Disney Licenses Play Dates for Mickey Mouse, ChatGPT in $1B OpenAI Deal – The Daily Upside
Some user-generated Sora videos will also make their way onto Disney+, and ChatGPT will become available to Disney employees.
Jamie Wilde
Guest Contributor to The Daily Upside
Sora users can legally make fan edits of themselves swimming next to Ariel, Disney’s mermaid celebrity, under a $1 billion deal that the entertainment giant announced yesterday with OpenAI.
Video-generator Sora and ChatGPT got Disney CEO Bob Iger’s go-ahead to use more than 200 copyrighted characters across the universes of Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. But any Ariel edits will be with the princess after she gave her voice to Ursula because the deal doesn’t include talent voices.
Some user-generated Sora videos will make their way onto Disney+, and ChatGPT (which got an update yesterday) will become available to Disney employees. The tie-up could become a template for Hollywood, which in the past has pushed back against AI getting its hands on its precious IP.
Disney has defined modern copyright law, lobbying Congress for decades to expand protections for its characters. The company’s known for suing anyone who violates those copyrights, including creators as small as an Etsy vendor that sold 200 Baby Yoda plushies.
So it was no surprise that the House of Mouse also cracked down on AI companies, which built their models by scraping the internet without any concern for copyrights. Disney and Universal jointly sued image-generator Midjourney this summer (Warner Bros. Discovery later hopped in, too), and Disney sent a cease and desist letter to AI chatbot Character.AI in September.
When OpenAI launched Sora this fall, and its users created celebrity deepfakes that flooded the web, Hollywood reacted:
Playing Favorites: OpenAI seems to have landed the leading role in Hollywood’s AI story. Disney on Wednesday sent a cease and desist letter to Google, CNBC reported, in which Disney alleged the tech giant violated its copyrights to train AI models. Still, Disney has always been quick to monetize trending tech, like when it invested $1.5 billion into Epic Games in a deal that brought Disney characters into the video game “Fortnite.”
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