The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora

Forbes has him at $2.2bn, mostly from Reddit and Stripe https://www.forbes.com/profile/sam-altman/

Altman talks to the talk of a CEO who is going to build a company that can change the world. It's what investors want to hear. He seems to make as many attempts as possible to actually execute on that. I think most of those plans are unlikely to be as successful as desired. But this isn't Theranos level fraud, where what they are trying to build is obviously impossible.

This was the case with youtube, and it was touch and go if they were going to be forced to close in the early days.

  > Mickey mouse is now copyright free

Scroll down on this page[0] and you'll see the different Mickeys and most of them are not under copyright. You got Steamboat Whillie + gloves but no Fantasia Mickey or later. Definitely no red-pants version.

Unsurprisingly Disney knows what they're doing and they have 95 years to modify a character's looks (and how the public imagines that character) before it enters public domain.

  > pluto is in two weeks

[0] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

[1] https://www.disneydining.com/disney-copyright-loss-pluto-202...

>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.

Seems like Nintendo still has that long term thinking. Disney was just waiting for the right price.

The modern books?

With the right sensors, your sentiment will be apparent to the system and it will be able to tune on the fly.

Maybe, but that's the minority of demand. Most book sales are to people looking for something comfortable - think the near-infinite supply of practically interchangeable romance novels or detective stories.

not for disney content. Disney can pick OpenAI as the winner for this by not signing deals and suing anyone else.

Disney is giving them money in the hopes that the AI market (bubble?) keeps growing and the value of OpenAI grows with it. And importantly, Disney wants to shift to AI generated slo... content so partnering with a top player with a proven product is a safe choice. Disney licenses its IP to OpenAI, OpenAI can then provide tools that generate said content Disney-style.

> Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees

It will never be this. There is always the expectation of being able to do more things.

"Log into my work email and deal with all of them whilst I have a bath".

"Start a company for me to earn some extra weekend cash by washing peoples driveways. Find and hire some people to do the actual washing"

"Find a nice house for me by a lake, negotiate a good price and buy it (get a mortgage if necessary) then book all the removals services and find me a new job nearby".

None of the companies you see on TV need to buy mindshare - because they did yesterday, and will again tomorrow - so why not save today’s spend?

Out of sight, out of mind: especially as media consumption towards individual creators.

We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.

I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.

≤4-year-olds do not care: there's bright colours and motion, and some semblance of story. The point is not to give some kind of lesson, but to distract/entertain (and probably release dopamine). See also Paw Patrol, Spidey Amazing Friends, PJ Masks, etc. None of these seem to have made any attempt at having a 'layer' that appeals to adults.

In some ways I equate this animation style with the algorithmic social media system: meant for 'quick hits'.

Contrast with (e.g.) Bluey.

But this past 5-10 years has indeed been quite the drastic dip. You'll have little bits of nuggets here and there because they still have some amazing artists (the '20's mickey mouse shorts are amazing). But you know we're in for a vast decline when they are starting to make even their premier content take shortcuts, play safe, and stifle creativity.

I think it’s important to remember that you probably aren’t their target audience. Their audience expects to see simple characters with simple stories. The CG doesn’t need to be advanced, so having it fast to produce is the goal. It has to hold the interest of a toddler for 25 min without annoying the parents too much. Shiny and simple rendering is probably what they are going for. You can certainly argue about the educational qualities of the show, but I think entertaining was their primary goal for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

Also, this show hasn’t been made for years, has it? You’re looking at a show that was produced from 2006-2016. The oldest shows would be almost 20 year old CG. The newest is still nearly 10 years old. At the time it was fresh, the CG was pretty good, compared to similar kids shows.

My kids were young right in this window, and we watched a lot of Disney.

Disney definitely hit a CG valley though that you can see with some of their shows that switched from a 2D look to a more 3D rendering. Thankfully we aged out of those shows around 2015, so it has been a while. Disney has always been a content shop where quantity has its own quality, so I’m sure I’d have similar opinions as you if I was looking at the shows now. But at the time, it wasn’t bad.

I’m not sure how the OpenAI integration will work. I can see all sorts of red flags here.

Disney has basically always been like this. Overpriced goods powered by the brand alone.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Dsy16hhOI

https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-straight-to-video-seq...

That explains the surprisingly mediocre Darth Vader toy I saw over the weekend, and the "the only Star Wars part of this trailer is the lightsaber"-ness on the ads for the new Star Wars game.

That's because people consider Disney an entertainment company whereas in fact its the biggest licensing company in the world.

Yes, this show is absolute dogshit, pure slop and yet it ended in 2016. The dialog is completely braindead, episodes barely make sense.

The ancient Mickey Mouse cartoons are so good! Just a few I loved which are still very funny and I bet a few people remember:

- 1940: Mr. Mouse Takes a Trip ("Tickets please!")

- 1959: Donald in Mathmagic Land

They can either invest in mass classification and enforcement operations or gain some revenue share from it.

Perhaps this is a play to own and monetize that vector in the future.

The tighter the loop between content creation (e.g. when you can generate unlimited content essentially for free) and the ability to measure its success (engagement), the more social media becomes a sort of genetic algorithm for optimizing content to be the most addictive possible at the expense of any other attribute.

In a few cases it is a dark in-joke between a small set of people that just happened to have used a public host for distribution, that unexpectedly went more viral.

I feel like we’re corrupting an innocent mind by explaining this to you.

They want the cucumber to be removed too buddy. Don’t worry about it OK.

This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.

Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.

Who asked for the content? Who elected the politicians?

**[Jiminy] crickets**

The IP holders will sue or DMCA the platforms, not the users.

First Grok, then eventually YouTube.

Then they'll charge licensing fees.

Are also: RIAA wrt Suno, Udio.

Why should Disney care?

To which you might say “because people care”, so:

Why should people care?

Back when I was a spud I used futuristic text-to-speech synthesis to make my computer say “Eye am Bill Gaytes my farts go FERT FERT FERT” - Should Bill Gates be offended? What about the people who like him? What about the Intel processor I used to create it? Or the company behind the TTS software? Would anyone think they’re involved and endorsed it? I guess the real question is: are we catering the world to people who can’t make that distinction?

Yes, AI enables people to produce these in higher fidelity, but I don't see how it is any different to Dolan MS Paint comics.

No one is going to think that Mickey doing lynching is official art, nor will they think that Mickey is a real person who has done that.

Take the input as normal, pass it into Sora 2 and execute it as you would, pass the output through a filtering process that adheres to hard guidelines.

Of course, when talking about images, what is a 'hard guideline' here? Do you take the output and pass it through AI to identify if there's x y or z categorys of content here and then reject it?

Yes, because AI's so far have been oh so resilient to jailbreaks and oh so great at picking out the potentially "not aligned with corporate values" content...

Don’t believe for a minute that whatever filters it uses will be sensitive enough to the way racist content is constructed to stop people from doing just that.

A certain combination of nonstandard characters will make an AI character drop an n-word no problem

I guess they could chuck the output through whisper or something to see if it transcribes back to anything dodgy?

LLM security feels very ball of sand held together with duct tape haha

It's not racist, it's an historically accurate depiction of 1930s Germany under the authority of a significant leader who may or may not be controversial today

I agree. Those characters are likely safe on Sora

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.

you can't nerdsnipe me like that and NOT drop a link. :p

what's the channel?

Disney likes to use their past image of animation and artistry and the current way the company works couldn't stray father from it.

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?

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.