Famous copyright tyrant Disney is now bending over for the AI industry and signing away its precious intellectual property.
On Thursday, the entertainment conglomerate announced a new licensing agreement with OpenAI that will allow it to use Disney’s iconic characters and properties to generate clips on Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app that lets you deepfake friends and celebrities, and which has quickly become a factory of controversy and surreal memes.
Sweetening the pot in an agreement that‘s already the first major licensing deal between OpenAI and a major Hollywood studio, Disney is also making a staggering $1 billion investment in the ChatGPT maker.
The three-year deal includes more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters that, starting sometime in 2026, will let users generate depictions of in Sora and also ChatGPT. Some notables include Darth Vader, Cinderella, Iron Man, and the toys from “Toy Story.”
The agreement doesn’t include talent likenesses or voices, the companies claimed. Only the animated or illustrated versions of the above characters will be depicted.
“Through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement.
Reader, be warned: the impending deluge of Disney AI slop will be so overwhelming that it’ll warrant its own flood myth when our successors are picking through the bones of our civilization.
That’s certainly the future that was being prefigured in the launch of Sora in October. The app was explicitly intended to let you deepfake friends and participating celebrities into all kinds of ridiculous scenarios. But what it really proved to excel at was seemingly infringing on every entertainment property imaginable. Sora users quickly churned out videos of SpongeBob cooking meth and dressed as a Nazi officer. Countless depicted various Pokémon, and an entire mini-trend spawned around inserting Pikachu into famous movies.
In sum, if you tried hard enough, or often not very hard at all, you could get Sora to spit out almost any cartoon or video game character you wanted, in the most controversial settings a prompt could dream up. This went largely unacknowledged by OpenAI, which hinted that it was simply a matter of time before all these potential copyright disasters became officially sanctioned, when Sora team leader Bill Peebles teased that fictional characters would soon be licensed.
It’s worth noting that despite Disney and OpenAI stressing that actors’ faces and voices won’t be part of the agreement, Sora has frequently been used to imitate performers and the characters they depict.
That raises another question: if character voices can’t be used, what does generating AI amalgamations of them look like in practice? Will Darth Vader or Yoda be completely silent?
Other details raise eyebrows. As part of the agreement, Disney says that fans will be able to watch “curated selections” of Sora videos on its streaming service Disney+, serving up the lowest form of AI slop directly to its audiences, many of whom are children. Disney also said it will become a “major customer of OpenAI,” using its AI “to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees.”
In all, the agreement marks a major turning point in an industry that has pushed back against AI’s rampant copyright abuses, if only so it could cash in on the tech on its own terms. Disney was chief among them: as recently as October, it issued a cease and desist letter to the chatbot platform Character.AI, demanding that it remove all its AI companions that imitate its copyrighted characters. Disney also sued the image and video AI tool Midjourney in June for alleged copyright infringement. And the night before announcing its new deal with OpenAI, Disney also sent a cease and desist order to Google, accusing it, too, of committing copyright infringement on a “massive scale” by training its AI models on its IP.
Whether Disney really needs the extra exposure from collaborating with OpenAI is pretty dubious, as is the prospect of reaping back money off its billion dollar investment. But it is, in a different way, still asserting control over its IP.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was effusive about the deal.
“Disney is the global gold standard for storytelling, and we’re excited to partner to allow Sora and ChatGPT Images to expand the way people create and experience great content,” Altman said in a statement.
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