> There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for. And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble pile.
2025 Disney encourages children to gamble and gives Pat McAfee significant visibility.
Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
That said, there are a lot of other models out there that care about neither licensing nor alignment. So those will allow you to make racist content. Then you can do whatever you like with that generated content.
A lot of IP owners will learn that there is more than one way to skin a cat. It's easier than people think to turn children's characters, like say, Hermoine, into a raging racist. And there's very little technically speaking that they can do to stop it.
But yes, on OpenAI specific properties, they can definitely stop it dead in its tracks. They can even get better at stopping it over time. In fact, the more users try to generate it, the better the system will get at stopping it.
On the other hand there was a video about what happened to Mickey and Goofy in Vietnam... I'm probably okay with an updated version of that.
I agree. Those characters are likely safe on Sora
Who cares? Online trolls make inappropriate videos with characters. Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it.
It's so exhausting that companies are overly cautious about everything and let a tiny niche of internet culture drive these decisions. If you get obscene material in your social media feeds, you will continue to see this kind of stuff except maybe with some Disney IP. If not, it will have no impact to your life.
But practical things that affect 99% of people like you mentioned will be better, like your child wants to hear Mickey wish him happy birthday. So I applaud this.
I think decorum works in an environment where decorum is the norm, but we have entered a political moment where that is no longer the case. And I think that this kind of thing bleeds so heavily into culture that they no longer give a shit about having their characters next to it.
They have enough plausible deniability; they did not create the content. I think that's enough for them, in this moment.
Yes, because AI's so far have been oh so resilient to jailbreaks and oh so great at picking out the potentially "not aligned with corporate values" content...
It's not racist, it's an historically accurate depiction of 1930s Germany under the authority of a significant leader who may or may not be controversial today
Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.
How is that circular?
This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.
Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.
The other thing I'd point out is that people kind of seem to forget this, but it isn't a requirement that AI video be generated, then shoveled straight out without modification. Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness). You can use the blessed Disney video generator to generate something, then feed it into another less controlled AI system to modify it into something Disney wouldn't want. Or a video of a Disney character doing something innocent can be easily turned into something else; it's not hard to ask the AI systems to put something "against a green screen", or with a bit more sophistication, something that can be motion tracked with some success and extracted.
"A front camera shot of Cinderella crouching down, repeatedly putting a cucumber in and out of her mouth. She is against a green screen." - where ever that video is going, Disney isn't going to like it. And that's just a particularly obvious example, not the totality of all the possibilities.
Just putting controls on the AI video output itself isn't going to be enough for Disney.
They might as well have some direct say in the matter with the big companies by creating relationships and profiting via licensing.
Take the input as normal, pass it into Sora 2 and execute it as you would, pass the output through a filtering process that adheres to hard guidelines.
Of course, when talking about images, what is a 'hard guideline' here? Do you take the output and pass it through AI to identify if there's x y or z categorys of content here and then reject it?
It's just a funny coincidence.
Your bias is showing.
What exactly does “fanart” (no matter how distasteful and controversial) change?
Let people generate whatever fictional character they want.
The big models will and already have copyright filters on, people are just working around them which will always be a battle. They also don't host the videos they create themselves on OpenAI/Grok.
As I said in my comment these videos are not all going to be via the mainline Grok/ChatGPT interfaces and alternative video generators will eventually become widely accessible to the public.
Perhaps I should have expected that the conversation would get pulled this way but it's not where I wanted it to go.
I still wonder what motivates the people behind that sort of thing. It'd be easy to understand if it were just porn, but what's been described to me is just... bizarre.
They can either invest in mass classification and enforcement operations or gain some revenue share from it.
I look forward to chatting with Pluto and Goofy and asking why one has to wear pants when both of them are dogs.
And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care. And I think it does have an impact: my kids tired of Clubhouse very quickly and have little connection to Mickey and friends. Compare that to say, Dreamworks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse which they loved.
Disney is propped up by its tentpole features but their bench is incredibly weak. There are only so many Blueys you can buy to make up the difference.
https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-straight-to-video-seq...
A certain combination of nonstandard characters will make an AI character drop an n-word no problem
I guess they could chuck the output through whisper or something to see if it transcribes back to anything dodgy?
LLM security feels very ball of sand held together with duct tape haha
Yep, Disney was also a leading producer of racist tropes and content during Jim Crow. Historical clips of Mickey Mouse characters putting on minstrel shows with blackface alongside other racist stereotypes like crows can easily be found online[0]. Not to mention Song of the South[1], a film Disney produced based on Uncle Remus stories following slaves who happily live on a Georgia plantation. Disney has, of course, done their best to scrub these entries from history, but they played a major role in depicting racist tropes to kids for decades.
The question is what will happen when "the platform" is a model downloaded on torrent sites and just generates movies from a prompt. On the plus side: excellent compression ratio. On the down side: discussion with your kids about how at the end Snow White did not transform into a gigantic mech and blew up the Evil Queen with rockets. Must be your old memory, dad!
Don’t believe for a minute that whatever filters it uses will be sensitive enough to the way racist content is constructed to stop people from doing just that.
Sad I had to scroll this far to find a comment that wasn't pro-censorship of Fan Art because a character they saw on the internet offended someone's Protestant values.
OpenAI knows that, and the people interested in that capability know that, even if many of the other people seeing the marketing about it don't.
The majority of creation will happen directly through the powerful platforms themselves - YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Sora. This is the first time where platforms will be able to embed extremely powerful creation tools directly into the platform, and this will undoubtedly begin to take over for the majority of content produced.
Platforms and IP rights holders won't police the 1% of external user uploads. They'll negotiate deals with the platforms in bulk. If they don't license Elsa, Marvel, Pokemon, etc. then the platform wholesale will lose access to the IPs.
Platforms will have to pay. These are probably billion dollar deals. YouTube getting Pokemon exclusively for the next three years? Easily billions. Why even chase random internet users when you can just collect the gigantic platform check from one deal?
It'll look kind of like the cable tv / network model with occasional renegotiations. Or gaming consoles and exclusives. Or networks and sports.
Sure, but does that mean "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn"? A bit like saying W3C is getting into porn because the web is used for porn, together with other things. Even when I try to think of parent's comment in the most charitable way, I don't think that's what they meant.
Personally I prefer if my tools stay as tools, and let me do professional work with them regardless of what that profession is.
The tighter the loop between content creation (e.g. when you can generate unlimited content essentially for free) and the ability to measure its success (engagement), the more social media becomes a sort of genetic algorithm for optimizing content to be the most addictive possible at the expense of any other attribute.
Don't throw shade. If you haven't gotten "How the fuck did that get there?", consider yourself lucky I guess. Best I can figure, terriers have some unintentional shared vector space with much more unpleasant content.
Yes, it literally means they have indicated to the customer base that is looking into making porn.
It may not mean they have indicated it to some other audiences.
> A bit like saying W3C is getting into porn because the web is used for porn, together with other things.
No, its a bit like saying the W3C is getting into porn if the W3C had announced changes in the platform whose main market appeal was to people making porn, but announced it in a way that glossed over and minimized that.
If, on the other hand, the web had a steady state of being used for porn, you wouldn't say the W3C is getting into anything, you’d just say “the internet is for porn” (which has, of course, rather famously been said, and even sung.)
Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable function is to facilitate porn production is only the case for the OpenAI action and you have presented nothing analogous for the entities you are trying to hold up as comparable.
Why should Disney care?
To which you might say “because people care”, so:
Why should people care?
Back when I was a spud I used futuristic text-to-speech synthesis to make my computer say “Eye am Bill Gaytes my farts go FERT FERT FERT” - Should Bill Gates be offended? What about the people who like him? What about the Intel processor I used to create it? Or the company behind the TTS software? Would anyone think they’re involved and endorsed it? I guess the real question is: are we catering the world to people who can’t make that distinction?
They'll optimise for whatever causes numbers to increase. Children just happen to sometimes be what makes that happen.
≤4-year-olds do not care: there's bright colours and motion, and some semblance of story. The point is not to give some kind of lesson, but to distract/entertain (and probably release dopamine). See also Paw Patrol, Spidey Amazing Friends, PJ Masks, etc. None of these seem to have made any attempt at having a 'layer' that appeals to adults.
In some ways I equate this animation style with the algorithmic social media system: meant for 'quick hits'.
Contrast with (e.g.) Bluey.
Yes, AI enables people to produce these in higher fidelity, but I don't see how it is any different to Dolan MS Paint comics.
No one is going to think that Mickey doing lynching is official art, nor will they think that Mickey is a real person who has done that.
Where exactly did this happen though? And how am I supposed to prove a negative? It's up to you to present evidence that this is something OpenAI actively promote as a use case for their tools, something I personally haven't seen, but I'm open to changing what I think is happening if proof can be presented that this is the case.
Whatever the reason is (maybe online doesn’t feel “real” to people or something), a person with an internet connection where $100 is a great monthly income will do anything to make that money, even if that means endangering someone else’s children or mentally scarring them. Combined with poor enforcement in places like Nigeria and India, we’re already in the midst of a scam epidemic.
That's because people consider Disney an entertainment company whereas in fact its the biggest licensing company in the world.
Guy on the internet knows more about businesses than a 200 billion century-old corporation.
A classic.
They aren't trying to pervert the children. This isn't some cabal.
It's just money.
It's just people trying to get children's eyeballs to collect minuscule ad revenue.
It's the same as the people who abuse their kids for a Youtube channel, or the russian companies that put out 10 """DIY""" shorts a day which are just fake.
Youtube rewards constant churning content creation, so that's what is done
Yes, this show is absolute dogshit, pure slop and yet it ended in 2016. The dialog is completely braindead, episodes barely make sense.
The ancient Mickey Mouse cartoons are so good! Just a few I loved which are still very funny and I bet a few people remember:
- 1940: Mr. Mouse Takes a Trip ("Tickets please!")
- 1959: Donald in Mathmagic Land
In a few cases it is a dark in-joke between a small set of people that just happened to have used a public host for distribution, that unexpectedly went more viral.
It's right up there with "Let kids communicate anonymously but not to perverts" and "Is this porn or educational?"
We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.
I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.
That explains the surprisingly mediocre Darth Vader toy I saw over the weekend, and the "the only Star Wars part of this trailer is the lightsaber"-ness on the ads for the new Star Wars game.
They do it because it actually works.
The way advertisement works is that it's brain hacking - it's just associations. Over time your brain associates a brand with a product or products, and then simply by having this association in your brain you're more likely to buy the product.
This also works for negative advertisement.
Think about it. Suppose you did see mickey mouse saluting Hitler, or maybe you saw mickey mouse stick a jar up his little rat ass.
When you see mickey mouse, undoubtedly, even if just for a second, your mind will think about what you saw before. You might discount it immediately, but the damage is done. You still feel that emotion, even if only for a split second, and you have been influenced by it.
If it finds out you're a woman, within mere minutes it's 100% "you're fat" "try this diet" "you've GOT to buy this viral dress on shein!!"
And if you're a man, it's boobs, ass, objectification, and products to make you feel more like a man.
The sheer velocity at which Instagram will shovel you into capitalist-patriachy++ is shocking.
I think it’s important to remember that you probably aren’t their target audience. Their audience expects to see simple characters with simple stories. The CG doesn’t need to be advanced, so having it fast to produce is the goal. It has to hold the interest of a toddler for 25 min without annoying the parents too much. Shiny and simple rendering is probably what they are going for. You can certainly argue about the educational qualities of the show, but I think entertaining was their primary goal for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
Also, this show hasn’t been made for years, has it? You’re looking at a show that was produced from 2006-2016. The oldest shows would be almost 20 year old CG. The newest is still nearly 10 years old. At the time it was fresh, the CG was pretty good, compared to similar kids shows.
My kids were young right in this window, and we watched a lot of Disney.
Disney definitely hit a CG valley though that you can see with some of their shows that switched from a 2D look to a more 3D rendering. Thankfully we aged out of those shows around 2015, so it has been a while. Disney has always been a content shop where quantity has its own quality, so I’m sure I’d have similar opinions as you if I was looking at the shows now. But at the time, it wasn’t bad.
I’m not sure how the OpenAI integration will work. I can see all sorts of red flags here.
https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-semitism-ra...
Right now the deal is structured as Disney pays OpenAI. That's going to invert.
Once OpenAI pays Disney $3B/yr for Elsa, Disney is going to go to Google and say, "Gee, it sure would suck if you lost all your Disney content." Google will have to pay $5B/yr for Star Wars. And then TikTok, and then Meta... door to door licensing.
Nintendo, Marvel, all of the IP giants will start licensing their IPs to platforms.
This has never happened before, but we're at a significant and unprecedented changing of the tides.
IP holders weren't able to do this before because content creation was hard and the distribution channels were 1% creation, 99% distribution. One guy would make a fan animation and his output was a single 5 minute video once every other month. Now everyone has exposure to creation.
Now that the creation/consumption funnel inverts or becomes combined, the IP holders can charge a shit ton of money to these platforms. Everyone is a creator, and IP enablement is a massive money making opportunity.
In five years, Disney, Warner, and Nintendo will be making absolute bank on YouTube, TikTok, Meta platforms, Sora, etc.
They'll threaten to pull IP just like sports and linear TV channels did to cable back in the day.
This will look a lot like cable.
Also: the RIAA is doing exactly this with Suno and Udio. They've got them in a stranglehold and are forcing them to remove models that don't feature RIAA artists. And they'll charge a premium for you to use Taylor Swift®.
Anyone can make generic AI cats or bigfoot - it's pretty bland and doesn't speak to people. But everyone wants to make Storm Troopers and Elsa and Pikachu. Not only do teenagers willfully immerse themselves in IP, but they're far more likely to consume well-known IP than original content. Creators will target IP over OC. We already know this. We have decades of data at this point that mass audiences want mass media franchises.
The "normies" will eat this up and add fuel to the fire.
Disney revenues are $90B a year. I would not be surprised if they could pull a brand new $30B a year off of social media IP licensing alone. Same for Nintendo and the rest of the big media brands. (WBD has a lot more value than they're priced at.)
This is the end game. Do you see it now?
Or in other words: a typical adult needs about one year of self study (or nearly 6 months of more focused intensive study) before they can fully understand a show like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
And maybe half that for substantial understanding. (3 months intensive, 6 months typical self study to reach A2+ / watch Bluey with substantial understanding but not complete understanding).
If I were to guess at Mickey Mouse clubhouse, it's damn near A1 or A0+, it's so repetive and slow that you can learn some words from it.
Yeah, that's a lot more boring than the 'advanced' shows like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
Also note that children are not aware of tools (ie hammers or screwdrivers) yet. So simple learning exercises to know that hammer hammers nail but not screws is the kind of thing needed at pre-school level.
I'd imagine that the appropriate age for Mickey Mouse clubhouse is under 3. Bluey/Peppa Pig are closer to 6 or 7+ year old material.
Or in foreign language levels: B1-ish / 2+ on the American scale.
------
Seriously. Just switch the shows to a different language and the level gap becomes blatantly clear.
In perhaps more Techie terms: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse level of understanding is achievable with Duolingo. Peppa Pig / Bluey (and similar level shows) are so far beyond Duolingo that I bet most Duolingo users will NEVER be able to achieve Bluey-level understanding in a foreign language (and that deep textbook + 1000ish vocab study memorization needs to be done before Bluey can be understood).
------
Maybe the vocab estimate is easiest to understand. Bluey feels like a show that uses 1000 words with mastery (and maybe 2000 hard words as learning exercises in the show).
Mickey Mouse clubhouse uses maybe 250 words with mastery and maybe uses the top1000 list as learning/teaching words.
How (and why??) does Mickey Mouse clubhouse make an ENTIRE song consisting of a single word? (hotdog?) Because it's written for people where 'Hot dog' is a difficult word and needs repetition.
Perhaps this is a play to own and monetize that vector in the future.
But this past 5-10 years has indeed been quite the drastic dip. You'll have little bits of nuggets here and there because they still have some amazing artists (the '20's mickey mouse shorts are amazing). But you know we're in for a vast decline when they are starting to make even their premier content take shortcuts, play safe, and stifle creativity.
This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available. Trying to charge premiums for slop never works. Just ask McDonald's 2-3 years back. The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element. We already made it very cheap for people to make content. No amount of Mickey or Star wars is gonna undo the fact that people like looking at other people. Animation slop will find its audience, but it's not gonna overthrow TikTok with real(ish) people making people slop.
If Disney tries to pull out of Google, they will double down on Shorts. This won't work on most companies. It's a best a nice hook into Disney+.
Disney has basically always been like this. Overpriced goods powered by the brand alone.
The only real bastion of hope in an ocean of slop is that demand for curwtion will be better than ever. People who want quality will tire of swimming and pay larger premiums for someone to pick out thr nuggets in the rough. Basicslly, the new HBO.
The context is messy, but my comment's in the context of rejecting blame on Disney alone for "losing their way" when they have had the same way (read: $$$) as before and they're delivering products people want.
We let "engagement" get way too far in the way of IP's that already won brand awareness. Ad views are NOT off putting a view from even the unprofitable streaming platform. Let alone a theater ticket. It's pretty much the opposite of Nintendo's model to keep everything premium for as long as possible.
The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions. There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
Looking at the top videos on YouTube this week, 7 of the top 10 are all "Pop IP" content: Candy Crush the Movie, Miley Cyrus, "I wanna Channing All Over Your Tatum", Superman Drawn, Star Wars Elevator Prank, We are World of Warcraft, Red Bull.
People love and drown themselves in pop culture and corporate-owned IP. Whether that's music, games, anime - they love corporate-owned IP.
If this content gets pulled en masse, YouTube is fucked. YouTube has been getting all of this for free. That's something that could be done today, but it's just non-obvious. When you package that with the "creation enablement", it's a packaged good that can be licensed or sold enterprise-to-enterprise.
Disney is about to wet their toes. Nintendo has already been experimenting with it. The concept is right there in front of them, and as distribution channels and content creation merge into one uniform thing - it'll be obvious.
> The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
> The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element.
It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element.
People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Vivienne Medrano, Glitch Productions, Jaiden Dittfach, and many others have minted huge franchises on YouTube - views, merch, Amazon/Netflix deals, etc. The problem is that it takes them ages to animate each episode, whereas filming yourself on your smartphone is quick, easy, accessible, affordable, low-effort, low-material, and low-personnel.
Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
This is all changing.
PM is probably the nicest guy on the network. I get why people hate him, but rarely does he talk shit about people.
If anything, SAS paved the way for PM.
That was why I said you’re biased. Or you just don’t know the network very well.
Okay, free with ads is "free" to consumers. That will get swamped by tiktok. Subscription is premium. People won't pay for slop. Those are both covered.
>There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
Yes. But who's making a profit? You can only shuffle money for so long, and we're hitting the breaking point of that. Ads won't invest into platforms they suspect are filled with bots and don't give ROI. Companies won't invest once saying "AI" isn't a get rich quick scheme. Customers won't invest once they run out of money.
It works, until it doesn't. Then it's suddenly freefall and people will act like they didn't hear creaking for 5- 10 years.
>When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
YouTube isn't really known for "IP content". That debate ended in 2010 with Viacom. They in fact rampantly remove traces of IP content.
Meanwhile, they have a monopoly on video hosting and control payouts in an opaque way to millions of non-IP creators. unless you think it's the end of premium media as we know it, Disney is still going to host trailers on YouTube and Vevo will host music videos. There's no reason to go anywhere. Disney+ and YouTube can exist simultaneously.
>To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
Yeah, in complete agreement. Short term monies, long term damage. Media has a "lingering effect" where results on the prequel will pass into the sequel and vice versa. So you can still have a profitable but panned release simply because previous movie was that well received.
>It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element. People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Do you think that if we had the same amount of animation as we did live action content that they'd be consumed equally? I'm a huge animation fan and very skeptical.
Consider this phenomenon
https://erdavis.com/2021/06/14/do-women-who-pose-with-their-...
Even in art spaces, people will engage more with the presence of a human face. Females more, but even males get a noticeable boost You can chalk it up to lust or familiarity or anything else, but there seems there's some deeper issue at work than simply "there's more live action slop for now".
If we do get more animation slop, I think it will veer a lot more towards hyperrealism instead, for similar reasons. I always see it as uncanny, but it doesn't seem to hinder as much on others. It'll just be trying to mimic live action at the end of the day.
>Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
Sure. Animation is more engaging with kids. Kids aren't profitable, though. Their parents are. Unless its with ads, but advertising targeting kids has so much red tape.
I dont see a profitable model out of a media empire focusing on kids. Even Nintendo gets a lot of its money off of merchandising despite selling premium games with rare sales.
These shows are honestly fine. They all depict kids working together as a team, solving problems, and navigating socializing with each other. (And in the case of Paw Patrol, some environmentalism. And a few terrible puns.)
It's not like the Smurfs, Rocket Robin Hood, The Mighty Hercules, He-Man, Care Bears, etc. that I watched growing up were that much better.
Meanwhile Prime Video has shows that are basically cartoon cars going through a carwash for an hour. And YouTube has much, much worse junk like rapid-fire 60 second unboxing videos, and morons fake-reacting to various colours of slime.