Brooks Barnes

You know, this was a big controversy in Hollywood last year during our Oscar season.

In fact, so much that the Academy then clarified its rules and said,

Using AI in this sense does not exclude a performance.

Right.

I discovered that he's already finished Connections that day, and I'm like, Jonah, it was my day.

You're right.

This was a watershed deal, a moment.

It hasn't gone into effect yet.

They said early this year, which I would take to mean by the end of April, people are going to be able to use Sora, which is OpenAI's video creation tool, to make their own 30-second movies, shorts, using 200 Disney characters, Yoda, Cinderella, Iron Man.

Darth Vader, Elsa, all of these classic characters that until now have been only available in carefully controlled stories by professional artists or in the black market of AI.

Disney is one of the most obviously controlling companies of its copyright.

There are all sorts of examples.

Such as?

Well, the famous one was they told a stonemason that he couldn't engrave Winnie the Pooh on a child's gravestone.

That created quite a firestorm of criticism of Disney.

So to have this company that has so aggressively policed its copyright...

do a deal with open AI is groundbreaking.

It went from adversarial to cooperative.

It tells you that they feel like they have no choice.

You know, if you go on VO, which is Google's AI video generator, you can create a clip using a Disney character.