Disney has a difficult relationship with generative AI art. While it's been reported that several Disney attempts to use AI were abandoned over legal issues, and LucasFilm's AI Star Wars movie was just embarrassing, the company's also been pursuing legal action to protect its IPs from AI image generators.
Yet, now it seems the animation giant might be about to sacrifice its assets to AI itself. The company's CEO has revealed that it's talking to AI companies about letting fans make user-generated AI content that they would be able to consume and share with others on Disney+.
As cited by The Hollywood Reporter, Disney CEO Bob Iger told people on the company’s full-year earnings call that Disney+ is “rolling out the biggest and the most significant changes. Part of this is a licensing agreement with Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, to add game-like features to the streaming service.
But Iger also revealed that the company is working with AI companies on plans to allow subscribers to create their own short-form video content based on its IPs.
“The other thing that we’re really excited about, that AI is going to give us the ability to do, is to provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience, including the ability for them to create user-generated content and to consume user-generated content — mostly short-form — from others,” he said.
He didn't name the AI companies involved, but the idea immediately brings to mind the cases we've seen of crude content and controversial content created using copyrighted IPs in various AI image and video generators – something that Disney has been trying to prevent.
Iger said Disney had held “productive conversations” with several developers and hoped to reach an agreement that would “reflect our need to protect the IP.”
Considering how AI developers, from Google to Meta and xAI, have struggled to implement comprehensive controls over the output of their AI image generators, that might prove to be challenging.
Just last month, the Motion Picture Association wrote to OpenAI to complain of Sora 2's copyright infringements after people generated AI videos of things like a Nazi SpongeBob SquarePants and ads for 'Epstein Island' children’s toys.
That makes the idea of Disney promoting user-generated AI video directly on its own platform seem a strange move for a company that has been so protective about how its characters are depicted.
An in-house Disney+ AI generator may be easier to control than a general public model, but it could still be difficult to prevent all the forms of misuse that could emerge, while the sheer existence of infinite user-generated content could also water down the value of Disney's characters.
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