Agreement comes amid anxiety in Hollywood over impact of AI on the industry, expression and rights of creators
Walt Disney has announced a $1bn equity investment in OpenAI, enabling the AI start-up’s Sora video generation tool to use its characters.
Users of Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that draw on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters as part of a three-year licensing agreement between OpenAI and the entertainment giant.
A selection of the videos made by users will also be available for streaming on the Disney+ platform.
Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, hailed a deal which paired his firm’s “iconic stories and characters” with OpenAI’s AI technology. It will place “imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans in ways we’ve never seen before”, he claimed.
