Disney Making $1b Investment in Openai, Will Allow Characters on Sora AI
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The Disney-OpenAI partnership has sparked heated debate, with many commenters warning that allowing Disney characters on OpenAI's Sora AI platform will lead to a flood of disturbing and explicit content. As one commenter put it, "There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted." The conversation took a darker turn when the original poster mentioned OpenAI's rumored plans to venture into pornography, prompting a discussion about the potential consequences of allowing lewd content generation using LLMs. Amidst the chaos, some commenters clarified that Sora refers to OpenAI's text-to-video model, not the Kingdom Hearts character.
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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(Kingdom_Hearts)
It's just a funny coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)
But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble pile.
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.
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.
It's right up there with "Let kids communicate anonymously but not to perverts" and "Is this porn or educational?"
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
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...
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?
2025 Disney encourages children to gamble and gives Pat McAfee significant visibility.
Who asked for the content? Who elected the politicians?
**[Jiminy] crickets**
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.
Who said and where's the "false dichotomy" you allude to in the discussion above?
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.
https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-semitism-ra...
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
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.
Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness that is now famous for shamelessness.
Your bias is showing.
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.
They might as well have some say in the matter with the big companies.
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.
The big models will and already have copyright filters, people are just working around them which will always be a battle.
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.
The majority of creation will happen directly through YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Sora.
Platforms and IP rights holders won't police the 0.1%. They'll negotiate deals with the platforms. If they don't license Elsa, Marvel, Pokemon, etc. then the platform wholesale will lose access to the IPs.
Platforms will have to pay.
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!
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.
Sad I had to scroll this far to find a comment that wasn't defending Artistic Censorship or Censoring Fan Art because a cartoon they saw on the internet offended someone's Protestant values one way or another.
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.
They can either invest in mass classification and enforcement operations or gain some revenue share from it.
Perhaps this is a play to own and monetize that vector in the future.
And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care.
≤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.
Contrast with Bluey.
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 understand a show like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
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.
These shows are honestly fine. They all depict kids working together as a team, solving problems, and navigating socializing with each other. (And in the case of Paw Patrol, some environmentalism. And a few terrible puns.)
It's not like the Smurfs, Rocket Robin Hood, The Mighty Hercules, He-Man, Care Bears, etc. that I watched growing up were that much better.
Meanwhile Amazon has shows that are basically cartoon cars going through a carwash for an hour. And YouTube has much, much worse junk like rapid-fire 60 second unboxing videos, and morons fake-reacting to various colours of slime.
How about like the show with the antropomorphed airplanes delivering packets to kids.
It’s important to remember that you probably aren’t their 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.
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.
Right now the deal is structured as Disney pays OpenAI. That's going to invert.
Once OpenAI pays $3B/yr for Elsa, they're 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.
Nintendo, Marvel, all of the IP giants will start licensing their IPs to platforms.
This has never happened before, but we're at a changing of the tides.
They weren't really able to do this before because content creation was hard and the distribution channels were 1% creation, 99% distribution. Now that that inverts or becomes combined, the IP holders can charge a shit ton of money to these platforms.
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®.
The "normies" will eat this up and add fuel to the fire.
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.
Disney has basically always been like this. Overpriced goods powered by the brand alone.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Dsy16hhOI
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.
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_
That's because people consider Disney an entertainment company whereas in fact its the biggest licensing company in the world.
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-straight-to-video-seq...
Disney is meant to be a global company. If offensive videos happen this will backfire in many regions.
How is that circular?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They'll optimise for whatever causes numbers to increase. Children just happen to sometimes be what makes that happen.
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
They do it because it actually works.
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.
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.
Isn't that essentially the same thing now?
What exactly does “fanart” (no matter how distasteful and controversial) change?
Let people generate whatever fictional character they want.
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.
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.
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.
I have faith that the Parks Imagineers will soon be installing Sora Stalls in and around every attraction in Disney World.
> 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.