in enough.'”
While they allegedly told him that they want “restrictions” so their characters wouldn’t “say some crazy offensive thing,” Altman says copyright holders want “people to interact” and to “develop the relationship” to make their franchises become “more valuable.”
“So I can completely see a world where subject to the decisions that a rightsholder has, they get more upset with us for not generating their character often enough than too much,” he told Horowitz and Torenberg.
It’d be interesting to know the balance of rightsholders who have reached out to OpenAI who are upset that their characters are being featured on the app versus ones who want greater visibility on the platform. Major content producers have historically bristled at having their IP reproduced without authorization.
A litany of lawsuits aimed at AI image generator Midjourney and embattled AI chatbot company Character.AI suggest that OpenAI may be facing an uphill battle to get rightsholders on its side. Case in point, last week, Character.AI announced that it was removing chatbots directly inspired by Disney characters from its platform after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the media juggernaut.
In short, the company’s launch of Sora 2 seems to have preceded working out many of the logistics.
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