Disney and OpenAI’s recent $1 billion partnership seems symbolic of the terrible times we live in. In exchange for access to the company’s APIs and generative AI tools like ChatGPT, the studio plans to let users of OpenAI’s Sora AI video generator create clips of hundreds of Disney-owned characters. Sora AI users will be able to generate as many amazing Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars mash-ups as they want, and Disney will share some of them in a special section on Disney Plus. It’s not difficult to predict where this is all going.
Disney CEO Bob Iger described the partnership as “an important moment for our industry” and said it would provide studio customers with “richer and more personal ways to connect with the Disney characters and stories they love.” Iger also said the deal aims to “expand the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.”
This may actually be what Iger says going to bed with OpenAI will be like, but if we take an sincere look at what the Sora AI is and how Disney’s previous experiments with generative AI have gone, it becomes clear that this is all going to end very, very stupidly.
At the core of this partnership is OpenAI providing a fresh infusion of capital, and Disney is a mighty supporter of one of the next generation artificial intelligence companies fighting for supremacy in the technology sector. Disney’s promised $1 billion will not be fully resolved OpenAI’s cash flow issuesbut it will be the first company of this type to establish cooperation with an older entertainment studio on such a scale. While Sora will not be immediately integrated into the production processes of Disney projects, it will provide the studio with a concrete way to signal to the public its interest in using generative artificial intelligence. On the other hand, Disney gets access to a ton of content that it can stream without having to pay anyone to do it.
After months of various studios, including Disney, filing lawsuits against Generation AI companies for building models trained on unlicensed IP, it seems extraordinary that Disney would do it pay OpenAI for using Disney characters such as The Avengers and The Mandalorian. At first glance, the trade looks clearly unsustainable, but the situation is even stranger when you look at what Sora AI is capable of.
While Sora can turn a few sentences of text into shiny video, the AI-generated clips are always low, odd, and riddled with inconsistencies that make them unsuitable for employ in the type of entertainment that people are typically willing to pay for. That’s why so many “movies” and ads created using generative artificial intelligence look like absolute garbage. But these limitations are likely also why Disney plans to start by focusing on bite-sized user-generated content.
Fans having fun with corporate intellectual property using their own unique creations is nothing recent, but what’s different here is how Disney wants to exploit this behavior. Sora AI integration would give Disney direct access to a stream of content that subscribers would pay the studio to employ. This system would effectively invite Disney Plus users to become customers AND unpaid employees, which probably seems ideal for Disney management. However, the last time Disney gave people the ability to manipulate their intellectual property in this way, things quickly took a turn in the most expected way possible.
While players couldn’t do that FortniteDarth Vader’s AI-powered NPCs who did whatever they wanted, it was possible to get characters to say hateful, bigoted things in the voice of James Earl Jones with enough pressure. Epic Games has taken some steps to preserve FortniteVader wasn’t behaving inappropriately, but shockingly, players still found workarounds because that’s how people are. That same “let’s do it because we can” energy animates many of the clips you see on Sora AI’s dedicated social video platform, where you can easily find footage of the likes of Mister Rogers and Bob Ross saying and doing offensive things.
OpenAI has likely told Disney executives that it has put measures in place to prevent people from, say, creating characters The Incredibles shouting racist insults. But even if the studio vets every single Sora AI product featuring Disney characters, there will still be an endless stream of content that deviates from the quality that the IP’s original creators – skilled human artists – intended.
It’s difficult to believe Iger’s claims that this collaboration was made with the intention of respecting and protecting the art and artists that have made Disney such a powerful company. The company claims that Sora AI will not be able to reproduce the voices or likenesses of any of the actors associated with its characters, but this also seems to be a sign of the callousness of the whole endeavor. This gives Disney a solid way to ensure it doesn’t have to pay again the artists whose work originally brought these characters to life. You also get the impression that Disney thinks people can be entertained by simply showing familiar faces out of context.