Barely three months ago, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would be bringing user-generated AI slop to Disney+ as part of a landmark $1 billion investment into OpenAI that would allow people to use Sora to create short videos from more than 200 beloved Disney characters. The announcement was so important that Disney\u2019s then-CEO Bob Iger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both championed it in a press release that is full of the kind of cope that Silicon Valley AI boosters and some Hollywood executives suggest would unleash a new era of moviemaking and storytelling powered by AI that is cheaper than making movies with human workers.\u201cThe rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,\u201d Iger said.\u00a0\u201cDisney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees,\u201d the press release stated. \u201cUnder the license, fans will be able to watch curated selections of Sora-generated videos on Disney+, and OpenAI and Disney will collaborate to utilize OpenAI\u2019s models to power new experiences for Disney+ subscribers, furthering innovative and creative ways to connect with Disney\u2019s stories and characters. Sora and ChatGPT Images are expected to start generating fan-inspired videos with Disney\u2019s multi-brand licensed characters in early 2026.\u201dTuesday was a disastrous day for that future, and the complete and utter failure of both Sora and Disney\u2019s dalliance with AI garbage suggests AI slop is indeed not the future of Hollywood.\u00a0Disney did not even get to the point here it allowed people to build anything with Disney characters before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor and its investment.Sora is dead. May the memory of its four-month existence as a copyright infringement machine that was also used to make videos of men strangling women and ICE arresting undocumented immigrants be a blessing.\u00a0Disney is pulling out of its billion-dollar investment in OpenAI entirely. Other efforts to slopify Hollywood look underwhelming, appear to have been quietly shelved, or have utterly failed to gather any audience whatsoever. This news does not bode well for OpenAI and it likely does not bode well for Paramount\u2019s megamerger with Warner Brothers, a deal whose financial terms and the debt involved only make sense if you can believe in a future in which the cost of creating blockbuster movies is drastically reduced by AI via huge numbers of people losing their jobs.\u00a0At the time of Disney\u2019s announcement with OpenAI, it was hard to imagine why Disney would infect its flagship paid streaming service with content from a service whose viral videos consisted of users turning Pikachu into a felon and SpongeBob into Hitler. It was not clear why Disney would want AI slop made by randos to live next to, say the $200 million Toy Story 4 or any number of Disney\u2019s masterpieces. It was also hard to imagine why a company that has so aggressively enforced its copyright would suddenly say all bets are off for Sam Altman\u2019s plagiarism machine. The only thing that made any sense is that Hollywood executives, like Silicon Valley executives, hate paying for human labor so much that they have convinced themselves that their customers would happily consume AI slop if it was shoved down their throats.\u00a0After Sora\u2019s initial novelty wore off, it became clear that people do not actually want this, and that the people using Sora were using it at great financial cost to OpenAI in order to largely take videos off-platform to spam other social media sites. The Sora subreddit has been basically dead for months outside of people attempting to figure out how to get it to create nudes or people complaining about content violations. When I scrolled Sora Tuesday evening I almost exclusively saw videos that had few or no likes or comments. I saw very little Disney content, though I did see a lot of South Park, Peppa Pig, and SpongeBob videos, none of which were very good.\u00a0<\/p>\n
0:00<\/p>\n
\/0:45<\/p>\n
1\u00d7<\/p>\n
The death of Sora is a good time to check in on how other attempts to slopify Hollywood are going. In December 2024, I wrote about Chinese television giant TCL\u2019s attempt to make an AI-generated movie studio called TCL Film Machine, which was pitched as a \u201ckey pillar of TCLArt, an important brand initiative of TCL to make art more accessible and inspiring worldwide.\u201d I went to the premiere of a series of short films that were pitched as a new way of making movies faster and cheaper. At the time, I asked Chris Regina, TCL\u2019s then Chief Content Officer and a leader of the TCL Film Machine project what the plan was.\u00a0\u201cIf you can imagine where we might be a year or 18 months from now, I think that in some ways is probably what scares a lot of the industry because they can see where it sits today, and as much as they want to poke holes or be critical of it, they do realize that it will continue to be better,\u201d he said, 14 months ago.\u00a0Regina and another TCL executive on that project now have other jobs. TCL itself has released the five shorts I saw, as well as an 11-minute, widely mocked romcom film called Next Stop Paris, and a four-minute film called Memory Maker. Memory Maker was released 13 months ago and has 1,771 views on YouTube. Next Stop Paris has 10,000 views on YouTube. Comments have been turned off for both movies. The \u201capplications\u201d page for prospective TCL Film Machine projects is now just a static page, and TCL hasn\u2019t mentioned AI films in any of its press releases in roughly a year; many of its recent announcements have to do with releasing reruns of shows from the 80s and 90s.\u00a0Meanwhile, much-hyped \u201cAI movies\u201d or \u201cAI special effects,\u201d including the Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise AI fight scene that the New York Times boldly declared \u201cspooked Hollywood\u201d have been wildly overhyped, still have various continuity errors and an uncanny feel, or are simply not movies in any meaningful sense.\u00a0This is not to say that AI will have no role in Hollywood or that people are not making money from AI slop. Hollywood studios are using AI behind the scenes for editing, storyboarding, scratch voiceover, and a handful of other things. But the wild hype of AI slop as a direct threat to human storytelling and AI tools as a replacement for talented humans in Hollywood has not come to pass and it\u2019s not clear if it ever will. The AI movies at AI film festivals continue to suck and the people who show up to them are largely people involved in making them or invested in having them work out. AI slop is effective on social media, meanwhile, not because it is good or because people like it but because these platforms are flooded with it, because social media companies are invested in making generative AI tools, and because their algorithms are wildly broken. It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it.And the end of Sora does not mean there is no demand for AI video generators, but it does mean that the overwhelming use case for AI video generators continues to be what it has always been: people making porn, nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation, and low-effort slop at scale. The people making this type of content do not want to deal with guardrails or limitations and so have largely flocked to open source and Chinese models. When you take away those use cases, it turns out there\u2019s basically nothing left. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"