6It was a big day for The Walt Disney Company and its ventures in artificial intelligence (AI). This morning, Disney announced a $1 billion equity investment and content licensing deal with OpenAI.
This three-year deal enables users to create AI-powered videos featuring hundreds of iconic Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars characters using OpenAI’s Sora video generator and ChatGPT Images platform. The agreement explicitly excludes the use of any talent likenesses or voices to protect the rights of actors.
This deal with OpenAI comes on the heels of Disney CEO Bob Iger announcing that Disney plans to expand its use of artificial intelligence, allowing users to post their own content on Disney+. While this expands the possibilities for users, it comes at the expense of those who originally created the content.
So, that’s it? Disney is fully invested in AI, and users are free to utilize Disney’s characters across various platforms to create their own content. Well, not exactly.
Shortly after announcing its partnership with OpenAI, news broke that Disney had sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, claiming that the company was using Disney’s works to train its own generative AI models without compensating Disney.
The letter, obtained by Axios, claims that Google’s “willful infringement is especially alarming because it is leveraging its dominance in generative AI and across multiple other markets to make its infringing AI Services as widely available as possible.”
“Google’s AI Services are designed to free ride off Disney’s intellectual property,” the letter continues. “Google has refused to implement any technological measures to mitigate or prevent copyright infringement, even though such measures are readily available and being used by Google’s competitors. Instead, Google continues to directly exploit Disney’s copyrights for commercial gain.”
In response to questions from Axios, Google stated that it only utilizes publicly available content to train its AI models and has a “longstanding” relationship with Disney. Disney’s lawyers claimed that they have been raising these issues with Google for months, and the tech giant has taken no action to curb its behavior.
Disney is currently suing the AI company Midjourney and the Chinese company MiniMax, alleging that both companies infringed on Disney’s copyrighted materials when creating their AI models.
While Disney has become a Hollywood leader in the AI revolution, many of its creators fear that their creations could be used in ways they never anticipated and ruined without their permission. One of those creators was animator Dana Terrace, who created the Disney Channel show “The Owl House,” and urged fans to pirate the show rather than pay for Disney+.
For now, Disney has become a leader in AI creation in Hollywood, but only using those platforms it controls and/or can profit from. Disney appears to have already found the wave of the future, and it doesn’t look good for its creative talent.
What do you think of Disney taking the leap into AI content creation? Let us know in the comments.