The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora

Altman said "We can pay with equity, but let's frame it as an investment"

No cash exchanged

It's been his entire career. Guy has made billions of dollars from talking.

Given the context, I think snark and disdain are called for.

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?

It’s archaic. The only thing we need now is identification. Oh, this is actually produced by Disney? Great. Oh, this is some Chinese knockoff? I might not want to consume it then.

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.

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

My teenage kids watch YT and TikTok (which gets highly relevant UGC daily) and couldn’t care less about Mickey Mouse or Kylo Ren.

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.

Is it charity to buy AAPL as well?

I really don't understand your perspective

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.

There’s no direct return.

They’ll get every dollar of that billion in mindshare over the next twenty years.

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 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.

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.

2025 Disney encourages children to gamble and gives Pat McAfee significant visibility.

What exactly does “fanart” (no matter how distasteful and controversial) change?

Let people generate whatever fictional character they want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(Kingdom_Hearts)

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.

People are spotting obvious AI slop artwork places and it’s so poorly done.

Disney used to have artist integrity, what a sad path to drag everyone down.

I guess it’s back to the good out Japanese studios who are forcing craft and skill still from artists (the world is full of talent, at least, for now).

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.

P.S. If you can't win them, join them ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

"Disney putting their characters into something called Sora with a confusing roadmap and lore nobody fully understands. We've come full circle"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_a_copyright-fre...

Apparently so.

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.

Cost/token disagrees with you there...