9 ms·

The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora

269 points by inesranzo 10mo ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/disney-openai-sora-characters-video.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/disney-openai-sora-character...

tiahura 10mo ago
Iger and Altman on CNBC at 10:30.
tiahura 10mo ago
Iger and Altman on CNBC at 10:30.
- deleted 10mo ago
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mynti 10mo ago
>> 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 10mo ago
  There’s unpaid Disney+?
- mrweasel 10mo ago
  > Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora short form videos available to stream on Disney+. Apparently so.
- j4nkest 10mo ago
  Quite possibly, it was mentioned a while ago and blew up after Dana Terrace, creator of The Owl House, made some very strong statements about it https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/owl-house-creator-demands-show-111738410.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/owl-house-cr...
empath75 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
  And, don't forget to figure in that OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
      It's hard to tell.
    - dragonwriter 10mo ago
      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.
fidotron 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  Sounds like the opposite, all disney characters become memes and Sora becomes known only for that
- nkotov 10mo ago
  My household might be an anomaly but my kids know and prefer YouTubers more to Disney characters.
solumunus 10mo ago
Oof.
dfedbeef 10mo ago
Disney shareholders, feel free to make images of Iger, Mickey, and Br'er Rabbit lighting piles on money on fire.
- atonse 10mo ago
  I'm not a shareholder but buying equity in OpenAI seems to be a much better deal (for Disney) than making OpenAI just pay royalties, no? Seems like everyone wins, unless you think OpenAI will never amount to anything and it's all a bubble.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 10mo ago
    Cash from royalties doesn't disappear like equity value would, in the event of a bubble pop. Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that.
    - blibble 10mo ago
      where does the royalty cash come from when the bubble pops?
      - sjsdaiuasgdia 10mo ago
        It stops, but you still have what you got before that point. You're "cashing out" on an ongoing basis.
    - dfedbeef 10mo ago
      Royalty payments from a company that can't pay them aren't useful either.
    - atonse 10mo ago
      What does a bubble pop look like to people? Does anyone envision a scenario where OpenAI or Anthropic (or google) disappears? I can understand the investment bubble in new infra. But even that, I’m not so sure. Right now, demand is so far outstripping supply, which is why we’re having so many conversations about energy or chips. But yes that’s the bubble people keep talking about.
wiseowise 10mo ago
The cancer spreads.
- mvkel 10mo ago
  The Marvel slop that the human creators have been putting out hasn't inspired much confidence in wetware either
  - herbturbo 10mo ago
    Exactly - Disney sees this as a cheaper way to produce the same slop.
    - podgietaru 10mo ago
      Probably worse slop, but now no human will be paid. What a marvelous future we've invented for ourselves.
      - wiseowise 10mo ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9b7BOJyE9A
      - mvkel 10mo ago
        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 10mo ago
        To be fair the humans working at Disney had their chance and blew it.
  - adrian_b 10mo ago
postalcoder 10mo ago
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 https://overcast.fm/+AA4DU9JreIE
- ramesh31 10mo ago
  >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.
  - irishcoffee 10mo ago
    Yeah, he’s a sociopath
    - nish__ 10mo ago
      He's taking from Disney and Microsoft though so I see no moral issues.
      - DANmode 10mo ago
        Who does Disney and Microsoft get their money from? Groups like this aren’t singular entities.
        nish__ 10mo ago
        Americans mostly. Both abuse copyright law to profit off of works done by creators/inventors of the past. Neither contribute much to humanity these days.
      - irishcoffee 10mo ago
        What if he’s wrong? He doesn’t care. It could however, be pretty fucking shitty for the US/World economy. He don’t care.
sd9 10mo ago
This is “impressive” negotiation from Altman. Can’t imagine this being good for Disney.
- DrewADesign 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    All the more reason it's insane for Disney to be the one giving money!
    - mritchie712 10mo ago
      > commoditized not for disney content. Disney can pick OpenAI as the winner for this by not signing deals and suing anyone else.
      - deleted 10mo ago
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    - raincole 10mo ago
      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.
      - 10mo ago
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OldGreenYodaGPT 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    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.
    - LetsGetTechnicl 10mo ago
      I don't know, the ad also looks like shit
- bossyTeacher 10mo ago
  >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.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- mnky9800n 10mo ago
  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.
tossit444 10mo ago
I'm genuinely stunned they're giving OAI money.
mvkel 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231585
gekoxyz 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  >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 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
      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 10mo ago
        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.
DrewADesign 10mo ago
Congrats Disney. You just sold out every actual animator you pretended to care about. Sure, go ahead and downvote me.
- preisschild 10mo ago
  Im just a consooomer and upvoting you. Nobody wants more slop...
  - DrewADesign 10mo ago
    I suspect most consumers feel the same way. Zealous AI boosters— they are extremely over represented here— do not.
throwaway613745 10mo ago
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_ 10mo ago
Awesome! Can't wait to see what people create.
- herbturbo 10mo ago
  Nothing of value is my prediction.
Mistletoe 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  >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.
- redwood 10mo ago
  Mickey mouse body slamming the Queen of England for laughs risks sullying their brand
- venusenvy47 10mo ago
  I don't really understand why Disney is paying $1B for this. Shouldn't OpenAI be paying Disney to avoid getting sued?
  - twostorytower 10mo ago
    Disney will either get a multiple on their return on investment, or OpenAI will die anyways and their IP issue with it.
    - thehappypm 10mo ago
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tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
Surely OpenAI should be paying Disney for the rights to their content. What an upside down period we are living in.
- dist-epoch 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    Not sure people gonna consume more Disney content because there will suddenly be better way to make more AI slop of it...
  - echelon 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
pinebox 10mo ago
As a place to park some cash, sure. But if I were running Disney there would be no character deal and I would need some kind of proprietary technology license that keeps certain AI improvements out of the hands of my competitors. Disney really giving away the store here.
raincole 10mo ago
While it's not explicitly stated, I'm sure what is actually happening here is: Disney buys OpenAI equity. OpenAI uses the cash to pay Disney licensing fees, and buying hardware for Disney's use. Whether it's bubble is up to the reader's interpretation.
artur44 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
$1B, how many hours of runway does that buy.
- whalesalad 10mo ago
  it will defer the next price increase of disney+ by 47.3 days
- mekdoonggi 10mo ago
  -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.
quitit 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
Shouldn't OpenAI be paying Disney?
- s1mon 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    > they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting Are OpenAI even denying this?
MallocVoidstar 10mo ago
Related: https://www.reuters.com/business/disney-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-google-cnbc-reports-2025-12-11/ 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.
josefresco 10mo ago
> As part of this new, three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, including costumes, props, vehicles, and iconic environments. In addition, ChatGPT Images will be able to turn a few words by the user into fully generated images in seconds, drawing from the same intellectual property. The agreement does not include any talent likenesses or voices. Is there a list of allowed characters? Or are we just supposed to "spin the wheel" and deal with whatever results are returned? Or will these characters be selected instead of using natural language?
seydor 10mo ago
Oh the memes
HarHarVeryFunny 10mo ago
So we're soon going to see Sora-generated Disney movies?
- postalrat 10mo ago
  Im sure its going to be used by many movies. Just like CGI. And just like CGI some people will complain.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
$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?
- arealaccount 10mo ago
  From https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/ https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/ It's an equity investment, and yes they're agreeing to a committment to protecting the rights of the creators. > Disney and OpenAI affirm a shared commitment to responsible use of AI that protects the safety of users and the rights of creators. >Alongside the licensing agreement, 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. >As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
  - sofixa 10mo ago
    > protects ... the rights of creators So all those creators that OpenAI plagiarised from, and are suing them, they just needed to pay them to get protection? Sounds easy!
- radicaldreamer 10mo ago
  $1B is nothing for OpenAI or Disney
lunias 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  openai prbly is my most favorite because everyone else is obsessed with job replacement as the final goal
  - gdulli 10mo ago
    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.
    - dominotw 10mo ago
      why not sell ads and products?
  - lunias 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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.
  - NewsaHackO 10mo ago
    I guess there is an expectation of a lack of control when it’s made through AI, versus an image that is from their owned parks. Even without AI, people have been putting Disney characters in unsavory contextes, and I don’t think anyone ever thought, “Wow, I can’t believe Disney sanctioned that picture of a princess doing whatever.”
    - jeffwask 10mo ago
      Yes, but Disney legal is incredibly aggressive with any unauthorized use of characters. They have made day care's repaint walls with character murals. They have an army that chases that stuff down.
      - ryandrake 10mo ago
        Which is why it's so weird that they are seemingly doing a 180 if it involves "AI". The biggest actual impact of the AI craze has been the extent to which mere mention of it is causing businesses to upend themselves and break with decades of historical behavior.
illwrks 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  > 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.
- deleted 10mo ago
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shevy-java 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  Copyright unencumbered... For their own characters?? Why would they need clearance to generate things trained on their data.
  - shadowgovt 10mo ago
    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.
    - dfedbeef 10mo ago
      Art isn't a volume business though.
      - shadowgovt 10mo ago
        Andy Warhol disagreed. But in general: it's not a bulk or commodity business like, say, toilet paper, but an artist that creates five thousand works a year can definitely out-sell an artist that creates five. To the extent that art intersects capitalism, that matters (even if the second artist is charging thousands per work; when your price is too high, people can't buy, so the artist charging dozens or hundreds per work but making 5,000 a year can sell to all the people who can't afford five-works-a-year).
pantsforbirds 10mo ago
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.
- FergusArgyll 10mo ago
  You're not. You're the only HN commenter who's excited
- rhetocj23 10mo ago
  [dead]
- amelius 10mo ago
  Yeah, but Disney will make you pay extra for it, that's for sure.
mervz 10mo ago
wtf are we doing, man?
- cindyllm 10mo ago
  [dead]
dawnerd 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai
- jfindper 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    Instead of "out there," it would be on an official Disney/OpenAI venue. That strikes me as rather risky on their part.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
otterley 10mo ago
What mad world are we living in where Disney — Disney — is paying someone to lose control over its IP?
- xhkkffbf 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    Why not equity in exchange for rights? The crazy thing is they're surrendering both rights and cash.
    - xhkkffbf 10mo ago
      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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
    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.
mvkel 10mo ago
First take: ew more ai generated slop Second take: well I guess the blame lays with us for consuming it and reinforcing its creation Third take: content creation becomes cheaper, allowing for more creative risks to be taken Fourth take: this is a net-good because we see new creative ideas being attempted at low sunk cost
mrdependable 10mo ago
I wonder how the various creative guilds will respond. Seems like they are stabbing their team in the back on this one.
arichard123 10mo ago
Is this some kind of pre-AI crash long game? Does that make any sense?
andrew_lettuce 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
Well I guess the best outcome is that the AI bubble bursts. Gonna be way worse if it is actually legit...
epolanski 10mo ago
That's some serious FOMO.
jpadkins 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  > 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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
That's a great way for OpenAI to keep Disney's lawyers away.
lightbendover 10mo ago
[dead]
bgwalter 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
Have no fear! The free market of AI slop is here!
whywhywhywhy 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
Bob Iger: Disney’s OpenAI Deal “Does Not In Any Way” Threaten Creatives https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob-iger-openai-deal-paramount-netflix-warner-bros-1236448029/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob...
myjumpingsocks 10mo ago
we're cooked
sireat 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
There's a Kingdom Hearts joke in there somewhere, but I don't know enough of the lore to make it.
- j-bos 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
My immediate thought: when does the copyright on Mickey expire? Didn’t it happen already?
- frm88 10mo ago
  It did but with the old, original Micky. That mouse looked pretty different: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/mickey-mouse-poster-1960s-disneyland-3784470254 https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/mickey-mouse-poster-1...
thatgerhard 10mo ago
1B down the toilet
ojr 10mo ago
Disney witnessed AI boosting Studio Ghibli’s cultural impact and relevance and decided to invest big in OpenAI, not surprising.
XorNot 10mo ago
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?
RataNova 10mo ago
This feels like the moment big media finally decided that if they can't stop generative AI, they might as well monetize it
toofy 10mo ago
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.
maplethorpe 10mo ago
For anyone confused by this, what you're probably forgetting is that children make no distinction between slop and high quality content. You know all those bad 3D knock-off YouTube videos of that everyone was in a moral panic about a few years ago? Disney wasn't upset those were damaging their brand. They were upset that they weren't making any money from them. But they just found a way to undercut all the sweatshops in Bangladesh pumping that stuff out: recruit children to make videos for children.
blobbers 10mo ago
I see a lot of "mickey mouse" but if this is Disney IP, then it includes Star Wars and Marvel, no? You can literally make your own Marvel movie now! Legally!
- Zee2 10mo ago
  If you read the release, it explicitly does not include the likenesses of human actors. Only animated and illustrated characters are included. (Although, that does cover animated/illustrated versions of characters that are typically portrayed by human actors...) This is almost certainly due to the photographic/human likenesses of actors being under an entirely separate license and royalty contract than pure IP from Disney.
  - blobbers 10mo ago
    Interesting; what about say... ironman? Humanoid, has someone inside. Darth Vader, C3PO, or Chewbacca? Or say the Mandalorian?
ijidak 10mo ago
> Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora short form videos available to stream on Disney+. I actually think this is genius. The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech. Among the millions of slop videos generated, some might be the next Baby Shark, etc. I've seen some Star Wars fan fiction created using AI that is truer to the original Star Wars than the most recent trilogy. This is a chance for Disney to take the best of the user generated content, with high quality AI generated animation, and throw it on Disney+ to get free content for their streaming platform. My guess is that's the gamble here. Worst-case scenario at the end of three years they just shut it down. It's really the professionals who get paid to generate content for Disney that should be worried about this deal. This could be how AI causes them to lose their jobs.
- irishcoffee 10mo ago
  > The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech. Cost/token disagrees with you there...
neuroelectron 10mo ago
Disney is pretty much over so why not
LarsDu88 10mo ago
They should have licensed the technology to automate the process of making live-action remakes... This deal just guarantees we'll get to see some Mickey Mouse QAnon shit
lugu 10mo ago
The deal look unbalanced. Could it be that 1. Disney wants/needs to use Gen AI and 2. Disney cannot use a model that was trained to prevent their IP? Therefore they have to pick one partner and unblock their IP for this model?
keeda 10mo ago
Wait, so let me get this straight. Altman got Disney to pay OpenAI, via an investment, for Sora -- which was likely trained on and used to generate infringements of all kinds of their copyrighted material. And then Disney sends Google a Cease & Desist for using its copyrighted material, not only restricting what people can do with Google's AI image generators, but which could potentially also force Google to retrain all their models without Disney content. Very likely Disney will reach a licensing deal with Google, which would conveniently finance Disney's investment in OpenAI. And all this on the heels of the coup where Altman simultaneously signed a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to lock up 40% of the world's DRAM supply, effectively cornering a key component for AI training hardware. As I've said before: All these others are playing Capitalism. Altman out there playing Game of Thrones. /popcorn
darthvaden 10mo ago
Walt Disney would be tossing and turning in his grave as his legacy is destroyed by these arseholes
- chii 10mo ago
  Walt Disney has been turning in his grave for over 20 years since disney's fall from being a creative visionary to simply trying to regurgitate existing IP as a cash grab.
RobRivera 10mo ago
Soras not even the main character, it's Roxas
rifty 10mo ago
With numbers like this, it feels like OpenAI is selling at this point the value of an IPO if everyone consolidates around OpenAI more than on the competitive value of its product. For every extra company they get effectively exclusive usage with the more believable the strategy becomes. As it wouldn't be the first time that beating out competitors in enterprise distribution led to users making what they are used to using at work what they use personally.
famahar 10mo ago
I watched an interesting video about how the look of cinema has changed dramatically with the advent of green screen sets, CG, VFX, and a move away from large scale on-location scenes. This feels like we're inching towards a new era of cinema that has lost its charm in being real. Maybe I'm just getting old and this is what everyone seems to like (or can't relate to the charm of older cinema from the 90s). https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=EYdu543vJlAjdX5c https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=EYdu543vJlAjdX5c Another thought I had. Is there no desire to make a modern film that still intentionally looks like an old Pixar film. Less poly. Simpler lighting. No fancy physics effects. In the same way PS1 graphics are popular now.
- btown 10mo ago
  To add to that (extremely thought-provoking) video, I do think that the Marvel model of "pre-viz everything to death, the edit's already done before filming begins" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgvgi3ShcmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgvgi3ShcmY - can lose a lot of spontaneity. Perhaps the fading luster to Marvel films overall will bring us back from this place. On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
- irishcoffee 10mo ago
  There a ton of indie video games that march to the beat of that drum. “Oldschool” graphics, more about gameplay/story. I imagine there is a market for this.
- DarkNova6 10mo ago
  Inching? We are in it already and it’s only getting worse.
strogonoff 10mo ago
“In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>” https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/
lz400 10mo ago
In the meanwhile... Google should demand another $1bn from Disney to crush the lawsuit https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/disney-hits-google-with-cease-and-desist-claiming-massive-copyright-infringement/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/disney-hits-google-with-ce...
lolive 10mo ago
Will ChatGPT generate the Star Wars scripts from now on? [Ahem… And can it make them interesting?]
- squarefoot 10mo ago
  AI will in a few years generate entire movies, including Star Wars ones. I can see at least one remake of A New Hope coming in the next years with all the original cast after their characteristics are licensed for use with AI. The huge amount of money saved makes just impossible for the studios to ignore the technology.
  - Ylpertnodi 10mo ago
    > The huge amount of money saved makes just impossible for the studios to ignore the technology. It will be interesting to see the knock-on reaction to the quality of the output vs the money saved.
    - squarefoot 10mo ago
      Today the reaction would be mostly negative, but at the pace technology is improving and with new generations getting used to find AI in everything I think it's just a matter of time before making movies with AI becomes the norm and the traditional way will become restricted to film lovers. Not that I necessarily like all that; I just find hard to think they're ignoring the opportunity.
gregjw 10mo ago
Slop, but agreed upon slop.
testfrequency 10mo ago
Extortion
schrototo 10mo ago
Presumably, being able to use Sora to generate some pictures or videos involving Disney characters does not mean being able to actually distribute those pictures or videos, right? Those are still copyrighted characters.
578_Observer 10mo ago
This deal establishes a clear dichotomy: Disney/OpenAI as the "Walled Garden" of premium IP vs. the "Open Bazaar" of mass distribution. Google is now backed into a corner. To keep YouTube relevant against this alliance, they can't rely on tech alone—they need comparable IP. I expect them to immediately start courting Sony Pictures or Universal to fill that gap. It’s essentially a battle between "Exclusivity" and "Scale".
- herbturbo 10mo ago
  This sounds like old TV exec logic. Disney IP is not “premium” any more thanks to relentless overuse in their garbage movies and shows. My teenage kids watch YT and TikTok (which gets highly relevant UGC daily) and couldn’t care less about Mickey Mouse or Kylo Ren.
  - 578_Observer 10mo ago
    Valid point. "Premium" might be the wrong word now due to the recent dilution of their IP (Marvel/Star Wars fatigue). However, as AI-generated content floods platforms like YouTube, the value of "Human-Curated" narratives—even if currently diluted—might regain value as a counter-balance to infinite slop.
economistbob 10mo ago
Are they trying to make AI outputs copywritreable? If so, the deal is dispicable.

269 points by inesranzo 10mo ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/disney-openai-sora-characters-video.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/disney-openai-sora-character...

tiahura 10mo ago

Iger and Altman on CNBC at 10:30.

tiahura 10mo ago

Iger and Altman on CNBC at 10:30.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

mynti 10mo ago

>> 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 10mo ago
There’s unpaid Disney+?
mrweasel 10mo ago
> Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora short form videos available to stream on Disney+. Apparently so.
j4nkest 10mo ago
Quite possibly, it was mentioned a while ago and blew up after Dana Terrace, creator of The Owl House, made some very strong statements about it https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/owl-house-creator-demands-show-111738410.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/owl-house-cr...

empath75 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
And, don't forget to figure in that OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    It's hard to tell.
  - dragonwriter 10mo ago
    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.

fidotron 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
Sounds like the opposite, all disney characters become memes and Sora becomes known only for that
nkotov 10mo ago
My household might be an anomaly but my kids know and prefer YouTubers more to Disney characters.

solumunus 10mo ago

Oof.

dfedbeef 10mo ago

Disney shareholders, feel free to make images of Iger, Mickey, and Br'er Rabbit lighting piles on money on fire.

atonse 10mo ago
I'm not a shareholder but buying equity in OpenAI seems to be a much better deal (for Disney) than making OpenAI just pay royalties, no? Seems like everyone wins, unless you think OpenAI will never amount to anything and it's all a bubble.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 10mo ago
  Cash from royalties doesn't disappear like equity value would, in the event of a bubble pop. Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that.
  - blibble 10mo ago
    where does the royalty cash come from when the bubble pops?
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 10mo ago
      It stops, but you still have what you got before that point. You're "cashing out" on an ongoing basis.
  - dfedbeef 10mo ago
    Royalty payments from a company that can't pay them aren't useful either.
  - atonse 10mo ago
    What does a bubble pop look like to people? Does anyone envision a scenario where OpenAI or Anthropic (or google) disappears? I can understand the investment bubble in new infra. But even that, I’m not so sure. Right now, demand is so far outstripping supply, which is why we’re having so many conversations about energy or chips. But yes that’s the bubble people keep talking about.

wiseowise 10mo ago

The cancer spreads.

mvkel 10mo ago
The Marvel slop that the human creators have been putting out hasn't inspired much confidence in wetware either
- herbturbo 10mo ago
  Exactly - Disney sees this as a cheaper way to produce the same slop.
  - podgietaru 10mo ago
    Probably worse slop, but now no human will be paid. What a marvelous future we've invented for ourselves.
    - wiseowise 10mo ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9b7BOJyE9A
    - mvkel 10mo ago
      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 10mo ago
      To be fair the humans working at Disney had their chance and blew it.
- adrian_b 10mo ago

postalcoder 10mo ago

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 https://overcast.fm/+AA4DU9JreIE

ramesh31 10mo ago
>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.
- irishcoffee 10mo ago
  Yeah, he’s a sociopath
  - nish__ 10mo ago
    He's taking from Disney and Microsoft though so I see no moral issues.
    - DANmode 10mo ago
      Who does Disney and Microsoft get their money from? Groups like this aren’t singular entities.
      - nish__ 10mo ago
        Americans mostly. Both abuse copyright law to profit off of works done by creators/inventors of the past. Neither contribute much to humanity these days.
    - irishcoffee 10mo ago
      What if he’s wrong? He doesn’t care. It could however, be pretty fucking shitty for the US/World economy. He don’t care.

sd9 10mo ago

This is “impressive” negotiation from Altman. Can’t imagine this being good for Disney.

DrewADesign 10mo ago
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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  All the more reason it's insane for Disney to be the one giving money!
  - mritchie712 10mo ago
    > commoditized not for disney content. Disney can pick OpenAI as the winner for this by not signing deals and suing anyone else.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - raincole 10mo ago
    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.
    - 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

OldGreenYodaGPT 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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.
  - LetsGetTechnicl 10mo ago
    I don't know, the ad also looks like shit
bossyTeacher 10mo ago
>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.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
mnky9800n 10mo ago
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.

tossit444 10mo ago

I'm genuinely stunned they're giving OAI money.

mvkel 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231585

gekoxyz 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
>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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
      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.

DrewADesign 10mo ago

Congrats Disney. You just sold out every actual animator you pretended to care about. Sure, go ahead and downvote me.

preisschild 10mo ago
Im just a consooomer and upvoting you. Nobody wants more slop...
- DrewADesign 10mo ago
  I suspect most consumers feel the same way. Zealous AI boosters— they are extremely over represented here— do not.

throwaway613745 10mo ago

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_ 10mo ago

Awesome! Can't wait to see what people create.

herbturbo 10mo ago
Nothing of value is my prediction.

Mistletoe 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
>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.
redwood 10mo ago
Mickey mouse body slamming the Queen of England for laughs risks sullying their brand
venusenvy47 10mo ago
I don't really understand why Disney is paying $1B for this. Shouldn't OpenAI be paying Disney to avoid getting sued?
- twostorytower 10mo ago
  Disney will either get a multiple on their return on investment, or OpenAI will die anyways and their IP issue with it.
  - thehappypm 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

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tonyedgecombe 10mo ago

Surely OpenAI should be paying Disney for the rights to their content. What an upside down period we are living in.

dist-epoch 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  Not sure people gonna consume more Disney content because there will suddenly be better way to make more AI slop of it...
- echelon 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago

pinebox 10mo ago

As a place to park some cash, sure. But if I were running Disney there would be no character deal and I would need some kind of proprietary technology license that keeps certain AI improvements out of the hands of my competitors. Disney really giving away the store here.

raincole 10mo ago

While it's not explicitly stated, I'm sure what is actually happening here is: Disney buys OpenAI equity. OpenAI uses the cash to pay Disney licensing fees, and buying hardware for Disney's use. Whether it's bubble is up to the reader's interpretation.

artur44 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

$1B, how many hours of runway does that buy.

whalesalad 10mo ago
it will defer the next price increase of disney+ by 47.3 days
mekdoonggi 10mo ago
-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.

quitit 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

Shouldn't OpenAI be paying Disney?

s1mon 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  > they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting Are OpenAI even denying this?

MallocVoidstar 10mo ago

Related: https://www.reuters.com/business/disney-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-google-cnbc-reports-2025-12-11/ 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.

josefresco 10mo ago

> As part of this new, three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars, including costumes, props, vehicles, and iconic environments. In addition, ChatGPT Images will be able to turn a few words by the user into fully generated images in seconds, drawing from the same intellectual property. The agreement does not include any talent likenesses or voices. Is there a list of allowed characters? Or are we just supposed to "spin the wheel" and deal with whatever results are returned? Or will these characters be selected instead of using natural language?

seydor 10mo ago

Oh the memes

HarHarVeryFunny 10mo ago

So we're soon going to see Sora-generated Disney movies?

postalrat 10mo ago
Im sure its going to be used by many movies. Just like CGI. And just like CGI some people will complain.
- HarHarVeryFunny 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago

$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?

arealaccount 10mo ago
From https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/ https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/ It's an equity investment, and yes they're agreeing to a committment to protecting the rights of the creators. > Disney and OpenAI affirm a shared commitment to responsible use of AI that protects the safety of users and the rights of creators. >Alongside the licensing agreement, 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. >As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
- sofixa 10mo ago
  > protects ... the rights of creators So all those creators that OpenAI plagiarised from, and are suing them, they just needed to pay them to get protection? Sounds easy!
radicaldreamer 10mo ago
$1B is nothing for OpenAI or Disney

lunias 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
openai prbly is my most favorite because everyone else is obsessed with job replacement as the final goal
- gdulli 10mo ago
  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.
  - dominotw 10mo ago
    why not sell ads and products?
- lunias 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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.
- NewsaHackO 10mo ago
  I guess there is an expectation of a lack of control when it’s made through AI, versus an image that is from their owned parks. Even without AI, people have been putting Disney characters in unsavory contextes, and I don’t think anyone ever thought, “Wow, I can’t believe Disney sanctioned that picture of a princess doing whatever.”
  - jeffwask 10mo ago
    Yes, but Disney legal is incredibly aggressive with any unauthorized use of characters. They have made day care's repaint walls with character murals. They have an army that chases that stuff down.
    - ryandrake 10mo ago
      Which is why it's so weird that they are seemingly doing a 180 if it involves "AI". The biggest actual impact of the AI craze has been the extent to which mere mention of it is causing businesses to upend themselves and break with decades of historical behavior.

illwrks 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
> 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.
deleted 10mo ago
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shevy-java 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
Copyright unencumbered... For their own characters?? Why would they need clearance to generate things trained on their data.
- shadowgovt 10mo ago
  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.
  - dfedbeef 10mo ago
    Art isn't a volume business though.
    - shadowgovt 10mo ago
      Andy Warhol disagreed. But in general: it's not a bulk or commodity business like, say, toilet paper, but an artist that creates five thousand works a year can definitely out-sell an artist that creates five. To the extent that art intersects capitalism, that matters (even if the second artist is charging thousands per work; when your price is too high, people can't buy, so the artist charging dozens or hundreds per work but making 5,000 a year can sell to all the people who can't afford five-works-a-year).

pantsforbirds 10mo ago

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.

FergusArgyll 10mo ago
You're not. You're the only HN commenter who's excited
rhetocj23 10mo ago
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amelius 10mo ago
Yeah, but Disney will make you pay extra for it, that's for sure.

mervz 10mo ago

wtf are we doing, man?

cindyllm 10mo ago
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dawnerd 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai

jfindper 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  Instead of "out there," it would be on an official Disney/OpenAI venue. That strikes me as rather risky on their part.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]

otterley 10mo ago

What mad world are we living in where Disney — Disney — is paying someone to lose control over its IP?

xhkkffbf 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  Why not equity in exchange for rights? The crazy thing is they're surrendering both rights and cash.
  - xhkkffbf 10mo ago
    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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago
  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 10mo ago
  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.

mvkel 10mo ago

First take: ew more ai generated slop Second take: well I guess the blame lays with us for consuming it and reinforcing its creation Third take: content creation becomes cheaper, allowing for more creative risks to be taken Fourth take: this is a net-good because we see new creative ideas being attempted at low sunk cost

mrdependable 10mo ago

I wonder how the various creative guilds will respond. Seems like they are stabbing their team in the back on this one.

arichard123 10mo ago

Is this some kind of pre-AI crash long game? Does that make any sense?

andrew_lettuce 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

Well I guess the best outcome is that the AI bubble bursts. Gonna be way worse if it is actually legit...

epolanski 10mo ago

That's some serious FOMO.

jpadkins 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
> 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 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

That's a great way for OpenAI to keep Disney's lawyers away.

lightbendover 10mo ago

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bgwalter 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

Have no fear! The free market of AI slop is here!

whywhywhywhy 10mo ago

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 10mo ago
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 10mo ago

Bob Iger: Disney’s OpenAI Deal “Does Not In Any Way” Threaten Creatives https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob-iger-openai-deal-paramount-netflix-warner-bros-1236448029/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob...

myjumpingsocks 10mo ago

we're cooked

sireat 10mo ago

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 10mo ago

There's a Kingdom Hearts joke in there somewhere, but I don't know enough of the lore to make it.

j-bos 10mo ago
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 10mo ago

My immediate thought: when does the copyright on Mickey expire? Didn’t it happen already?

frm88 10mo ago
It did but with the old, original Micky. That mouse looked pretty different: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/mickey-mouse-poster-1960s-disneyland-3784470254 https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/mickey-mouse-poster-1...

thatgerhard 10mo ago

1B down the toilet

ojr 10mo ago

Disney witnessed AI boosting Studio Ghibli’s cultural impact and relevance and decided to invest big in OpenAI, not surprising.

XorNot 10mo ago

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?

RataNova 10mo ago

This feels like the moment big media finally decided that if they can't stop generative AI, they might as well monetize it

toofy 10mo ago

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.

maplethorpe 10mo ago

For anyone confused by this, what you're probably forgetting is that children make no distinction between slop and high quality content. You know all those bad 3D knock-off YouTube videos of that everyone was in a moral panic about a few years ago? Disney wasn't upset those were damaging their brand. They were upset that they weren't making any money from them. But they just found a way to undercut all the sweatshops in Bangladesh pumping that stuff out: recruit children to make videos for children.

blobbers 10mo ago

I see a lot of "mickey mouse" but if this is Disney IP, then it includes Star Wars and Marvel, no? You can literally make your own Marvel movie now! Legally!

Zee2 10mo ago
If you read the release, it explicitly does not include the likenesses of human actors. Only animated and illustrated characters are included. (Although, that does cover animated/illustrated versions of characters that are typically portrayed by human actors...) This is almost certainly due to the photographic/human likenesses of actors being under an entirely separate license and royalty contract than pure IP from Disney.
- blobbers 10mo ago
  Interesting; what about say... ironman? Humanoid, has someone inside. Darth Vader, C3PO, or Chewbacca? Or say the Mandalorian?

ijidak 10mo ago

> Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora short form videos available to stream on Disney+. I actually think this is genius. The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech. Among the millions of slop videos generated, some might be the next Baby Shark, etc. I've seen some Star Wars fan fiction created using AI that is truer to the original Star Wars than the most recent trilogy. This is a chance for Disney to take the best of the user generated content, with high quality AI generated animation, and throw it on Disney+ to get free content for their streaming platform. My guess is that's the gamble here. Worst-case scenario at the end of three years they just shut it down. It's really the professionals who get paid to generate content for Disney that should be worried about this deal. This could be how AI causes them to lose their jobs.

irishcoffee 10mo ago
> The next Spielberg might be some poor kid in a third-world country who can create a global hit using this tech. Cost/token disagrees with you there...

neuroelectron 10mo ago

Disney is pretty much over so why not

LarsDu88 10mo ago

They should have licensed the technology to automate the process of making live-action remakes... This deal just guarantees we'll get to see some Mickey Mouse QAnon shit

lugu 10mo ago

The deal look unbalanced. Could it be that 1. Disney wants/needs to use Gen AI and 2. Disney cannot use a model that was trained to prevent their IP? Therefore they have to pick one partner and unblock their IP for this model?

keeda 10mo ago

Wait, so let me get this straight. Altman got Disney to pay OpenAI, via an investment, for Sora -- which was likely trained on and used to generate infringements of all kinds of their copyrighted material. And then Disney sends Google a Cease & Desist for using its copyrighted material, not only restricting what people can do with Google's AI image generators, but which could potentially also force Google to retrain all their models without Disney content. Very likely Disney will reach a licensing deal with Google, which would conveniently finance Disney's investment in OpenAI. And all this on the heels of the coup where Altman simultaneously signed a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to lock up 40% of the world's DRAM supply, effectively cornering a key component for AI training hardware. As I've said before: All these others are playing Capitalism. Altman out there playing Game of Thrones. /popcorn

darthvaden 10mo ago

Walt Disney would be tossing and turning in his grave as his legacy is destroyed by these arseholes

chii 10mo ago
Walt Disney has been turning in his grave for over 20 years since disney's fall from being a creative visionary to simply trying to regurgitate existing IP as a cash grab.

RobRivera 10mo ago

Soras not even the main character, it's Roxas

rifty 10mo ago

With numbers like this, it feels like OpenAI is selling at this point the value of an IPO if everyone consolidates around OpenAI more than on the competitive value of its product. For every extra company they get effectively exclusive usage with the more believable the strategy becomes. As it wouldn't be the first time that beating out competitors in enterprise distribution led to users making what they are used to using at work what they use personally.

famahar 10mo ago

I watched an interesting video about how the look of cinema has changed dramatically with the advent of green screen sets, CG, VFX, and a move away from large scale on-location scenes. This feels like we're inching towards a new era of cinema that has lost its charm in being real. Maybe I'm just getting old and this is what everyone seems to like (or can't relate to the charm of older cinema from the 90s). https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=EYdu543vJlAjdX5c https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=EYdu543vJlAjdX5c Another thought I had. Is there no desire to make a modern film that still intentionally looks like an old Pixar film. Less poly. Simpler lighting. No fancy physics effects. In the same way PS1 graphics are popular now.

btown 10mo ago
To add to that (extremely thought-provoking) video, I do think that the Marvel model of "pre-viz everything to death, the edit's already done before filming begins" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgvgi3ShcmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgvgi3ShcmY - can lose a lot of spontaneity. Perhaps the fading luster to Marvel films overall will bring us back from this place. On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
irishcoffee 10mo ago
There a ton of indie video games that march to the beat of that drum. “Oldschool” graphics, more about gameplay/story. I imagine there is a market for this.
DarkNova6 10mo ago
Inching? We are in it already and it’s only getting worse.

strogonoff 10mo ago

“In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>” https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/ https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/

lz400 10mo ago

In the meanwhile... Google should demand another $1bn from Disney to crush the lawsuit https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/disney-hits-google-with-cease-and-desist-claiming-massive-copyright-infringement/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/disney-hits-google-with-ce...

lolive 10mo ago

Will ChatGPT generate the Star Wars scripts from now on? [Ahem… And can it make them interesting?]

squarefoot 10mo ago
AI will in a few years generate entire movies, including Star Wars ones. I can see at least one remake of A New Hope coming in the next years with all the original cast after their characteristics are licensed for use with AI. The huge amount of money saved makes just impossible for the studios to ignore the technology.
- Ylpertnodi 10mo ago
  > The huge amount of money saved makes just impossible for the studios to ignore the technology. It will be interesting to see the knock-on reaction to the quality of the output vs the money saved.
  - squarefoot 10mo ago
    Today the reaction would be mostly negative, but at the pace technology is improving and with new generations getting used to find AI in everything I think it's just a matter of time before making movies with AI becomes the norm and the traditional way will become restricted to film lovers. Not that I necessarily like all that; I just find hard to think they're ignoring the opportunity.

gregjw 10mo ago

Slop, but agreed upon slop.

testfrequency 10mo ago

Extortion

schrototo 10mo ago

Presumably, being able to use Sora to generate some pictures or videos involving Disney characters does not mean being able to actually distribute those pictures or videos, right? Those are still copyrighted characters.

578_Observer 10mo ago

This deal establishes a clear dichotomy: Disney/OpenAI as the "Walled Garden" of premium IP vs. the "Open Bazaar" of mass distribution. Google is now backed into a corner. To keep YouTube relevant against this alliance, they can't rely on tech alone—they need comparable IP. I expect them to immediately start courting Sony Pictures or Universal to fill that gap. It’s essentially a battle between "Exclusivity" and "Scale".

herbturbo 10mo ago
This sounds like old TV exec logic. Disney IP is not “premium” any more thanks to relentless overuse in their garbage movies and shows. My teenage kids watch YT and TikTok (which gets highly relevant UGC daily) and couldn’t care less about Mickey Mouse or Kylo Ren.
- 578_Observer 10mo ago
  Valid point. "Premium" might be the wrong word now due to the recent dilution of their IP (Marvel/Star Wars fatigue). However, as AI-generated content floods platforms like YouTube, the value of "Human-Curated" narratives—even if currently diluted—might regain value as a counter-balance to infinite slop.

economistbob 10mo ago

Are they trying to make AI outputs copywritreable? If so, the deal is dispicable.