On Thursday, Disney announced a landmark partnership with OpenAI to license its iconic characters and properties to be used to generate clips on Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app, starting in 2026.
It’s the first major licensing deal between OpenAI and a major Hollywood studio, and will include more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters. But consequential as it is, it’s simply putting the rubber stamp on what is already happening on the app.
Since its launch, Sora users have been gleefully churning out absurd and dark short-form clips that spoof Disney’s intellectual property — especially those made by its animation studio Pixar, aping their recognizable aesthetic and often prominently flashing Disney’s and Pixar’s logos.
It doesn’t bode well for how fans will end up using the collaboration once it goes online. One of the most popular Sora trends has been to generate Disney-style trailers built on exceedingly dark humor.
One video shows a Pixar-ified version of the 2008 holocaust movie “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,” in which Pixar Hitler sends the young protagonists into a gas chamber. Or if your poor taste leans towards current events, how about a Pixar-style story about Jeffrey Epstein inviting children to his “amazing” island? Or the opposite of that: a fun adventure movie in which the kids try to escape Epstein’s lair instead? Or an anthropomorphic folder labeled “Epstein Files” being buried alive? Maybe we should just have Epstein be the main character!
Other originals include a trailer for “Towers,” a montage of a young man’s journey to becoming a pilot who — you guessed it — flies his airliner into a pair of skyscrapers, in just one example of a popular subgenre of Sora videos in which Pixar-style characters perpetrate the 9/11 terror attacks. Many are explicitly racist, touting stereotypes targeting Indians and Black people. Cruel gags about people with Down syndrome abound, too.
And to be clear, we’re just scratching the surface. There’s entire compilations of Sora “Disney” trailers out there already, plus their own little ecosystem of reaction YouTubers howling at Pixar-styled depictions of child labor or the death of George Floyd being a punchline.
The trend should raise questions about Disney’s decision to so closely associate its family-friend brand with an app that largely seems to be a factory of nothing but offensive jokes that also happen to have a blatant disregard for copyright law. It’s especially strange since Disney is clearly being cautious with other aspects of the deal: both companies stressed that actors’ faces and voices won’t be part of the licensing agreement, which is almost certainly because of the fraught copyright involved.
And now that Disney is officially licensing its IP to OpenAI, it seems very likely that the deluge of Disney-fied AI slop could get worse. How will Disney and OpenAI moderate how Disney’s IPs get used, when OpenAI very clearly has failed to clamp down on the existing Disney content? It’s perhaps an extra pressing question given that Disney says its fans will be treated “curated selections” of Sora videos on its streaming service Disney+.
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