[HN Gopher] Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora
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Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora
Author : timpera
Score : 149 points
Date : 2026-03-24 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
| harlequinetcie wrote:
| Are we sure it was in that order?
| singingwolfboy wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ABkeI
| pm90 wrote:
| It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of
| confidence is not something OAI can afford at this stage...
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Nothing like an ill-considered war with global economic
| consequences to bring reality crashing back down on Silicon
| Valley; sometimes life throws a big old margin call your way
| and things break down.
| ps06756 wrote:
| It's not because of the bubble. There is literally no advantage
| to generating slop videos. It looks cool for a while but no
| audience is going to consume such videos.
|
| Any platform which focusses on AI generated videos is doomed.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| > no audience is going to consume such videos
|
| sir, have you seen tiktok?
| ps06756 wrote:
| I meant the longer video format, not tiktok. Tiktok is full
| of slop, both AI and human generated
| emp17344 wrote:
| So much for "replacing VFX artists". It's not necessarily a
| harbinger of doom for the AI industry, but this indicates
| that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It's more like the VFX market is too small for OpenAI to
| bother killing. They are only interested in business models
| that can justify a trillion dollar valuation.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were
| dead wrong.
|
| I dont do design, or make videos, or ask ai for legal
| advice, or medical advice cause I lack the skill and
| understanding of these fields. Dunning Kruger still
| applies...
|
| There is interesting "AI" content out there, clearly the
| person(s) behind it put some thought into it and had a
| vision.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Sounds like a well disguised cope on your part. There
| absolutely is an audience (see reels, TikTok, etc.) and the
| tech will only get better from here.
| emp17344 wrote:
| You sound desperate to believe this. I think you could use
| a little more emotional distance here.
| msy wrote:
| Oh there's a huge (and wildly depressing) market for people
| endlessly scrolling video slop, it's just the barriers to
| entry and expectations of the market are so low you can't
| really differentiate with 'slightly better branded slop'.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| I never understood the appeal or business promise of video slop,
| with or without Disney's blessing.
| dawnerd wrote:
| The only people I've seen post AI Disney content was in the
| Facebook groups for the parks / cruises. Before that it was
| whatever clipart they could find. There's just no market for
| it. No one is going to pay to make fake disney art.
| latchkey wrote:
| What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that
| service? They would have signed multi-year contracts.
| PLenz wrote:
| This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever
| want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
|
| In practice people would just generate the videos with the app
| then post them on regular social media in which case OAI would
| not get the ad revenue for that
| echelon wrote:
| > The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would
| ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined
| feed?
|
| It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up and we
| couldn't do anything with the characters and culture we know.
|
| If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60%
| of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music,
| etc.
| tantalor wrote:
| > look at US top videos on YouTube any given day
|
| I'd rather eat poison
| echelon wrote:
| We can have that discussion, or we can have the more
| interesting discussion of just how much big corporate
| intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their
| hooks in pop culture.
|
| Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.
|
| It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom
| of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at
| a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to
| use corporate IP.
|
| I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming
| industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media
| to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being
| posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll
| go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and
| force them to obtain licenses to their characters and
| music.
|
| People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost
| the ability to generate IP. The interest faded immediately.
| The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0.
| chromacity wrote:
| > The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would
| ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined
| feed?
|
| It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of
| people use Facebook.
|
| But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent,
| YT Shorts) have cornered the market of AI slop, and no one
| really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models in
| any other way. Which probably made them not worth subsidizing.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Smart move. No clear path to growing meaningful revenue mixed
| with very expensive inference costs is not a good mix ahead of an
| IPO --- oh and not to mention competitors in TikTok and Instagram
| that are doing just fine.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Is it a smart move? Or just plainly obvious when Sora was
| probably hemorraghing money and had no future? A smarter move
| would have not to make this horrible product that no one wanted
| in the first place
|
| After placing my hand on the red-hot stove, aren't I super
| smart for now removing my hand?
| saalweachter wrote:
| Depends, did you also fire the people who told you not to do
| it, and layoff the people who reluctantly installed the stove
| and preheated it for you as part of your exciting stove-
| touching initiative?
| wj wrote:
| May be incompatible with OpenAI possibly becoming more PG-13
| rated in the future?
|
| I had thought this would be combined with OpenAI launching a set
| top box where you could talk to an AI avatar. Disney IP could
| have been skins to sell people for their AIs.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| as a sora user:
|
| - sora was not great at making what you asked
|
| - i probably got 3 good videos out of 100 gens
|
| - every video that was good needed editing outside of sora (and
| therefore could not be shared within sora)
|
| just my experience
| jimmytucson wrote:
| Pretty much mirrors my experience using GPT to generate images
| creatively. I tried to generate an image to accompany a Robert
| frost poem and it made something... plausibly related. But not
| what I was describing. I spent the next 90% of the time making
| it 10% closer to what I wanted but it never got all the way
| there.
|
| I've given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow
| chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate
| an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never
| looks quite like what I have in mind.
|
| In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images
| if you're prepared to accept whatever comes out on
| approximately the first try.
| creantum wrote:
| It was the greatest thing yesterday.
| gradus_ad wrote:
| I thought AI video was the future? Now the biggest AI company in
| the world is straight up shutting their service down because it's
| too expensive? Simply a disaster for OpenAI and the industry as a
| whole.
| paxys wrote:
| It may very well be the future, but in the present OpenAI has
| to make money.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| It's the timeline of AI video that doesn't align with OpenAI.
| It's still far away for prompt to movie and they don't want to
| be another tool in the pipe for VFX because it doesn't pay.
| Other models are running circles around them because they
| focused on the needs of professionals in the space and not
| toys.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Every flop used for entertainment is opportunity cost. Compute
| is far more valuable used internally to create AGI than
| creating parody videos.
| Olumde wrote:
| VFX artists are ecstatic about this development.
| willis936 wrote:
| I feel like in several years we will look back at how we
| treated our most creative minds in disgust. This behavior will
| not be readily forgiven.
| Permit wrote:
| I feel like in several years we'll have much more capable
| video generation than Sora was capable of and we won't look
| back at all.
| emp17344 wrote:
| I feel like you're wrong. This is a clear signal that
| generative video is deeply unpopular.
| Gagarin1917 wrote:
| Sora was not the only video generation service, it wasn't even
| the gold standard.
|
| Offerings like Kling and ByteDance are considered much better.
| teekert wrote:
| "What you made with Sora mattered". Idk why that sentence irks me
| so much. Perhaps because the "how" is bit vague. I like to think
| that what I made in the toilet this morning also mattered.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's a wonderful combination of vague, patronizing, and self-
| promoting. "Mattered" is meaningless. The tone sounds like when
| you tell a child their scribble is so pretty. And the cherry on
| top, the users didn't make anything with Sora, they just fed a
| bit of input into the machine and it made the stuff. So this is
| really OpenAI saying that what _they themselves_ did mattered.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Please name next attempt Roxis
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Roxas*! Important because it's sora rearranged (with an X for
| cool factor)
| twoodfin wrote:
| If I were to get conspiracy-minded:
|
| Sora had to be shut down because it was the clearest, most
| consequential demonstration that OpenAI's models are running way,
| way ahead of their ability to align/jail them effectively.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Nope. It was just a bad product that no one wanted. It's not a
| super-secret indicator that OpenAI is actually going to take
| over the world any day now.
| yulker wrote:
| probably more cost than anything. image and video gen don't
| have much in common with llms
| code_biologist wrote:
| The Occam's Razor position (Sora was the most expensive to
| operate, least monetizable model) seems like a simpler
| explanation. The legal costs/difficulty on top of "most
| expensive" are just the cherry on top.
| Yizahi wrote:
| A bribe to stop thieves from profiting from the Disney's own IP
| is no longer needed now I guess :)
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