The Thursday before Thanksgiving is a holiday. Disney The following are some examples of how to get started: OpenAI A deal was announced that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. OpenAI can now use Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Ariel in its software. Sora video-generation model. Disney will invest $1 billion into OpenAI. Its employees will have access to its APIs, as well as ChatGPT. None of this makes much sense—unless Disney was fighting a battle it couldn’t win.
Disney is known for its aggressive litigation around intellectual property. In June, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney over outputs it claimed infringed upon classic TV and film characters. Disney announced the OpenAI agreement on June 8, a night before it was made public. sent a cease-and-desist letter Google claims that there are copyright violations on the website. “massive scale.”
Disney embracing OpenAI, while poking at its competitors seems to create a dissonance. It’s likely Hollywood will follow the same path media publishers have taken when it comes AI. They’ll sign licensing agreements when they can, and use litigation when they can’t. (WIRED is owned by Condé Nast, which inked a deal with OpenAI In August 2024.
“I think that AI companies and copyright holders are beginning to understand and become reconciled to the fact that neither side is going to score an absolute victory,” Matthew Sag is a professor at Emory University who specializes in artificial intelligence and law. While many of these cases are still working their way through the courts, so far it seems like model inputs—the training data that these models learn from—are covered by fair use. But this deal is about outputs—what the model returns based on your prompt—where IP owners like Disney have a much stronger case
A simple output agreement can resolve a lot of potentially insoluble issues. Even if a company tells an AI model not to produce, say, Elsa at a Wendy’s drive-through, the model might know enough about Elsa to do so anyway—or a user might be able to prompt their way into making Elsa without asking for the character by name. This tension is what legal scholars refer to as the “Snoopy problem,” In this case, you could just as easily call it Disney’s problem.
“Faced with this increasingly clear reality, it makes sense for consumer-facing AI companies and entertainment giants like Disney to think about licensing arrangements,” Says Sag.
