I never thought this could happen, especially after the "Ghibli scandal".
OpenAI has pulled a majestic business move. They got to allow people to generate Disney characters without issue AND will give 1 billion dollars to OpenAI?
Now the internet will be flooded by Disney character's videos, and since they don't have to pretend they didn't train on their intellectual property anymore I'm really curious to see where this will bring us.
>Now the internet will be flooded by Disney character's videos
How is Disney okay with this anyway? They've sent their lawyers after daycare centers who dared to paint a picture of a Disney character on their walls. Why are they suddenly going to ignore me prompting a video of Winnie the Pooh hitting the bong?
Disney, is well aware of the writing on the wall that copyright is going to continue to become increasingly harder to enforce, as generative ai distances itself from brute mimicry, and because infringers can generate new versions faster that takedown notices can be filed. Their alternative is to either be steamrolled, or leverage their IP while it has worth in order to latch on to the AI market. Plus, they give a solid explanation: it is free advertising when there are guardrails on how the characters can behave/say/portray (which is the advantage of the deal — I assume a similar one with Google, Microsoft or Apple will be forthcoming too).
When a true “leader” big or small emerges, every bit of capital will flock to it, leaving a burned out nest of ai company husks. But hey…maybe this time will be completely different. (And upon consideration, I think this is exactly why. All their deals are with the husks, while keeping their IP to leverage with the winner.)
They have to consider China. Right now Z-Image Turbo lets you render stills of any popular cartoon character you like, at frankly-disturbing levels of quality, doing almost anything you like. That's a relatively-tiny 6G-parameter model. If and when a WAN 2.2-level video model is released with a comparable lack of censorship, that will be the end of Disney's monopoly on pretty much any character IP.
Also, notice how Disney jumped all over Gemini's case before the ink was dry on the OpenAI partnership agreement. My guess is that Altman is just using Disney to attack his competitors, basically the 'two' part of a one-two punch that began by buying up a large portion of the world's RAM capacity for no valid business reason.
Mickey Mouse's character design as of 1930 is in the public domain. But if you ask an AI image model for "Mickey Mouse", you'll probably get something based on more recent versions of the character which are still copyrighted.
Scroll down on this page[0] and you'll see the different Mickeys and most of them are not under copyright. You got Steamboat Whillie + gloves but no Fantasia Mickey or later. Definitely no red-pants version.
Unsurprisingly Disney knows what they're doing and they have 95 years to modify a character's looks (and how the public imagines that character) before it enters public domain.
I have a feeling that the long-term economics of this don't really work. OpenAI is burning money and Altman has already gone out in public saying how Sora-generated content is being made in large volumes for little audience.
>People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
If OpenAI is going to pay Disney money for Winnie the Pooh smoking crack, I get the feeling that the money is going to come not from Sora profits but from companies that invested in OpenAI. Companies like Disney. Not that Sora is going to generate any profit if I can generate a video for free and I then post it on Discord instead.
> I have a feeling that the long-term economics of this don't really work. OpenAI is burning money and Altman has already gone out in public saying how Sora-generated content is being made in large volumes for little audience.
Let me introduce you to ponze scheme. He is feeding the hype, that's all that matters right now. More and more cash... The only real winner will be Nvidia when the bubble explode.
Yes, that's what makes Disney investing in OpenAI as part of this so confusing to me. Sign a licensing deal that means OpenAI pays you every time someone uses your character? Absolutely. Who cares if they're burning cash, as long as you get your payday it's all good. But investing in the company means their cash burning is your problem too. I don't know why you'd do it.
It’s ego and desperation for one last hurrah. Disney has a history of being a corporate governance nightmare - which Iger ironically contributed toward fixing. He’s undoing all that now.
>People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
That was the issue even the biggest Ai fans pointed out from day one. People aren't gonna post their videos on Sora. They are gonna make it on Sora and post on TikTok. A watermark won't change that reality (and I don't think ClosedAI is worried about brand recognition and taking a hit for that).
Likenthr rest of the scene, it's so utterly tone deaf.
It's not just that: generative AI tools make it so easy to make content that you run into discoverability problems. The pool of available content becomes huge but without a way to market or otherwise differentiate yourself, no one will likely stumble across it.
We already see this dynamic with the "vanity press" pay-to-play record labels / distributors like DistroKid: the vast majority of their catalog has never been played or was only played to test the initial upload. Huge numbers of tracks have a tiny number of views, with many literally never played. "Democratizing" content creation predictably does this, and it's frankly bizarre it wasn't anticipated.
The brand rot will be disgusting here. I thought "family" companies like Nintendo and Disney hit so hard, against their best interests, because they didn't want the next pregnant Elsa or Nazi Mario to cause a storm on their carefully tailored brands.
Seems like Nintendo still has that long term thinking. Disney was just waiting for the right price.
I mean, Disney can do basically whatever it wants and nothing will change. If my gay, Muslim friends are still willing to patronize the parks, despite their very real disagreement with how Disney conducts its business, then what hope is there for the exhausted, overworked mom whose child won't stop wailing about watching Frozen? This will absolutely tarnish the brand, and yet people will still consume Disney slop.
Disney has a long history of donating large dollars to ultra-conservative legislators and presidential hopefuls (they also donate to liberal candidates as well). As for the Muslim portion, it’s most likely due to Disney donating $2 million to Israeli Non-profits and condemning terrorism while making no statements or donations to the Palestinian people’s or groups that attempt to provide to the Palestinian people Israel was bombing in the closing months of 2023. The BDS movement has and keeps Disney on their list of boycott targets to this day.
IMHO the smart people saw the "Ghibli scandal" and thought "omg this is the feature of IP".
You don't like the last Star Wars trilogy? Pay us a few hundred dollars and you can rewrite your own story, thank you very much this is where you put the credit card number.
I’m pretty sure people don’t want that for the same reason people buy books instead of writing things they want to read. It’s not just to save the effort— stories are good because they surprise, challenge, and inspire us. I think the idea of the “everyone can make the exact movies they want to see” thing conceptually makes sense at first blush, but I just don’t think people want something that matches their assumptions entirely.
Not only that, they’re materially worse than real movies. Designer t-shirts still sell despite people being able to buy blank t-shirts and color them in with laundry markers.
If it's smart it won't be what you planned, but it'll almost always be what you like. If you thought the Vader scene at the end of Rogue One was stupid fanservice, it leans one way; if you went "FINALLY! YES!" it leans another. Lather rinse repeat across many potential inputs.
With the right sensors, your sentiment will be apparent to the system and it will be able to tune on the fly.
I think curated interactive environments like games are a much more realistic application of those distant technologies than automatically modified Hollywood movies on the fly.
And personally, I have absolutely no desire to modify movies that bothered me, story-wise, artistically, or editorially, with my own ideas. Likewise, I also don’t want to modify classic paintings to make the people fit my preferences for attractiveness. And I sure don’t want it done automatically.
Art is interesting because it comes from other people’s brains.
> It’s not just to save the effort— stories are good because they surprise, challenge, and inspire us.
Maybe, but that's the minority of demand. Most book sales are to people looking for something comfortable - think the near-infinite supply of practically interchangeable romance novels or detective stories.
No, it’s not the same as generating yourself a static piece of literature to read. It’s the difference between having an hours-long conversation and listening to an hours-long monologue. They are neither conceptually nor practically the same activity. It’s much closer to playing a video game.
Yes, we should abolish it. Great that you drew a shitty drawing, why would that mean I can’t draw a mouse anymore?
It’s archaic. The only thing we need now is identification. Oh, this is actually produced by Disney? Great. Oh, this is some Chinese knockoff? I might not want to consume it then.
We already did this for Object/Face recognition, it works but it's not the way to go. It's the way to go only if you don't have enough compute power (and data, I suspect) for a E2E network
No, it's what you do if your model architecture is capped out on its ability to profit from further training. Hand-wrapping a bunch of sub-models stands in for models that can learn that kind of substructure directly.
This honestly mirrors many of my interactions with credentialed professionals too. I am not claiming LLMs shouldn't be held to a higher standard, but we are already living in a society built on varying degrees of blind trust.
Majority of us are prone to believe whatever comes our way, and it takes painstaking science to debunk much of that. In spite of the debunking, many of us continue to believe whatever we wish, and now LLMs will average all of that and present it in a nice sounding capsule.
449 usd is pretty disappointing. A steam deck is pretty much the same price but is repairable and i don't have to pay for an online subscription. And even the steam deck doesn't appeal to me much since i like FPS games, which are better if played from a proper PC. At this point i'm sticking with my Nintendo 3DS for gaming away from home.
470€ vs 570€ for OLED 512GB. With 80€ (digital, 90€ physical) base price for a game, you'd probably go break even in like 2-3 games, especially when buying games on sales (Nintendo don't do that) and older titles (Nintendo don't discount these either)
Though the Switch 2 doesn't have 512GB of storage or an OLED screen. The cheaper Steam Deck that's a closer match is $50 cheaper than the Switch 2, $400 in the US.
In the past month i was also considering to buy a Wii to play some games with friends, but i waited to see if the switch 2 could be worth it. Now i'm seriously considering the Wii.
You will never run out of games to play with a softmodded Wii plus a massive SD card. Make sure your Wii has the correct ports and get some Gamecube controllers too.
It's way easier to use Dolphin. You haven't truly lived until you've played Mario Kart Wii in 4k HDR :) They make USB powered sensor bars. Wiimotes connect over Bluetooth, you just need to get a BT adapter that is compatible (many chipsets are finicky with Wiimotes).
I tried carrying a camera around, but honestly I didn't even remember about it most of the time. Taking the photo with the phone was easier, and they already were synced with my digital photo library. I would really like to carry around a camera and switch to a flip phone... but it's not for me unfortunately.
didn't headphone jack removal come also because the DAC (Digital-Analog Converter) made interference with the Cellular Modem? Or is it just propaganda I read about online?
If that's what's disappointing you about the iPhone, it's WAY worse on Android. Google were the ones that pushed me to switch to an iPhone after almost a decade on Android. Stuff not "innovating" is a feature in a mature, well-designed system. Google does the polar opposite and changes things constantly just for the sake of change (well, it's internally so some PO can get a promotion). Most of their UI changes don't even come in app updates, they'll have both interfaces installed on your device but only toggle one on from a server-side flag tied to your account/device, so one day some app will completely change without you having updated anything, then a week later it might just go back to the old UI. They'll deprecate any app or feature you like and replace it with something else, insisting it has the same feature set when it doesn't. Everything feels like a constant beta you're paying to participate in.
The iPhone's new Photos app was a controversial change, but it was so infamous because it's such a rare exception to their standard of changing very little. Open up your Messages app or Settings and it looks and functions basically exactly as it did on the first iPhone in 2007.
We got something similar with social interactions during covid lockdowns (if your country had those). Btw i feel like people would go literally MAD, I can see it when just WhatsApp crashses for just a couple hours (doesn't happen often but I remember people's reactions when it happened).
You can get a feel of what it would do for yourself by getting a dumbphone and limiting yourself from accessing social media.
>You can get a feel of what it would do for yourself by getting a dumbphone and limiting yourself from accessing social media.
I already do that. It's the most alienating and pessimism-inducing thing. I'd just love to see a world where people aren't hunched over, staring at a screen for 90% of their waking life.
Have you tried going to a classroom full of young adults like yourself in the last eight to ten years, without using one? I did, for years. You'll feel like there's no point in trying to socialize with anyone most of the time, as there's a huge barrier between them and yourself. Even when the phones aren't physically involved, people are way, way less social now than back then. Engaging in spontaneous conversations or interactions with people you aren't really familiar with is something that isn't seen in a positive light as much anymore. It's even panic-inducing or seen as ill-advised for many people, in environments that should be very conducive to such things, and safe for them to take place (college, for instance).
I'm haven't been in the young adult category for a few years now :)
What you describe fills me with really bad feelings. I truly feel bad for all that the younger generations are missing, and what we're losing as a species.
I'm still holding out hope that we'll see a bit of a social antibody reaction to the corporate takeover of the social sphere. I see some hope amongst younger folks, but it's pretty dire, and your descriptions make me less hopeful.
Tech is fun to play with, sure, but if the cost is that we lose our humanity when in each others presence - well I'd rather throw most of it in the trash. We're unconsciously throwing away much of what it means to be human - and all for the sake of some corporate profit. It's like a social suicide.
I would really like to work on splat rendering during the PhD i'm hoping to pursue