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The deal that the Walt Disney Company and OpenAI made on Thursday will have major consequences for the entertainment industry, and could set a precedent in how large intellectual property owners approach artificial intelligence and the protection of their content.
Disney will invest one billion euros in OpenAI and will make its characters available for use in Sora, the artificial intelligence system that produces short videos starting from simple textual indications. OpenAI will have free access not only to Disney characters, but also to all the company’s other intellectual properties, such as Marvel superheroes and the protagonists of Pixar films and the Star Wars saga.
It is the first time that a large multinational entertainment company has decided to invest in a company that develops generative artificial intelligence models. Until now, the main companies in the sector had adopted a mainly defensive approach, based on takedown requests, legal actions and pressure to obtain more stringent rules on the unauthorized use of their characters.
Disney itself had often used strategies of this type, and together with Universal had sued Midjourney, one of the most used software capable of generating images with artificial intelligence, for copyright infringement. In this case, however, he made a different choice, choosing to collaborate with OpenAI rather than fight it. Speaking about this aspect, the journalist from Vulture Eric Vilas-Boas ha written that Disney found it more convenient to try to “control the future of artificial intelligence, rather than see unauthorized versions of its intellectual properties run amok online, issue constant takedown notices, and engage in potentially endless lawsuits.”
In his newsletter, film producer Evan Shapiro has written that Disney has ensured that OpenAI becomes its “slopkeeper”, a neologism that indicates an entity in charge of selecting and controlling content generated with artificial intelligence, preventing the improper use of intellectual properties and making these uses traceable and potentially profitable.
– Read also: The new videos made with OpenAI artificial intelligence
The agreement provides that Disney will transfer the license on its characters to OpenAI for three years, but with some limitations. The voices of those who dubbed the characters cannot be reproduced, nor the faces of the actors who play them. Disney has taken these precautions to avoid retaliation from the unions representing screenwriters and voice actors, and in particular from SAG-AFTRA, the largest and most influential.
OpenAI will still have access to a huge amount of characters: all the animated ones, and presumably all those wearing a mask, such as Darth Vader and Iron Man. Some videos made with Sora will be made available on the Disney+ streaming platform, which in this way will have the opportunity to strengthen its offer with content particularly appreciated by the younger audience.
Steven Zeitchik, journalist from Hollywood Reporterwrote that the deal was primarily a response to Netflix’s attempted takeover of Warner Bros., which Paramount is trying to thwart.
Netflix has been using advanced artificial intelligence systems for years for data analysis, personalization of the offer and algorithms to recommend content to users, and is therefore much ahead of Disney on a technological level. The possible acquisition of Warner Bros. would allow it to combine this technological infrastructure with a vast catalog of films and characters from which to draw to train its systems, further strengthening its position.
Conversely, Disney has one of the largest catalogs of characters and intellectual properties in the world, but has lagged behind technologically, and in particular in the use of artificial intelligence. The agreement with OpenAI will allow it to bridge this gap: it will in fact become an important customer of OpenAI, with privileged access to its API (Application Programming Interface), i.e. the tools that allow you to directly integrate artificial intelligence models into your systems.
This will allow Disney to develop new products and experiences based on artificial intelligence and to use tools such as ChatGPT (the most famous chatbot in the world, developed by OpenAI) also within its work processes, making them available to employees for operational and analysis activities.
– Read also: Paramount put itself between Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery
Another reason that made the agreement advantageous for Disney is the timing: with this investment it acquired a small share of OpenAI (0.02 percent) before the company’s expected stock market listing. Currently OpenAI is evaluated around 500 billion dollars, but after the listing its capitalization could increase considerably.
– Read also: Nobody expected ChatGPT
