alt Hacker NewsThe Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora
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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
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.
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
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.
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.
In the meanwhile...
Google should demand another $1bn from Disney to crush the lawsuit
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/disney-hits-google-with-ce...
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.
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.
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.
Walt Disney would be tossing and turning in his grave as his legacy is destroyed by these arseholes
What mad world are we living in where Disney — Disney — is paying someone to lose control over its IP?
Will ChatGPT generate the Star Wars scripts from now on?
[Ahem… And can it make them interesting?]
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.
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"
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!
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.
This is “impressive” negotiation from Altman. Can’t imagine this being good for Disney.
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
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Surely OpenAI should be paying Disney for the rights to their content. What an upside down period we are living in.
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.
I'm genuinely stunned they're giving OAI money.
Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231585
Soras not even the main character, it's Roxas
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh the memes
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
This feels like the moment big media finally decided that if they can't stop generative AI, they might as well monetize it
Disney witnessed AI boosting Studio Ghibli’s cultural impact and relevance and decided to invest big in OpenAI, not surprising.
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.
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.
$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?
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.
There's a Kingdom Hearts joke in there somewhere, but I don't know enough of the lore to make it.
I wonder how the various creative guilds will respond. Seems like they are stabbing their team in the back on this one.
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.
Congrats Disney. You just sold out every actual animator you pretended to care about.
Sure, go ahead and downvote me.
Disney shareholders, feel free to make images of Iger, Mickey, and Br'er Rabbit lighting piles on money on fire.
That's a great way for OpenAI to keep Disney's lawyers away.
Is this some kind of pre-AI crash long game? Does that make any sense?
“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/