Disney's Misguided AI And Streaming Gamble

This week news broke that Disney had signed a rather lucrative deal with OpenAI to allow use of Disney characters and intellectual property in its generative AI software. This mostly extends to Sora (it was admittedly disappointing as a long-suffering Kingdom Hearts fan waiting to see "Disney" and "Sora" in the same headline and not have it be about Kingdom Hearts IV), OpenAI's generative video platform.

The deal as stated is two-fold: number one, it will allow consumers to use Disney IP in their own generated slop on the platform, and number two, it will allow Disney to use Sora as a platform to create new content for Disney+. The unstated aspect of the deal is that it inherently gives Disney greater grounds to pursue legal action against other generation platforms like Midjourney or whatever nonsense Gemini's video thing is called. This is because if Disney is being paid upwards of a billion dollars to license their properties, it gives a dollar amount for how much they are missing out on if these other companies also use them.

Coupled with what we know about Disney, both historically and from reporting within the last year, a new deal with them to try and create slop for Disney+ with as little money or people involved as possible is on-brand for them. Keep in mind, this is the studio founded by the man who accused rival animators of being communists and is the reason that The Animation Guild is under the jurisdiction of IATSE, diluting their collective bargaining ability in their favor. In the last year, the reporting has indicated that Disney+ has become an albatross for the studio and there is not a desire from within to invest in shows and movie for the platform.

One of the problems with AI, aside from the massive environmental impact, destruction of trust from both consumers and creators through its use, the normalization of a computer program with no positive use-case, the fact that it is a giant financial bubble that's going to take the global economy out with it when it bursts, the fact that people are outsourcing thought to a computer program so their critical thinking and research abilities are being diminished, wait where was I going with this?

Oh right, on top of the mountain of other issues for society, if the creators of generative AI get their way, it will gradually degrade in quality. For example, journalism as a method of relaying information is something that is routinely under threat from generative AI because it can take information from websites and condense it down to a digestible (and likely incorrect) form. The problem is that the average person does not care about accuracy as much as they do expediency so if I ask a question to Gemini about something that happened on Dancing With The Stars, it will likely give me something resembling an accurate answer.

The problem with this is that right now this system works, but as these models improve and cut into the bottom line of companies like People or Time because the readers are no longer going to their sites, these LLMs will be increasingly dependent on less reliable sources or information of their own creation. As this happens, the output will get progressively worse and the enshittification machine will, ironically enough, enshittify itself.

Now, unless Disney's plan is to generate new IP for theaters, throw those movies into the plagiarism machine to shit out new versions for streaming, how long will that be a sustainable model? Disney is already running into IP issues by putting all their eggs in the baskets of their already popular franchises, but what fills the Moana, Frozen, Zootopia, Lilo and Stitch, or Toy Story-sized holes in the slate when audiences get tired of it?

It is important to realize that Sora cannot create. There is definitively nothing that Sora can do that cannot be done by people working within Disney now or could be hired by Disney in the future to do these things for them. It is short-sighted if this is intended as a serious method of making money, unless this is specifically for lawsuit potential. Either way, the optics of this are absolutely awful.