Walt Disney announced a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, allowing the company's characters to be used in the AI startup's Sora video generation tool.
Sora users will be able to generate short, user-directed social videos leveraging more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters as part of a three-year licensing agreement between OpenAI and the entertainment giant.
The agreement comes at a time of intense anxiety in Hollywood about the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of entertainment, and excludes the likeness and voice of talent.
Disney CEO Bob Iger praised the deal for combining the company's “iconic stories and characters” with OpenAI's AI technology. This, he claimed, “puts imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans in a way never seen before.”
The deal marks OpenAI's most notable move into Hollywood after Sora's controversial rollout and years of backlash against AI from many entertainment industry players. Concerns from writers, actors, visual effects artists, and other creators about AI replacing their jobs or using their likenesses without their consent have led to union protests and copyright lawsuits against AI companies.
When OpenAI announced the latest version of Sora earlier this year, it immediately ran into a number of potential copyright issues. The feed became dominated by videos featuring characters like SpongeBob SquarePants and Pikachu (sometimes generated to appear in Nazi-like garb).
Racist depictions of Martin Luther King Jr. led OpenAI to ban the use of his likeness on the platform, while Malcolm X's daughter called seeing her father in Sola “extremely disrespectful and hurtful.”
Disney itself is concerned about the unauthorized use of its characters by generative AI platforms. In October, the company sent a stern cease-and-desist letter to chatbot company Character.AI, saying the platform was “blatantly infringing Disney's copyrights” by using character likenesses.
On Wednesday night, lawyers representing Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, demanding it stop alleged infringements by the tech company's AI systems, Variety reported.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been on a charm offensive, recently appearing on the U.S. talk show “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.” He touted his company's deal with Disney on Thursday as evidence that artificial intelligence companies can partner with the entertainment sector.
“This agreement demonstrates how AI companies and creative leaders can work together responsibly to foster innovation that benefits society, honor the importance of creativity, and help work reach vast new audiences,” Altman said.
In addition to Disney bringing its characters to Sora, the company plans to use OpenAI's application programming interfaces to build new products and tools and become a major customer of the ChatGPT maker. Some of the videos users create with Sora can also be streamed on the Disney+ platform. According to the companies, they plan to introduce ChatGPT for employees as well.
“Technological innovation continues to shape the evolution of entertainment, giving us new ways to create and share great stories with the world,” said Iger. “Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are a critical moment for our industry. Through this collaboration with OpenAI, we will thoughtfully and responsibly expand the reach of storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their work.”
