The Walt Disney Company and Openai Partner on Sora
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The entertainment world is abuzz with the news that Disney has partnered with OpenAI to integrate Sora, a cutting-edge AI video generation tool, into its content creation pipeline. As commenters weigh in, concerns about the potential for "Sora Slop" – low-quality, AI-generated content – flooding Disney+ are palpable, with some predicting a creative freefall. While some joke about the impending deluge of AI-generated mediocrity, others lament the likely demise of human creators' rights and the homogenization of content. The partnership has sparked a lively debate about the responsible use of AI in creative industries.
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Wow so Sora Slop is coming to payed Disney+?
Apparently so.
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
I would argue it's going to be a good thing because more creative risks can be taken at lower sunk costs.
People are spotting obvious AI slop artwork places and it’s so poorly done.
Disney used to have artist integrity, what a sad path to drag everyone down.
I guess it’s back to the good out Japanese studios who are forcing craft and skill still from artists (the world is full of talent, at least, for now).
> 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.
It's been his entire career. Guy has made billions of dollars from talking.
Groups like this aren’t singular entities.
It could however, be pretty fucking shitty for the US/World economy.
He don’t care.
Altman talks to the talk of a CEO who is going to build a company that can change the world. It's what investors want to hear. He seems to make as many attempts as possible to actually execute on that. I think most of those plans are unlikely to be as successful as desired. But this isn't Theranos level fraud, where what they are trying to build is obviously impossible.
Frustratingly impressive.
Forbes has him at $2.2bn https://www.forbes.com/profile/sam-altman/
I like the phrase “vulture capital”
Altman said "We can pay with equity, but let's frame it as an investment"
No cash exchanged
Do you mean to say they’ll never take the payment?
Given the context, I think snark and disdain are called for.
> 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.
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?
It unspoken business model is giving an IP license to anyone that can breathe at make a rev share agreement or hefty sum - so, less than you think.
not for disney content. Disney can pick OpenAI as the winner for this by not signing deals and suing anyone else.
I don't need some stuck up HNer telling me about stuff I deal with in my day-to-day job.
Then I guess we need a new term because that's not how I interpret the term moat either. To me, ChatGPT chat history is a moat. It allows them to differentiate their product and competitors cannot copy it. If someone switches to a new AI service they will have to build their chat history from scratch.
By comparison a business deal that can be transferred to a new partner the second it expires is much more temporary.
Every service has a chat history. You are talking about stickiness, which is (roughly) the same for every product.
ChatGPT wins a bit with stickiness because their AI personalizes itself to you over time, in a way that others don't quite do.
A moat is something unique. It can't really be a moat if all services offer it.
There’s no direct return.
They’ll get every dollar of that billion in mindshare over the next twenty years.
This feels like more funny accounting.
None of the companies you see on TV need to buy mindshare - because they did yesterday, and will again tomorrow - so why not save today’s spend?
Out of sight, out of mind: especially as media consumption towards individual creators.
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.
Is that the same thing as making bootleg graphics involving Disney characters?
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.
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.
Is it charity to buy AAPL as well?
I really don't understand your perspective
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.”
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
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.
The only people who don't think it's worthless are the people who would be worth a lot less if that were the case. Hug your loved ones and make peace with your gods, because the crash is going to be insane.
I am not sure that it is very interesting that LLM apis are a commodity. It's not even a situation where it is _going_ to be a commodity, it already is. But so is compute and file storage, and AWS, Google and Microsoft etc have all built quite successful businesses on top of selling it at scale. I don't see why LLM api's won't be wildly profitable for the big providers for quite a long time. 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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
We already see this dynamic with the "vanity press" pay-to-play record labels / distributors like DistroKid: the vast majority of their catalog has never been played or was only played to test the initial upload. Huge numbers of tracks have a tiny number of views, with many literally never played. "Democratizing" content creation predictably does this, and it's frankly bizarre it wasn't anticipated.
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 right now is Nvidia.
Seems like Nintendo still has that long term thinking. Disney was just waiting for the right price.
What is this referring to?
The modern books?
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...
The "modern" Mickey Mouse will be at the public domain in about five years.
Scroll down on this page[0] and you'll see the different Mickeys and most of them are not under copyright. You got Steamboat Whillie + gloves but no Fantasia Mickey or later. Definitely no red-pants version.
Unsurprisingly Disney knows what they're doing and they have 95 years to modify a character's looks (and how the public imagines that character) before it enters public domain.
Not the Pluto you're thinking of...[1][0] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/
[1] https://www.disneydining.com/disney-copyright-loss-pluto-202...
I think it is a mistake. 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.
Also, notice how Disney jumped all over Gemini's case before the ink was dry on the OpenAI partnership agreement. My guess is that Altman is just using Disney to attack his competitors, basically the 'two' part of a one-two punch that began by buying up a large portion of the world's RAM capacity for no valid business reason.
This was the case with youtube, and it was touch and go if they were going to be forced to close in the early days.
They rather have control over who, when, how can create AI with Disney property, than let people figure it out themselves.
You don't like the last Star Wars trilogy? Pay us a few hundred dollars and you can rewrite your own story, thank you very much this is where you put the credit card number.
It was INEVITABLE.
Not only that, they’re materially worse than real movies. Designer t-shirts still sell despite people being able to buy blank t-shirts and color them in with laundry markers.
With the right sensors, your sentiment will be apparent to the system and it will be able to tune on the fly.
And personally, I have absolutely no desire to modify movies that bothered me, story-wise, artistically, or editorially, with my own ideas. I also don’t want to modify classic paintings to make the people fit my preferences for attractiveness. And I sure don’t want it done automatically.
Art is interesting because it comes from other people’s brains.
Clearly there’s a market for Netflix background noise, but no one’s going to theme parks for that.
Maybe, but that's the minority of demand. Most book sales are to people looking for something comfortable - think the near-infinite supply of practically interchangeable romance novels or detective stories.
It’s archaic. The only thing we need now is identification. Oh, this is actually produced by Disney? Great. Oh, this is some Chinese knockoff? I might not want to consume it then.
Sure, go ahead and downvote me.
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.
I suspect their ongoing concern is just their IP/brands/characters being misused. Spielberg is next
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.
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.
And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
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