The Disney/OpenAI slop flop
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How Sora, the Disney/Open AI collaboration started.
At the time of Disney’s announcement with OpenAI, it was hard to imagine why Disney would infect its flagship paid streaming service with content from a service whose viral videos consisted of users turning Pikachu into a felon and SpongeBob into Hitler. It was not clear why Disney would want AI slop made by randos to live next to, say the $200 million Toy Story 4 or any number of Disney’s masterpieces. It was also hard to imagine why a company that has so aggressively enforced its copyright would suddenly say all bets are off for Sam Altman’s plagiarism machine. The only thing that made any sense is that Hollywood executives, like Silicon Valley executives, hate paying for human labor so much that they have convinced themselves that their customers would happily consume AI slop if it was shoved down their throats.
The only quibble I have with that is the word “happily.” If comments by billionairebro Alex Karp are representative of what the billionaires think, they don’t care whether consumers or employees or anyone not a billionairebro is happy. We’ll take what they give us because they’re in control and we aren’t.
How the plan to “allow people to use Sora to create short videos from more than 200 beloved Disney characters” went.
Tuesday was a disastrous day for that future, and the complete and utter failure of both Sora and Disney’s dalliance with AI garbage suggests AI slop is indeed not the future of Hollywood. Disney did not even get to the point here it allowed people to build anything with Disney characters before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor and its investment.
Sora is dead. May the memory of its four-month existence as a copyright infringement machine that was also used to make videos of men strangling women and ICE arresting undocumented immigrants be a blessing.
Disney is pulling out of its billion-dollar investment in OpenAI entirely. Other efforts to slopify Hollywood look underwhelming, appear to have been quietly shelved, or have utterly failed to gather any audience whatsoever.
It appears that Sora was such a box of shit that Disney couldn’t figure out how to use it to screw everyone outside of the C-suite without screwing the denizens of the C-suite. That is one big box of shit.
For Bob Iger, who officially stepped down as Disney’s CEO earlier this month, the OpenAI pact was meant to be one of his final signature deals — giving Disney an on-ramp to the exploding world of AI.
A fitting tribute for one of the first people to give tRump a multi-million dollar gift settlement.
People who leave off-topic comments have AI slop for brains.
