{"id":343361,"date":"2025-12-12T15:05:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T15:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/343361\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T15:05:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T15:05:07","slug":"whats-really-happening-with-disney-openais-deal-for-sora-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/343361\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Really Happening With Disney-OpenAI’s Deal for Sora Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCan something be expected but huge? That\u2019s what Disney<\/a>\u2018s OpenAI<\/a> deal is: the most inevitable bombshell around, but still a bombshell.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Thursday the country\u2019s biggest legacy entertainment company announced that it would be partnering with OpenAI to allow its characters to be toyed\u00a0with in AI<\/a>. Starting in the next few months, you\u2019ll be able to play with Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars characters using Sora on Disney+, or on OpenAI\u2019s own platforms. You want to crouch at a race starting-line next to a character from Cars, as a Disney sample showed? Your moment is here.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe inevitable part is that Disney CEO Bob Iger hinted several weeks ago something like this was coming<\/a>, and most smart money had it involving OpenAI; the kind of social virality Iger suggested fit squarely with what OpenAI has been good at with the likes of Sora and ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, we didn\u2019t know how soon this would happen. And the details weren\u2019t known. One big detail: Disney is paying OpenAI $1 billion for an undisclosed stake in the company. Another detail: a lot of Disney characters will be available as part of the licensing component, but not such that you can see their face; the company is choosing to stay far from that SAG-AFTRA\u00a0minefield (for now). Also, no voices, to avoid a voice-actor legal\/ethical situation, though voice-mouth alignment in current models isn\u2019t very good or convincing anyway.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that still leaves a gigantic swath \u2014 so many animated characters, and presumably plenty of faceless ones like Darth Vader and Iron Man. (There will be content guardrails, Iger says.)<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019re about to be inundated\u00a0on Disney+ with everyone making their own content \u2014 to type or likely soon speak a character into your own personalized story, the way you used to speak\u00a0action figures into your own personalized story, except now it instantly becomes a video. Is this the world\u2019s coolest Play-Doh or the world\u2019s lamest memeslop? Just one of the key questions you\u2019re forgiven for asking. Here are a bunch more, with some answers.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s motivating this move?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a word, Netflix<\/a>. That\u2019s true historically \u2014 Netflix ran a 10K on streaming before Disney could lace up its sneakers, prompting a mad belated frenzy from the Burbank firm to get its own service up and running more than a decade later, in 2019. Bob Iger doesn\u2019t want to see that happen again, so he\u2019s getting out front on the\u00a0next wave of digital entertainment \u2014 AI creations \u2014 before Netflix can add its own offering.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut it\u2019s also true literally. Entertainment giants in the AI age will thrive if they excel\u00a0on two criteria: tech and content. Netflix has the tech \u2014 no Hollywood platform has better algorithms, data or personalization engines. And Disney has the content \u2014 no Hollywood studio has more beloved characters and properties. What Netflix did earlier in the week was seek to bolster its content \u2014 by buying Warner Bros, it will have a library for training and AI character manipulation<\/a>s it couldn\u2019t have built in 100 years (technically 102, given the age of WB). And now with the OpenAI deal, Disney is hoping it has the tech. Netflix. It\u2019s always Netflix.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo how quickly\u00a0does this thing go from faceless, voiceless characters to Captain America showing up at my holiday dinner table?<\/p>\n

\n\tIger is smart by keeping it away from the stuff people are most worried about: live actors getting manipulated to oblivion. There\u2019s a Guild issue there, but there\u2019s also an uncanny-valley issue there \u2014 are we really ready for Chris Evans to be walking and talking as we see fit? Animated characters are already stylized, so that valley is a lot shallower. \u201cA Buzz Lightyear custom birthday card for their kid,\u201d OpenAI leader Sam Altman said<\/a> on CNBC Thursday. Which is pretty much the most benign, casualty-lite use case you could devise (unless you\u2019re Hallmark)<\/p>\n

\n\tBut make no mistake: existing actors moving in lifelike ways (or synthetic actors doing the same) is where this is all going. Disney just needs to start making deals with unions and getting consumers comfortable first. Think of this as designing a car that looks like a carriage. Necessary, but temporary. Teslas will fill the road soon enough.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow should we think about OpenAI now?<\/p>\n

\n\tHow much time do you have? The most intriguing company in all of tech-dom is also the most frustrating to define. Founded as a do-gooder nonprofit a decade ago this month, morphed into a social-media ChatGPT \u201cIt\u201d company three years ago this month, OpenAI is now something entirely uncategorizable. It has a knack for creating buzz thanks to Sam Altman\u2019s evangelism; it has a tendency to be a lighting rod for everything we worry about thanks to Sam Altman\u2019s evangelism. Its video tools are not seen as strong as Google\u2019s Veo and its lack of app development is noticeable; the company waits for others to come along and build stuff for its models. Also, many, many people have left OpenAI because they worry about the company\u2019s more \u2026 liberal attitude to safety.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe alignment with Disney, a company as American as they come, does a little burnishing. I mean can the place of Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom really be leading us down an apocalyptic path? For all the ways Disney\u2019s move sullies it with creatives in Hollywood, OpenAI\u2019s new partner does the opposite \u2014 gives it massive cred in Silicon Valley. And, really, around the world. How un-American can Sam Altman be if Disney loves him?<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, OpenAI is still building mysterious pins<\/a>, promising AGI <\/a>and releasing weirdly named <\/a>Large Language Models, no matter how many Little Mermaid re-creations it enables. If a company this vexing didn\u2019t exist it would be necessary to invent it.<\/p>\n

\n\tIsn\u2019t Disney suing Midjourney? And did they really just cease-and-desist<\/a> Google on the same day they announced this OpenAI deal?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt can seem at first glance like the company is all over the place on AI; you can be forgiven for saying \u201cpick a lane, Bob.\u201d The truth is Disney has picked a lane: the express one, to the land of Generative AI.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat people thought back when Disney\u2019s Midjourney lawsuit was filed this summer<\/a> \u2014 that it really wanted\u00a0human-led art \u2014 wasn\u2019t really accurate. It wanted machine-generated art. It just wanted to control what was being fed into that machine. The alignment with screenwriters and craftspeople was just incidental.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the way, if you think it\u2019s only Disney, well. This will also open the door for others. Where one conglomerate plunges, others will soon tread.\u00a0Expect Universal and Warners \u2013 despite their own Midjourney suits \u2014 to follow Disney into the pool. They may not have the same store of animated characters that Disney has. But they\u2019ll find a way.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat does this mean for new movies and TV shows? Is Disney still as excited about that business?<\/p>\n

\n\tWell of course if you ask them they will say yes. Iger himself told CNBC<\/a> Thursday that \u201cthis does not in any way represent a threat to the creators at all. In fact, the opposite. I think it honors them and respects them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut he also said\u00a0that when it comes to AI \u201cyou can\u2019t do anything about it. No human generation has ever stood in the way of technological advance, and we don\u2019t intend to try,\u201d adding \u201cif it\u2019s going to happen, including disruption of our current business models, then we should get on board\u201d \u2013 which hardly sounds like a man eager to keep television and film output at the current levels.<\/p>\n

\n\tPart of what\u2019s happening here is a concession \u2014 I wouldn\u2019t call it a white flag, but I\u2019d hardly call it a vote of confidence either. Iger is seeing just how much of the attention economy is being gobbled up by user-generated content on TikTok, YouTube, Insta et al. And rather than fight it, he\u2019s leaning into it. He\u2019s betting that instead of makeup tutorials and viral dances, AI now allows Disney can play the short-form user-generated game too, by making many of its properties available \u2014 that people looking to upload, create and share would rather do it with stuff they grew up loving, especially now that you can have those characters do pretty much anything you want.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd he\u2019s\u00a0betting that this is a majorly good use of the company\u2019s time and resources \u2014 a form that drafts off what they have instead of the laborious, unproven expensive work of creating something new. That doesn\u2019t mean Disney won\u2019t be in the original content business, of course \u2014 if nothing else you need to refresh old characters or invent new ones for us to AI-play with it. But it does mean the focus is a little different; it does likely mean that in a world of limited dollars more of them are going to be rehashing what\u2019s been made than making something new; it does mean that the artist-led work of film reboots and nostalgia plays could be given way to the masses-led work of rehashes and prompted entertainment.<\/p>\n

\n\tDisney is still Disney. But as of today it\u2019s a little less about finding new water sources and a little more about going back to the well.<\/p>\n

\n\tWill this work?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe part nobody knows. Legit nobody. All this supply, in a very strange inversion of everything you learned in freshman Microeconomics, is coming before any evidence of demand. Will speaking characters into action be a novelty or a mainstay \u2014 a paradigmatic way of interacting with screens or just a passing diversion that will turn this deal cringe in short order? Will it be TikTok or MySpace? The bet feels like the former \u2014 people love these characters, and the stuff you could do with them is elastic and eye-opening. But nobody really knows. Iger\u2019s billion will soon help us find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Can something be expected but huge? That\u2019s what Disney\u2018s OpenAI deal is: the most inevitable bombshell around, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[256,64,63,437,134,344,435,5044],"class_list":{"0":"post-343361","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-disney","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-netflix","15":"tag-openai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}