is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
Disney and OpenAI’s new $1 billion partnership feels emblematic of the terrible times we’re living through. In exchange for access to the generative AI firm’s APIs and tools like ChatGPT, the studio plans to let users of OpenAI’s Sora AI video generator create clips featuring hundreds of Disney-owned characters. Sora AI users will be able to generate as much uncanny Pixar / Marvel / Star Wars slop for themselves as they want, and Disney will share some of it in a special section on the Disney Plus platform. It’s not hard to see where this is going to go.
Disney CEO Bob Iger described the partnership as marking “an important moment for our industry” and said that it will give the studio’s customers “richer and more personal ways to connect with the Disney characters and stories they love.” Iger also said that the deal is meant to “extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.”
That might genuinely be how Iger thinks getting into bed with OpenAI will play out, but when you take an honest look at what Sora AI is and how Disney’s past experiments with generative AI have gone, it’s clear that this is all going to end very, very stupidly.
At its core, this partnership is about OpenAI securing a new influx of capital and Disney coming out in strong support of one of the big gen AI companies fighting for tech sector dominance. The $1 billion Disney has pledged won’t completely solve OpenAI’s cash flow problems, but it will make it the first company of its kind to do business with a legacy entertainment studio on this scale. While Sora isn’t immediately being integrated into the production workflows for Disney’s projects, it will give the studio a concrete way of signaling to the public its interest in using generative AI. And on the flip side of things, Disney is getting access to a boatload of slop content it can stream without having to pay anyone to make it.
After months of various studios including Disney filing lawsuits against gen AI companies for building models trained on unlicensed IP, it seems beyond odd that Disney would pay OpenAI for its use of Disney’s characters like the Avengers and the Mandalorian. On its face, the transaction reads as being pointedly imbalanced, but the situation is even stranger when you look at what Sora AI is capable of.
Though Sora can turn a couple of text sentences into glossy video footage, AI generated clips are always short, strange, and filled with inconsistencies that make them ill-suited to be used in the kinds of entertainment people are typically willing to pay for. That’s why so many “movies” and ads created with generative AI look like absolute garbage. But those limitations are also probably the reason that Disney plans to begin with a focus on bite-sized, user-generated content.
Fans entertaining themselves by riffing on corporate-owned IP with unique creations of their own is nothing new, but what’s different here is the way that Disney wants to capitalize on that behavior. Sora AI integration would give Disney direct access to a content pipeline that subscribers would be paying the studio to use. This system would effectively invite Disney Plus users to become customers and unpaid employees, which is a scenario that probably sounds ideal to Disney’s executive leadership. But the last time Disney gave people the ability to mess around with its IP this way, things quickly devolved in the most expected way possible.
While players couldn’t make Fortnite’s gen AI-powered Darth Vader NPC do whatever they wanted, it was possible to coax the character into saying hateful, bigoted things in James Earl Jones’ voice with enough prodding. Epic Games took some measures to try to keep Fortnite’s Vader from behaving in inappropriate ways, but — shocker — players still found workarounds because that’s the way people are. That same “let’s do it because we can” energy is what animates a lot of the clips you see on the dedicated Sora AI social video platform, where it’s easy to find footage of figures like Mister Rogers and Bob Ross saying and doing offensive things.
OpenAI has likely told Disney leadership that it has put measures in place to keep people from, say, making characters from The Incredibles shout racist invective. But even if the studio reviews every single Sora AI output involving Disney characters, there is still going to be an endless stream of content that’s far from the quality the IP’s original creators — skilled human artists — intended.
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