[HN Gopher] The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora
___________________________________________________________________
The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/disney-openai-sora-character...
Author : inesranzo
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-12-11 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| tiahura wrote:
| Iger and Altman on CNBC at 10:30.
| tiahura wrote:
| Iger and Altman on CNBC at 10:30.
| mynti wrote:
| >> Disney and OpenAI affirm a shared commitment to responsible
| use of AI that protects the safety of users and the rights of
| creators.
|
| Wow so Sora Slop is coming to payed Disney+?
| DANmode wrote:
| There's unpaid Disney+?
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora
| short form videos available to stream on Disney+.
|
| Apparently so.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This will not end well for Disney, there were certain historical
| characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist
| videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly
| unhinged. This feels like another circular investment where
| Disney is hoping to make money back I'm sure. On the other hand,
| assuming they do the freemium stuff, I look forward to making a
| few videos of my daughters favorite Disney princesses "talking"
| to her.
| empath75 wrote:
| reposting what i said in the other thread:
|
| > 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.
| tiahura wrote:
| And, don't forget to figure in that OpenAI has indicated
| they're getting into porn.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Is this about when Sam mentioned they want to continue/start
| letting people do lewd texting with LLMs? Or are you talking
| about actual pornography?
| complianceowl wrote:
| It's _hard_ to tell.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The "lewd texting with LLM" will be a tool for writing
| actual pornography, and in workflows for image and video
| pornography, even if the image and video generation doesn't
| happen on OpenAI's platform (in fact, people are using
| ChatGPT and other major AI engines as tools in that
| _already_ , but loosening the filters were facilitate that
| even more on OpenAI's platform.)
|
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > The "lewd texting with LLM" will be a tool for writing
| actual pornography
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Sure, but does that mean "OpenAI has indicated they're
| getting into porn"?
|
| 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.)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're
| getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts,
| story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean
| OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and
| Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting
| into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're
| getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts,
| story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean
| OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and
| Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting
| into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.
|
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable
| function is to facilitate porn production
|
| 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.
| qmr wrote:
| Sora?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(Kingdom_Hearts)
| tecleandor wrote:
| It's also the text-to-video model from OpenAI
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I had the same thought. Finally, Sora will be teaming up with
| all your favorite Disney characters! Didn't that happen
| already?
|
| It's just a funny coincidence.
| ipaddr wrote:
| This might end well for Disney. This provides a different
| marketing angle to bring in younger people to Disney. The
| filters will block a lot of the sexual violence content. The
| original cartoons are deemed racist by some so this won't open
| a door already opened.
|
| But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble
| pile.
| smith7018 wrote:
| Is it circular, though? Is an AI company giving Disney $1B?
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| If just the news of the deal boosts Disney stock enough to
| pay for the deal, then yes. Or if it boosts OpenAI
| valuation because they now have Disney IP enough to pay off
| on Disney's investment, it is basically Disney producing
| content indirectly.
| impulser_ wrote:
| I guess it will depend on how good their security is, because
| I'm assuming Disney is entering this deal with hard guidelines
| on what will be allowed.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| This.
|
| 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.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Once you make the content it's just content, no? How the
| hell are you going to ban racism? A lot of racism is "dog
| whistle" stuff anyway -- it's designed to convey a message
| to people who already know what is being suggested while
| seeming innocuous to any enforceable standards of
| decency... The racists will surely have no trouble bending
| the models to produce Disney content that is in practice
| used to promote and celebrate racism.
| zrobotics wrote:
| I'm sure that's what Disney's lawyers specified in the
| contracts and what their execs expect. However, judging by
| how LLM controls have gone in the past, I'm fully expecting
| to see a slew of awful content featuring Disney's
| characters in the days after this launches. OpenAI also
| probably won't ever be able to actually stop people from
| generating harmful content with the characters, but the
| volume of awful stuff will probably eventually slow down as
| people get bored and move onto the next controversial
| thing.
| dagmx wrote:
| How can you prevent it from making that content? People
| will find a way to combine certain words together to make
| it happen.
| simonw wrote:
| Given the creativity of the jailbreaking community I will
| be very impressed if OpenAI manage to reliably prevent Sora
| from creating disagreeable content with Disney characters.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Based on what I've seen on Sora, it's likely possible but
| only for a day or a few hours. They've been getting better
| and faster at censoring.
|
| I agree. Those characters are likely safe on Sora
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| That's still whack-a-mole though, just because they're
| rolling out new virus definitions quicker doesn't do
| anything to prevent zero day exploits
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to
| make racist content with Disney characters.
|
| 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...
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to
| make racist content with Disney characters.
|
| 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
| corobo wrote:
| How are they going to stop it?
|
| 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
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to
| make racist content with Disney characters.
|
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| "Don't let the user do racist shit" is literally _AGI
| Hard_ territory of problem solving.
|
| It's right up there with "Let kids communicate
| anonymously but not to perverts" and "Is this porn or
| educational?"
| butlike wrote:
| Great, so censorship by attrition.
| doug_durham wrote:
| I don't think that you will ever be able to generate Disney
| characters with the Sora app. Sora is both a model and an
| app. Instead I think that there will be a heavily
| guardrailed specialized app where you can do some highly
| restricted things for the opportunity for the content to
| show up on Disney+. Think of it as "Disney art! Powered by
| Sora".
| edoceo wrote:
| AI with hard guidelines? I don't think that will work.
| forgotaccount3 wrote:
| Not necessarily AI with 'hard guidelines' AI tools that
| pass output to a filter with 'hard guidelines' is
| definitely feasible.
|
| 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?
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Hard guidelines" is making me think of the Pirate Code
| from Disney's Pirates of The Caribbean.
| postalcoder wrote:
| Disney is not the same company it was 20 years ago.
|
| 2025 Disney encourages children to gamble and gives Pat McAfee
| significant visibility.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Disney is the same company as it was 20 years ago. In fact,
| it's the same company as it was 100 years ago. They only care
| about profit. They do just enough brand management to
| preserve the profit motive.
| caminante wrote:
| Amen. Blaming Disney for bad content is like blaming
| politicians.
|
| Who asked for the content? Who elected the politicians?
|
| ** _[Jiminy] crickets**_
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Garbage in, garbage out, as someone wise once said
| armenarmen wrote:
| Fwiw I think the all US presidents since Clinton were
| elected on a non interventionist/pacifist campaign.
| Blaming the voters when every one of them (less so with
| Biden) violated those promises is a bit unfair, if you
| still believe in democracy.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Almost every one of them was elected again, often by
| wider margins (the only exception losing to another one
| of them) _after_ deatroying any illusion innthat
| direction you might argue was produced by their campaign
| positions, so I don 't think you can absolved the
| American electorate here, even if one agrees that their
| campaign before taking office met your description.
| caminante wrote:
| The parent's claim is effortlessly debunked.
|
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Blaming the voters seems completely sensible when they
| reelected W in 2004. The man's Vice President was Dick
| freakin' Cheney. You can't seriously tell me the people
| voted for pacifism and got screwed over.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| I don't recall George W. Bush ever actually promising to
| stay out of wars and interventions. It's been standard
| for the two parties to criticize each-other on grounds of
| doing interventionism badly or going too far towards one
| extreme regarding foreign policy, but nobody has run as a
| real pacifist or isolationist because they would lose in
| a landslide. It especially doesn't help that pacifism and
| isolationism are associated with activist fringes in both
| parties who often lean into crank theories or make
| friends publicly with adversarial states.
| wat10000 wrote:
| We can acknowledge that people are terrible, while also
| wanting people not to cater to the lowest common
| denominator.
| caminante wrote:
| You appear to be lost.
|
| Who said and where's the "false dichotomy" you allude to
| in the discussion above?
| wat10000 wrote:
| I read your comment as saying that we should blame the
| people who create the demand for Disney's products, and
| the voters who elect the politicians, instead of Disney
| and the politicians. Not so?
| caminante wrote:
| No, comparative blame is fair for all parties.
|
| 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.
| postalcoder wrote:
| Yes, perhaps if we deflated Disney's moral rot by a
| diversified basket of other morally-rotted goods, I suppose
| we'd be able to conclude that Disney is perhaps the same
| company.
|
| Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its
| prudishness now unafraid of shame.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| Companies can have additional motives to profit, and
| they're more likely to when control is concentrated just
| because individual people have multiple desires.
|
| 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.
| jeffwask wrote:
| To be fair to Walt Disney, he cared about a lot beyond
| profit and believed in advancing technology and society in
| a way modern corporate leaders absolutely do not. He was no
| saint but he's a far cry from modern CEO's.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| To be fair, Walt Disney partnered with his brother Roy
| Disney, and they co-founded and ran the Walt Disney
| Company (and the iterations before it). These iterations
| of the Disney Company were never just Walt Disney.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Yes, but if you watch any documentaries about early
| Disney and listen to those people talk everything was
| about Walt's vision even after death they would ask "What
| would Walt want or do?" He was a figure whose influence
| and vision is on another level in American History (both
| good and bad) and early Disney was Walt no matter who was
| in charge on paper or even if Walt was still alive. That
| only started to change under Eisner. Roy was the one who
| kept Walt grounded so ambition shrunk but they stayed the
| course Walt set.
| macintux wrote:
| Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that
| wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations
| to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere
| along the way.
| LocalH wrote:
| We lost that when it was found that losing that was even
| more profitable.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| I think that, _given the times_ , we might rate him a
| little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at
| par with the norms of his time, which we could now look
| back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in
| society.
|
| https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-
| semitism-ra...
| meesles wrote:
| I firmly disagree and think this shallow take dishonors a
| pretty great man. While not perfect, Disney gave us the
| bedrock of American children's culture which has been a
| soft tool for the US for generations. Not to mention
| technology and other advancements. I'm not a Disney nut,
| but the man was one-of-a-kind and an impressive
| industrialist who instilled a great culture of innovation
| and a deep love of children and play. All things I value.
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| > While not perfect
|
| 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.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b5j4T9E8PuE
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Don't forget the Native Americans in Peter Pan!
| mikkupikku wrote:
| We all acknowledge that Walt Disney was a flawed person,
| I don't think anybody here disagrees. To me, what sets
| him apart from other corporate leaders isn't Walt's moral
| character, but rather his ambition to influence the
| direction of humanities development, both culturally and
| technologically. He was about a lot more than just making
| number go up.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| One could argue that the company reoriented itself so
| purely towards children's art and kitsch _because_ they
| needed to get themselves into a market segment where they
| could completely sanitize their output of these kinds of
| embarrassments.
| wooger wrote:
| What has Pat Mcafee got to do with anything, is he somehow a
| controversial figure now?
| jairuhme wrote:
| I think its just that people either love him or hate him
| and it seems like OP is part of the latter group
| postalcoder wrote:
| I don't have an opinion on him, despite the
| suggestiveness of my comment. He's more illustrative of a
| spirit that Disney at a time did not have an appetite
| for.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Pat Mcafee catching strays (He has had his show for ~6
| years) but Screamin' A Smith gets a pass?
|
| Your bias is showing.
| postalcoder wrote:
| Stephen A Smith has done as much to harm ESPN's brand
| than any other figure. Please don't assume my biases from
| whom I failed to mention - I could have used SAS instead
| of Pat and my point would have been the same.
|
| Perhaps I should have expected that the conversation
| would get pulled this way but it's not where I wanted it
| to go.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Sorry, my point was SAS has been on the network for at
| least what, 15 years? And he isn't knowledgeable about
| anything but the NBA.
|
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| But their robotics division though
| havblue wrote:
| There is a lot of YouTube content that is basically people
| playing with toys like Paw Patrol and having them interact in
| doll houses. I'm not a fan of this for my kids, and there will
| be a ton more of it. And yes, there will be political slop as
| well.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Grok create already lets you make 6 second videos, though
| sometimes you have to say "Italian plumber" or "famous
| princesses".
| dmix wrote:
| It's definitely not a war you're going to win simply via
| copyright claims to the big chat interfaces. This stuff will
| happen regardless. Especially as more open high quality LLMs
| role out.
|
| They might as well have some direct say in the matter with
| the big companies by creating relationships and profiting via
| licensing.
| echelon wrote:
| The AI IP lines are being drawn now.
|
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| They will be DMCA'ing the social media posts which is
| nothing new.
|
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| It won't move the needle if users have access to
| unfiltered Wan, Comfy, local, etc. as that's unlikely to
| be how most users will create content.
|
| 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.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Pretty sure Youtube is constantly being sued for
| copyright violation by now.
|
| 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!
| bko wrote:
| Why is this a problem with Disney?
|
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I agree with you completely but I'm absolutely shocked that
| Disney would agree to this. They are extremely protective of
| how their IP is used. Famously so.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Not anymore. Just like every other business on the planet
| it is being run by people focused solely on wealth
| extraction now
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| 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.
| podgietaru wrote:
| I actually straight up don't think they give a shit anymore.
|
| 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.
| philistine wrote:
| Yeah, basically Disney invested a billion dollar in _Pregnant
| Elsa Spider-Man Beach Castle_.
| lumost wrote:
| They may be viewing this as an inevitable outcome with open
| models/fly-by-night providers/providers in more liberal
| copy-right jurisdictions.
|
| They can either invest in mass classification and
| enforcement operations or gain some revenue share from it.
| startupsfail wrote:
| They are likely making informed decisions. Disney/Pixar
| are players, not bystanders.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| True, those videos were probably going to happen
| regardless. At least this way Diseny gets to give OpenAI
| a billion dollars at the same time.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| You need to realize more children in the world interact
| with Disney IP through Pregnant Elsa Spider-Man than
| through actual Disney real IP.
|
| Perhaps this is a play to own and monetize that vector in
| the future.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| In the same way more people interact with the Tifa senate
| meme than played FF7 (any version), sure.
|
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| When I became a parent I was really surprised at how much
| crap Disney puts out. My previous exposure had just been
| their blockbuster movies which showed a close attention to
| detail. But you scratch under the surface and it's an endless
| pile of awful quality clothing, crappy lunchboxes, that kind
| of thing. To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized
| rip off until you discover they license to anyone.
|
| 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Fond-ish memories of Disney's direct-to-vhs push in the 90s
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-straight-to-video-
| seq...
| scrumbledober wrote:
| The animation quality of mickey mouse clubhouse was
| appalling when I first had kids. They seem to have decided
| to care about that, as the animation on mickey mouse
| clubhouse + is a marked improvement.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _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._
|
| <=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_.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Bluey is just one show. Disney has an entire network and
| platform to fill with content. There's not a lot of
| producers making Bluey level content, yet the vacuum
| still needs to be filled. Bluey level content also costs
| more to create than the one step above AI slop to fill
| that void. Just like not every song on an album will be a
| banger, there will always be fluff/fill/padding.
| tietjens wrote:
| It's in too short supply. That level of humor,
| thoughtfulness, just human care put me into a show
| parents and kids can relate to.
| dragontamer wrote:
| On a foreign language scale, Bluey and Peppa Pig are
| around B1- or A2+.
|
| 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.
|
| ------
|
| 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).
|
| ------
|
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Fluff/filler on a banger album will still be decent. And
| it may even be someone's favorite. The point is that
| quality is fairly consistent. Not that everything is
| "peak".
|
| 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.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| This is because parents don't watch with their kids
| anymore, just hand over the tablet.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip
| off until you discover they license to anyone.
|
| That's because people consider Disney an entertainment
| company whereas in fact its the biggest licensing company
| in the world.
| mkehrt wrote:
| Apropos of nothing, I watched some Gabby's Dollhouse with
| some children recently, and that show is absolutely
| _unhinged_. Cats everywhere.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| > Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and
| unimaginative storytelling
|
| 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_
| MandieD wrote:
| If I never hear the theme to "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse"
| again, it will be too soon.
|
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip
| off until you discover they license to anyone.
|
| 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.
| mbreese wrote:
| _> Mickey Mouse Clubhouse 's lazy CG animation and
| unimaginative storytelling_
|
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| I think y'all are thinking about this wrong.
|
| 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(r).
|
| 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?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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+.
| echelon wrote:
| > This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually
| good or 2) not freely available.
|
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's been there for at least 40 years or so. Like, direct
| to DVD shows how they'll crank things down for a quick
| buck. So this isn't surprising in the grand scheme of
| things.
|
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Krusty the clown was a parody of Disney and the simpsons
| authors nailed it. [1]
|
| Disney has basically always been like this. Overpriced
| goods powered by the brand alone.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Dsy16hhOI
| reactordev wrote:
| Besides, the character they built their empire on is in the
| public domain now.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| No he's not. Disney still owns the trademark on the
| signature mouse. What's in the public domain is Steamboat
| Willy.
| apercu wrote:
| I agree. It would be hilarious if we weren't all strapped to
| the hood of the same car.
| tr45872267 wrote:
| >This feels like another circular investment where Disney is
| hoping to make money back I'm sure.
|
| How is that circular?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I assume that they mean that OpenAI will now be obligated to
| pay a lot of that money back to Disney as some kind of
| licensing fee. No idea if it's true, but that's the only way
| his comment makes sense.
| sschueller wrote:
| If I were Disney I would want up front cash from OpenAI at
| this point.
| baggachipz wrote:
| The carousel of ~progress~ financing continues to turn....
| jerf wrote:
| "there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2
| because people kept making racist videos that are hard to
| censor, and it became increasingly unhinged"
|
| 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.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Don't use a cucumber if you're going to be subtracting the
| green screen
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I think the idea is you want the cucumber also removed so
| it can be replaced with something else...
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| i assumed it was the egg plant, guess i'm getting old
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| Oh my.
|
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people
| would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search
| for Elsagate.... 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).
|
| 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.
| krick wrote:
| Well, bizarre is the point. Surely you do understand that
| this is the content to gather kids views, because there is
| a ton of kids on the internet, and they can be monetized. I
| don't know what kind of research they do on their audience
| and if they purposefully want to traumatize kids as much as
| possible, but I suppose all this shit does capture kid's
| attention more than just Disney characters fucking.
| macNchz wrote:
| I always figured it was an engagement optimization thing--
| there were people mass producing content using popular
| characters and just throwing tons of stuff at the wall, and
| the ones that veered unsettling/bizarre wound up getting
| lots of engagement so they kept doubling down on it. That
| kind of feedback loop is certainly responsible for many
| other curious traits of online content that is circulated
| in algorithmically-curated feeds.
|
| 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| It's probably a lot of kids just being silly. Sure there
| are plenty of adult trolls, but whenever I see people
| bewildered at unruly online behavior, I think it's because
| they cannot see the age/maturity level of the troll. I can
| absolutely see why people would find this funny.
| lossolo wrote:
| There are people in this world who will do anything for
| money. They will destroy your children mentally if it makes
| them a single dollar, they will traumatize them and cause
| lasting damage. We have created a world in which these
| people have free access to our children.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| I'd like to give those people the benefit of the doubt,
| and state that I believe they don't start out
| intentionally trying to damage children. They're simply
| trying to maximise their own earnings, and don't give a
| shit about what collateral damage occurs in response to
| their actions, as long as earnings go up.
|
| They'll optimise for whatever causes numbers to increase.
| Children just happen to sometimes be what makes that
| happen.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Generative AI and getting everyone on the planet online
| is going to contribute massively to this. You're already
| seeing a massive rise in sextortion scams, pig butchering
| scams, scams of all kinds.
|
| 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.
| littlecorner wrote:
| There's an instinct in many of us to destroy and pervert,
| and it can lead to very dark places.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is silly.
|
| 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
| array_key_first wrote:
| Yes, spiderman and Elsa on YouTube is a prime example.
| It's just slop for kids, they're not even in the same
| universe. But kids like spiderman, and they also like
| Elsa, so... here we are.
|
| They do it because it actually works.
| dspillett wrote:
| There won't be one single reason. For some it is a dark
| sense of humour perhaps twisted a little too far off track,
| that perhaps they should keep in their own head or at least
| just between very close friends. For some it is simply
| money without caring that it might upset people: get enough
| engagement and ad impressions and it is worthwhile if you
| can ignore the moral aspect. Money might not be the
| objective at all, there are people who just want the
| attention, or the appearance of attention, and fake
| internet points (youtube views and such) sate their need at
| least temporarily. For some it is simply deliberate
| griefing, for all the reasons that is a thing generally. Or
| some mix of the above. None of it healthy IMO, but
| explainable.
|
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Sora has good enough controls it is basically impossible to
| make it do a dirty video like that.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Also Google "Elsagate" <snip> Or a YouTube search for
| Elsagate.
|
| Isn't that essentially the same thing now?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| People are already doing whatever clips they want to using open
| source models.
| hbosch wrote:
| >This will not end well for Disney
|
| I have faith that the Parks Imagineers will soon be installing
| Sora Stalls in and around every attraction in Disney World.
| yreg wrote:
| I understand that Disney might care about this, but I don't see
| why they should.
|
| What exactly does "fanart" (no matter how distasteful and
| controversial) change?
|
| Let people generate whatever fictional character they want.
| notyourwork wrote:
| It only works until Mickey Mouse shows up on your Tiktok feed
| lynching an African American and doing a sieg heil salute.
| Are you sure Disney wants that or would not care about that??
| zahlman wrote:
| The question is why it shows up on your Tiktok feed.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| I thought it was well known and generally accepted that
| the social medial companies push controversial click/rage
| bait to keep people "engaged"?
| gosub100 wrote:
| This is a good point. Instead of policing what trolls
| will use it for, the same AI should be able to detect
| racist content and prevent it from spreading
| salawat wrote:
| Look, I've gotten cartel beheadings and beatings on a
| YouTube search query for Jack Russell terriers.
|
| 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.
| stOneskull wrote:
| terriers/terrorists
| matsemann wrote:
| This used to be a "zing", but don't think it is anymore.
| Try to make a new profile somewhere and select a few
| topics of interest. You will get suggested the most
| engaging "relevant" content. For me, I made a cycling
| Instagram and my feed instantly got filled with girls
| showing of cleavage in lycra with cycling hashtags.
| zahlman wrote:
| It was not meant as an attack on GP; it was meant as
| exactly this opportunity to question "the algorithm".
| array_key_first wrote:
| I swear to god Instagram is like the patriarchy speedrun.
|
| 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.
| docjay wrote:
| There are clearly plenty of people who feel the same way as
| you, and for those people what I'm about to ask might have
| such an obvious answer that it could feel like I'm being
| rhetorical or feigning ignorance to provoke an emotional
| response, but it's truly honest:
|
| 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?
| array_key_first wrote:
| People care because it's entirely unconscious. Even if
| you choose not to care, you can't, because you've already
| seen it.
|
| 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.
| yreg wrote:
| So what? Similar videos and pictures have existed since the
| dawn of web.
|
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| People saying this have not worked with Sora before. I
| challenge you to generate anything even close to that.
| ojr wrote:
| Tiktok has AI moderation tools that you are highly
| underestimating.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The people making these are good at more subtle forms of
| hate with coded language and indirect references.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I look forward to making a few videos of my daughters favorite
| Disney princesses "talking" to her._
|
| I look forward to chatting with Pluto and Goofy and asking why
| one has to wear pants when both of them are dogs.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Given that only one of the dogs can talk, you're set to get
| only one answer. Though I suspect that the ability to talk
| bestows bodily shame, based on this anecdotal evidence.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Maybe the point is for it to not end well, like instead of
| waiting around they're taking the helm and driving it into the
| ground early.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >This will not end well for Disney [...]
|
| Guy on the internet knows more about businesses than a 200
| billion century-old corporation.
|
| A classic.
| RataNova wrote:
| The upside is personalized content that kids will love; the
| downside is the internet doing what it always does
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| My impulse is to agree, and I'm almost wondering whether Disney
| figured that they'd have more restraining influence by getting
| in legitimately than by having generative AI companies wink and
| look away from rampant trademark violations because Disney
| won't pay them to care.
| fidotron wrote:
| Is this their YouTube goes legit moment? i.e. Disney get paid (by
| indirect means so far) for characters on OpenAI but not (yet)
| Gemini?
|
| If this includes exclusivity deals it could be big.
| seydor wrote:
| Sounds like the opposite, all disney characters become memes
| and Sora becomes known only for that
| nkotov wrote:
| My household might be an anomaly but my kids know and prefer
| YouTubers more to Disney characters.
| solumunus wrote:
| Oof.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| Disney shareholders, feel free to make images of Iger, Mickey,
| and Br'er Rabbit lighting piles on money on fire.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The original depiction of Mickey Mouse is legally public domain
| anyway
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_a_copyright-fre...
| wiseowise wrote:
| The cancer spreads.
| mvkel wrote:
| The Marvel slop that the human creators have been putting out
| hasn't inspired much confidence in wetware either
| herbturbo wrote:
| Exactly - Disney sees this as a cheaper way to produce the
| same slop.
| podgietaru wrote:
| Probably worse slop, but now no human will be paid. What a
| marvelous future we've invented for ourselves.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Judging by how bad recent Marvel movies were, I wouldn't
| be surprised if fans plop out far better quality.
|
| 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
| mvkel wrote:
| It's our own fault. Apparently we find Jake Paul
| screaming "I'M GEEKED" into the camera highly
| entertaining.
|
| I would argue AI going to be a good thing because more
| creative risks can be taken at lower sunk costs.
| herbturbo wrote:
| To be fair the humans working at Disney had their chance
| and blew it.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Are we certain that it was wetware?
| postalcoder wrote:
| buried the lede:
|
| > 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
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >I say this with no snark or disdain: Sam has mastered the art
| of the flywheel.
|
| It's been his entire career. Guy has made billions of dollars
| from talking.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Did we forget about Enron? Or are we deliberately retconning
| it? Many such cases.
| sheeshe wrote:
| Lmao your user name.
|
| I like the phrase "vulture capital"
| npollock wrote:
| Disney said "Our IP is $1B for a 3yr license, or we sue"
|
| Altman said "We can pay with equity, but let's frame it as an
| investment"
|
| No cash exchanged
| sd9 wrote:
| This is "impressive" negotiation from Altman. Can't imagine this
| being good for Disney.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| This isn't good for anyone that prefers media that someone put
| soul into. People thought Disney lost their mojo over the past
| few years... be prepared for almost every Disney movie to have
| that straight-to-video vibe from now on.
| afavour wrote:
| AI has driven the corporate suites of these companies insane.
|
| > 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| If OpenAI has exclusive rights to AI generation for Disney and
| other IP rights holders, that would create the kind of moat
| they've been missing so far.
| afavour wrote:
| All the more reason it's insane for Disney to be the one
| giving money!
| mritchie712 wrote:
| > commoditized
|
| not for disney content. Disney can pick OpenAI as the
| winner for this by not signing deals and suing anyone else.
| raincole wrote:
| Disney is buying equity from OpenAI. You frame it as
| "giving OpenAI money" because you hold a (quite insane)
| assumption that OpenAI's equity is worth nothing.
| mcphage wrote:
| > Disney is buying equity from OpenAI.
|
| 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?
| Hamuko wrote:
| But Sam Altman has already said that they need to be able to
| ignore copyright laws because the Chinese are going to ignore
| them too. How is access to Disney IP a moat if everyone
| involved (except Disney) gives no shits about copyright?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Looks like he changed his mind.
| herbturbo wrote:
| Thats a business agreement not a moat. And you might have
| rights to generate the characters but they still need to do
| something. You only have to look at the repeated Disney flops
| to see they themselves have no ideas.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| And if you're the only company with that business
| agreement. As long as you still have it, it's a...moat.
| herbturbo wrote:
| Well that's the thing with moats - they don't just
| disappear one day.
| jimbokun wrote:
| No business moat is permanent.
| DANmode wrote:
| Why does Bayer spend what it spends putting its brand in front
| of you?
|
| There's no direct return.
|
| They'll get every dollar of that billion in mindshare over the
| next twenty years.
| empath75 wrote:
| > OpenAI and ChatGPT have been pioneering but they're
| absolutely going to be commoditized.
|
| 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.
| herbturbo wrote:
| Disney only exists now to exploit the IP it has bought. They
| just want to join the circle of OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft et al
| making meaningless deals with each other.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I do wonder if this $1B is effectively protection money to stop
| OpenAI from bulldozing any more copyright laws.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > but they're absolutely going to be commoditized
|
| 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.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| If 3 or 4 competitors can all provide a mostly identical
| product, isn't that a commodity? That is essentially the case
| right now, with the different companies playing around with
| UI, integrations and business model.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| If all models were equal then sure. But for professionals
| who use these to solve complex problems and need
| correctness above all? The models and weights are not equal
| and interchangeable.
| quietfox wrote:
| That's interesting. I think besides the hard facts (like
| numnber of possible tokens before throtteling happens) the
| perceived quality differs from use case to use case. In that
| sense, ChatGPT is my daily driver, in terms of helping with
| coding problems or debugging Claude feels far superior to me.
| And when it comes to ideation and creativity (product idea
| validation, etc.) Gemini surpasses both of the other in my
| opinion.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| But what could possibly be the secret sauce? Whatever it is,
| eventually enough engineers will move between orgs to get
| that stuff cross-pollinated.
|
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| I think OpenAI having the best model still isn't enough. The
| AI marketplace isn't really in a race to the top, it's in a
| race to the mass market middle. If Gemini is good _enough_
| for the majority of people to complete the majority of tasks
| they want to then market effects and bundling can get an
| already dominant company like Google to take over the market.
| And that 's without considering the integration
| possibilities, e.g. Gmail and Google Docs.
|
| 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.
| eddieroger wrote:
| If Disney could throw concepts at their properties like Mickey
| Mouse Clubhouse or Paw Patrol or any of their other CG shovel
| content (which my kid loves, of course) and have a new episode
| every day of the year, they would, and this lets them do that
| without employing the staff to make that happen. If all it took
| was a writer to put a pitch together and Sora to turn out an
| episode, that'd be a steal for $1B.
| elif wrote:
| How is buying equity "giving money"?
|
| Is it charity to buy AAPL as well?
|
| I really don't understand your perspective
| raincole wrote:
| They think OpenAI equity will be worthless so it's "giving
| money." Obviously Disney disagrees.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Buying already existing shares of a public company is very
| different from buying just-created shares of a private one.
|
| 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."
| close04 wrote:
| Shares are always "x% of whatever this thing turns out to
| be worth in the future". It can be something, it can be
| nothing.
|
| 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
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Right, but the distinction is that if I go buy a few
| thousand shares of DIS today, I'm not handing money to
| the Disney company, rather I'm handing it to the previous
| owners of those shares. The total pool of them is fixed,
| so it's all basically zero sum. At most my purchase might
| signal (in a microscopic way) to the market that there's
| demand, and push up the price, which benefits Disney.
|
| 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.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Afaict it might be another circular deal? They buy equity (at
| what evaluation?) and options, and license some IP (is this the
| billion flowing straight back?) to OpenAI (not to SORA users?)
| for very restricted use cases, with a commitment from OpenAI to
| support Disney's copyright racketeering.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| OpenAI equity is worthless _now_. It 's a company that
| absolutely _cannot_ turn a profit, not with how much they 're
| spending. And with a CEO that regularly lies about...
| everything (I'm sorry, you can't just spin up _hundreds of
| gigawatts_ of power generation, especially not in the US, but
| also because the only company that makes gas turbines has a
| _seven-year backlog_ ).
|
| 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.
| OldGreenYodaGPT wrote:
| The collapse in production costs from AI video is going to change
| the volume and quality of what gets made. We're headed for a
| world where studios and small teams alike can produce work that
| would have required a Game of Thrones budget not long ago. The
| pipeline for high end series and films is about to get a lot
| bigger, and the pace of experimentation is going to jump
| monkaiju wrote:
| It might have required a GoT level budget to make, but it wont
| look as good a GoT. Just a few days ago McDonalds learned that
| (again) in the Netherlands
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I think 90% of the McDonald's backlash was specifically
| related to the tone/content of the ad (anti-holiday, you're
| better off in McDonald's _than with your family_!), not the
| actual quality of the video.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| >The pipeline for high end series and films
|
| 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.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| We are heading towards a world where during the moment a
| company wins a bid to serve you an ad and it actually serves
| you an ad it generates a custom ad made just for you that will
| have video, etc. that is most likely to get you to engage in
| whatever the ad is attempting you to engage in.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I wonder if the next gen ad blocking strategy will involve
| convincing ad generators that I respond _really_ well to
| plain text ads with a font color of #FEFEFE on a #FFFFFF
| background.
| tossit444 wrote:
| I'm genuinely stunned they're giving OAI money.
| mvkel wrote:
| Not surprising in the least. If AI content can be monetized, I
| would imagine the struggling Hollywood set to be champing at the
| bit to participate.
|
| I suspect their ongoing concern is just their
| IP/brands/characters being misused. Spielberg is next
| worldsavior wrote:
| Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231585
| gekoxyz wrote:
| I never thought this could happen, especially after the "Ghibli
| scandal". OpenAI has pulled a majestic business move. They got to
| allow people to generate Disney characters without issue AND will
| give 1 billion dollars to OpenAI?
|
| 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Now the internet will be flooded by Disney character 's
| videos_
|
| 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?
| afavour wrote:
| Because they didn't get any money from the daycare and they
| will get money from OpenAI when you make your Sora video.
| That's all there is to it.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I have a feeling that the long-term economics of this don't
| really work. OpenAI is burning money and Altman has already
| gone out in public saying how Sora-generated content is
| being made in large volumes for little audience.
|
| > _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.
| afavour wrote:
| Yes, that's what makes Disney investing in OpenAI as part
| of this so confusing to me. Sign a licensing deal that
| means OpenAI pays you every time someone uses your
| character? Absolutely. Who cares if they're burning cash,
| as long as you get your payday it's all good. But
| investing in the company means their cash burning is your
| problem too. I don't know why you'd do it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The only explanation is if they think they can juice
| their stock by 2 billion and then whoever is on the ship
| jumps before the crash.
|
| Sounds like Iger has his finger on the eject button. How
| much stock has he announced to be cashing out over 2026?
| sheeshe wrote:
| It's not that.
|
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >People are generating much more than we expected per
| user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very
| small audiences.
|
| 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.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > I have a feeling that the long-term economics of this
| don't really work. OpenAI is burning money and Altman has
| already gone out in public saying how Sora-generated
| content is being made in large volumes for little
| audience.
|
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The brand rot will be disgusting here. I thought "family"
| companies like Nintendo and Disney hit so hard, against
| their best interests, because they didn't want the next
| pregnant Elsa or Nazi Mario to cause a storm on their
| carefully tailored brands.
|
| Seems like Nintendo still has that long term thinking.
| Disney was just waiting for the right price.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I mean, Disney can do basically whatever it wants and
| nothing will change. If my gay, Muslim friends are still
| willing to patronize the parks, despite their very real
| disagreement with how Disney conducts its business, then
| what hope is there for the exhausted, overworked mom
| whose child won't stop wailing about watching _Frozen_?
| This will absolutely tarnish the brand, and yet people
| will still consume Disney slop.
| onion2k wrote:
| Sora is a _heavily_ censored model so presumably they believe
| they can stop that sort of content being generated.
| crumpled wrote:
| As an aside: Winnie the Pooh is public domain, so he can do
| drugs if he wants. But he shouldn't wear a red shirt while he
| does.
| noosphr wrote:
| Dysneys characters are entering the public domain, they can
| either cash out now or not at all.
|
| 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...
| duskwuff wrote:
| Mickey Mouse's character design _as of 1930_ is in the
| public domain. But if you ask an AI image model for
| "Mickey Mouse", you'll probably get something based on more
| recent versions of the character which are still
| copyrighted.
| therealpygon wrote:
| Disney, is well aware of the writing on the wall that
| copyright is going to continue to become increasingly harder
| to enforce, as generative ai distances itself from brute
| mimicry, and because infringers can generate new versions
| faster that takedown notices can be filed. Their alternative
| is to either be steamrolled, or leverage their IP while it
| has worth in order to latch on to the AI market. Plus, they
| give a solid explanation: it is free advertising when there
| are guardrails on how the characters can behave/say/portray
| (which is the advantage of the deal -- I assume a similar one
| with Google, Microsoft or Apple will be forthcoming too).
|
| 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.)
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Congrats Disney. You just sold out every actual animator you
| pretended to care about.
|
| Sure, go ahead and downvote me.
| preisschild wrote:
| Im just a consooomer and upvoting you. Nobody wants more
| slop...
| throwaway613745 wrote:
| Seems @sama has stumbled onto a pretty good business strategy -
| unleash something that massively infringes on copyright into the
| world, then take it back and add "guardrails" and then ~~extort~~
| sell it back to the person you infringed on their copyright in
| the first place.
|
| 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.
| nba456_ wrote:
| Awesome! Can't wait to see what people create.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is the most circular of the circular funding deals. All the
| bubble signs are blaring it's just a game of chicken now until
| the crash. I just don't know if it is months or years.
| quitit wrote:
| I opened this article expecting to read that OpenAI was somehow
| delivering cash or in-kind payment to Disney as a means of
| appeasing the copyright beast.
|
| 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.
| eykanal wrote:
| I read this as "Disney approached OpenAI and threatened to sue
| them into oblivion --> OpenAI negotiated that Disney will use
| OpenAI internally for free, and will buy $1B of equity to have an
| ownership stake in the company".
|
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Surely OpenAI should be paying Disney for the rights to their
| content. What an upside down period we are living in.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| You pay for advertisement and product placement.
|
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Not sure people gonna consume more Disney content because
| there will suddenly be better way to make more AI slop of
| it...
| echelon wrote:
| The RIAA got it their way with Suno and Udio.
|
| 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.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| You're being downvoted because people don't like the future
| you are painting :)
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >You pay for advertisement and product placement.
|
| 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._
| alt227 wrote:
| It literally depends on who it is benefitting. If I run a small
| clothing company ad I want to print Mickey Mouse tshirts
| becasue it will make me money, I need to pay license fees to
| Disney to use their IP.
|
| 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.
| artur44 wrote:
| I keep wondering about one thing: maybe Disney isn't paying for
| the technology at all -- maybe they're paying for a spot in the
| future. If generative video becomes as common as social media, AI
| models will be the new TV channels, and whoever controls the
| prime shelf space wins. In that sense, this billion isn't a fee
| for Sora it's the price of having Disney's front row booth in a
| new world of storytelling. So the real question isn't why is
| Disney paying? but who's going to own the shelves in this new
| story marketplace?
| zorked wrote:
| $1B, how many hours of runway does that buy.
| mekdoonggi wrote:
| -2 months because they need to spend $2b to make this revenue.
| Investors should look for a bump of another -8 forward P/E.
| Huge upside (negative) potential.
| whalesalad wrote:
| it will defer the next price increase of disney+ by 47.3 days
| quitit wrote:
| I wonder if this will weaken Disney's suit against Midjourney.
|
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| Shouldn't OpenAI be paying Disney?
| s1mon wrote:
| That was my first thought. When I saw 'Disney' and 'OpenAI' in
| a headline together I assumed the money was flowing the other
| way around. Certainly other rights holders like the NYTimes are
| looking for the cash to flow the opposite direction (they're
| suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted
| material which can be reproduced through prompting). Unless
| this investment somehow is structured so that Disney gets stock
| which will potentially be worth orders of magnitude more
| later...
| sofixa wrote:
| > they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on
| copyrighted material which can be reproduced through
| prompting
|
| Are OpenAI even denying this?
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| Related: https://www.reuters.com/business/disney-sends-cease-and-
| desi...
|
| > Walt Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Alphabet's
| Google, CNBC reported on Thursday.
| seydor wrote:
| Oh the memes
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| So we're soon going to see Sora-generated Disney movies?
| postalrat wrote:
| Im sure its going to be used by many movies. Just like CGI. And
| just like CGI some people will complain.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I'd like to pre-register my complaint! :-)
|
| 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.
| dutchCourage wrote:
| $1B sounds huge, I don't understand what Disney has to gain. Is
| this only to have some control over the videos generated on Sora
| with their IP?
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| $1B is nothing for OpenAI or Disney
| lunias wrote:
| OpenAI is my least favorite AI company and Disney is (recently)
| among my least favorite entertainment conglomerates. Sounds like
| a match made in heaven. Good luck with the investment.
| dominotw wrote:
| openai prbly is my most favorite because everyone else is
| obsessed with job replacement as the final goal
| gdulli wrote:
| The endgame of every single one of them is replacement of
| labor, it's the only way the level of investment makes sense.
| Whether each org profits from it directly or indirectly is
| immaterial.
| lunias wrote:
| Sam Altman is probably among the fakest people on the planet.
| OpenAI's product offerings also seem to have been trounced by
| their competition.
| ossner wrote:
| Others have pointed out the problems of trolls generating racist
| or otherwise controversial content using Disney characters and
| this being short-sighted by Disney, but I think this could just
| be another case of "no such thing as bad PR".
|
| 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.
| jeffwask wrote:
| It's strange though because if you know anything about Disney
| and how the manage the characters in media and at the parks,
| they are extremely protective of the brand and image of the
| characters. Imagineers have very strict rules around virtual
| character meet and greets and etc.
|
| 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.
| ossner wrote:
| Yes, that is certainly true, but I think there is a certain
| monetary value attached to that virality that Disney now
| wants to cash in on, which is something they haven't done
| before.
|
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| > They are a half step from flooding the market with Disney
| Princess porn.
|
| I would think that whatever demand there is for that is
| already filled.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| rule 34 would strongly suggest that is not the case.
| squigz wrote:
| Rule 34 suggests there is demand, yes. The various rule
| 34 commision artists suggests there is supply.
|
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| Their characters are way past virality
| fudged71 wrote:
| They're way past being relevant and that is the problem they
| are solving... getting mindshare again.
| illwrks wrote:
| Perhaps.... functionality will only be available to paid
| accounts/integrations. OpenAI will be contractually bound to
| report offensive content, Disney Lawyers will get the direct
| contact details via the paid account to know the user and sue.
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| Not a lawyer but I'd be interested to know if you can sue an
| end user who uses AI ... In the past you could for using tools,
| but if AI has autonomy based solely on a prompt that might even
| open up free speech defenses
| illwrks wrote:
| Purely conjecture on my part I might add! I have no affiliation
| to either company, but I know Disney likes to sue so if they
| are paying so much money... and putting their IP at risk...
| what's in it for them?
| dagmx wrote:
| Putting aside feelings on AI, and also putting aside worst case
| scenarios of the kind of content (which will happen regardless of
| what they promise), I think this is a terrible move for the
| brand.
|
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| > Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders.
|
| 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| So the big fatso corporations all rally behind AI.
|
| 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.
| leoedin wrote:
| I see a lot of Google adverts for AI that seems to be "look,
| you can translate your photo into a sci-fi world".
|
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| For everyone concerned about the AI systems being trained on
| copyrighted material: this was always the end-game of that
| argument. Once the technology was proven out to be useful,
| _someone_ with a huge IP portfolio was going to slam that
| portfolio directly into the training data to get their own
| copyright-unencumbered AI.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| Copyright unencumbered... For their own characters?? Why would
| they need clearance to generate things trained on _their_ data.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Because the tool can generate output faster than human
| employees alone can (and they control the "legitimate" gate
| by which other people can use those characters in the tool).
|
| 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.
| pantsforbirds wrote:
| I think I'm the only one kind of stoked about this. My kiddos are
| going to LOVE making short films with their favorite Disney
| Princesses.
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, but Disney will make you pay extra for it, that's for
| sure.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| You're not. You're the only _HN commenter_ who 's excited
| mervz wrote:
| wtf are we doing, man?
| dawnerd wrote:
| Article makes it sound like Disney is just now rolling out ai for
| their employees but they've had access to it for a long time now.
| Disney has also been hiring for various AI positions for a bit.
| cs702 wrote:
| The technology is still immature.
|
| 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?
|
| ---
|
| [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai
| jfindper wrote:
| There's probably already terabytes and terabytes of disney porn
| out there. It's not clear to me why this would make much of a
| difference on that front.
| cs702 wrote:
| Instead of "out there," it would be on an official
| Disney/OpenAI venue.
|
| That strikes me as rather risky on their part.
| otterley wrote:
| What mad world are we living in where Disney -- _Disney_ -- is
| _paying someone_ to lose control over its IP?
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I think they're getting some equity in return for the
| investment. If it goes up, Disney makes out. If it doesn't,
| well, ...
| triceratops wrote:
| Why not equity in exchange for rights? The crazy thing is
| they're surrendering both rights and cash.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Maybe the negotiations established that the rights were
| worth $X, but Disney wanted $X + 1 billion worth of stock?
|
| 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?
| dmix wrote:
| The alternative is they make no money and people still produce
| them using other video gen tools without the copyright filters.
|
| Similar to the music industry piracy battle, it makes more
| sense to work with the big platforms than fight them.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| There are many alternatives. Another is they sue the shit out
| of Open AI until you basically can't generate anything
| related to mice or monarchies.
|
| This may be the right move but it's by no means forced.
| otterley wrote:
| I don't see the similarity here.
|
| 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.
| bloppe wrote:
| Buying GPUs and RAM is a bit of a barrier right now, but
| renting a cloud instance at Modal and running a model off
| hugging face is relatively affordable
| Iolaum wrote:
| Are they losing control though? OpenAI did sign a contract with
| them and that presumably gives them some power. Maybe less than
| the power they had over, for example netflix, but still more
| than nothing.
|
| P.S. If you can't win them, join them ...
| crazygringo wrote:
| Disney isn't "paying someone," they're expecting to _make_
| money. They 're _investing_.
|
| The $1B turns into OpenAI stock. If Disney characters make
| OpenAI more valuable, that stock and its future dividends
| become more valuable.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| Disney has been a wannabe tech company for the longest of
| times. They started the streaming Wars with Disney+ and have
| had massive spend on AI already. There is virtually no creative
| or artistic talent left in the company.
| torginus wrote:
| Isn't Disney on of the oldest tech companies of all time?
|
| 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.
| buu700 wrote:
| As I recall, Randy Pausch had a lot of positive things to
| say about Disney Imagineering.
| _fzslm wrote:
| > 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?
| neom wrote:
| Not OP but if you do wanna see some good youtube that
| shows what Disney knows about computering, the Disney
| research hub is super fun:
| https://www.youtube.com/@DisneyResearchHub/videos
|
| 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
| otterley wrote:
| If you're a Disney+ subscriber, be sure to watch _The
| Imagineering Story_ miniseries. Fun fact, it was directed
| by Leslie Iwerks, who's the granddaughter of Ubbe Iwerks,
| the co-creator of Mickey Mouse alongside Walt Disney.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Not your parent, but I'd expect they mean
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defunctland
| nubianwarrior wrote:
| His recent videos on Imagineering's animatronics and
| "Living Characters" was incredible.
| YY478436874326 wrote:
| Toy Story was essentially a tech demo for Pixar. And they
| worked alongside Apple to make the Squeak Smalltalk
| programming language.
| otterley wrote:
| Pixar was bought by Disney years after it was already a
| movie powerhouse. Toy Story was released in 1995; Disney
| acquired Pixar in 2006.
| RataNova wrote:
| Disney monetizing the loss of control that was happening anyway
| mrdependable wrote:
| I wonder how the various creative guilds will respond. Seems like
| they are stabbing their team in the back on this one.
| arichard123 wrote:
| Is this some kind of pre-AI crash long game? Does that make any
| sense?
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| Comments all act like Disney is giving them $1B, but they are
| essentially producing unlimited Disney IP content through OpenAI,
| and get any value boost on their ownership investment, and get
| the Disney stock bounce from the deal coverage. I don't really
| like the deal on the face value of what we know, but will admit
| there is huge potentially upside and it's very cheap relative to
| a lot of other company AI "strategies"
| j-kent wrote:
| Hopefully I'll have enough time to make a proper sequel to 'Wreck
| it Ralph' before it gets shut down due to the obvious risks.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Well I guess the best outcome is that the AI bubble bursts. Gonna
| be way worse if it is actually legit...
| epolanski wrote:
| That's some serious FOMO.
| jpadkins wrote:
| OpenAI is using a page from 2010's Facebook playbook. They know
| their valuation is hyper inflated, so they are using those crazy
| valuations to buy stuff with equity (just like Facebook bought
| WhatsApp with private stock with crazy valuations).
| toast0 wrote:
| > just like Facebook bought WhatsApp with private stock with
| crazy valuations
|
| 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.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Disney making a tech investment. Just the history of Disney and
| tech should make you roll your eyes: Starwave, Infoseek, Maker
| Studio, Playdom (I think Bamtech helped with Disney+, so maybe
| won't count that)
| amelius wrote:
| That's a great way for OpenAI to keep Disney's lawyers away.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Not that I expect any rational thought from Disney, but the race
| to the bottom has started. If anyone can make a video with Disney
| characters, their value goes to zero.
|
| 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?
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Have no fear! The free market of AI slop is here!
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Lot of the anti AI crowd hoped Disney would side with them and
| Disney IP appearing in models would be the thing to bring it all
| down, thinking copyright overreach was the lesser evil to use to
| get their way.
|
| Wonder how they feel about this.
| neom wrote:
| Wouldn't that be a losing battle given the open source nature
| of the technologies that power these things? I feel like you'd
| end up in a somewhat similar situation to torrenting back in
| the day, you punish a handful of folks but ultimately play
| whackamole. There are a few things I could imaging them
| thinking, one might be if they give the IP to the most cutting
| edge business with the best distribution and they can keep
| _some_ semblance of control + the market would be flooded
| mostly with "legitimate" "approved" "safe" stuff, openai may
| also be promising them tools to identify IP infringement on
| other platforms?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| _Bob Iger: Disney's OpenAI Deal "Does Not In Any Way" Threaten
| Creatives_
|
| https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob...
| myjumpingsocks wrote:
| we're cooked
| sireat wrote:
| How about picture gen though on Dall-E?
|
| 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...
| neallindsay wrote:
| There's a Kingdom Hearts joke in there somewhere, but I don't
| know enough of the lore to make it.
| j-bos wrote:
| I tried on my own but couldn't beat Claude for punch:
|
| "Disney putting their characters into something called Sora
| with a confusing roadmap and lore nobody fully understands.
| We've come full circle"
| rcarmo wrote:
| My immediate thought: when does the copyright on Mickey expire?
| Didn't it happen already?
| thatgerhard wrote:
| 1B down the toilet
| XorNot wrote:
| This seems like a net negative for Disney and is what, like a
| month more of runway for OpenAI?
|
| Doesn't Sora basically lose money at an enormous rate?
| ojr wrote:
| Disney witnessed AI boosting Studio Ghibli's cultural impact and
| relevance and decided to invest big in OpenAI, not surprising.
| RataNova wrote:
| This feels like the moment big media finally decided that if they
| can't stop generative AI, they might as well monetize it
| toofy wrote:
| does disney think a future is coming where the company who owns
| the model may be able to claim copyright on anything it's model
| creates?
|
| because that's the only way this makes sense to me.
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