Disney Never Hated AI. It Hated Not Owning It
Disney called AI a plagiarism pit and a smash-and-grab. Now it is testing AI lyric videos with Hercules. Its objection was ownership all along, and the margins that come with it.
Disney has found a shortcut for “Go the Distance”. On Tuesday, at its Accelerator Demo Day in Burbank, the company revealed that it is testing AI-generated lyric videos with the start-up OpenArt, beginning with the anthem from its 1997 animated Hercules. Creative teams can now judge several concepts “in hours rather than weeks“, the company boasts. A song about a boy who must survive every trial to earn his place among the gods has been spared the trial of waiting.
This is the same Disney that sued Midjourney with Universal last year, branding the AI company “a bottomless pit of plagiarism”. In February its lawyer told ByteDance that its Seedance video generator was a “virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP“. To any artist listening, it sounded like the mouse roaring on their behalf.
Read to the End of the Sentence
They should have read the small print, which was printed rather large. Kimberley Harris, general counsel of NBCUniversal, said the Midjourney suit would “protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content”. The artists open that sentence. The investment closes it, and in Hollywood the closing line is the one that gets paid.
Disney’s own chief lawyer, Horacio Gutierrez, was blunter on the same day. “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology,” he said. “But piracy is piracy.” There it was from the first hour of the war: Disney loves the machine, and objects only when somebody else’s name is on the deed.
Shopping for Machines
Now it is buying the deeds. All five companies in this year’s Accelerator are AI firms, and Disney gives them investment capital. It has offered $20 million for rights to Character.AI’s intellectual property and hired its former chief executive as its first chief technology officer, a year after threatening the company for letting its chatbots play Disney characters. It also tried to put $1 billion into OpenAI. That deal collapsed when OpenAI shut down Sora, and no money changed hands.
Then there is the menu at OpenArt, which sells access to other companies’ AI models and lets its customers choose. They include Kling, Google’s Veo and Seedream, which is made by ByteDance. Its Director tool, marketed as “vibe directing“, runs on models including Seedance 2.0, the very generator of February’s smash-and-grab. Nobody has said Disney’s team uses either, and OpenArt offers a tool that flags possible infringement. Still, the outrage of February is on the shelf of Disney’s new partner in November.
Midjourney spotted the awkwardness and asked the court for evidence of Disney’s own use of AI. In June a magistrate judge mostly refused, reportedly finding it irrelevant to Midjourney’s fair use defence. On the law that may be sound. A studio owns what it owns, and it can run its own songs through any machine it likes. Copyright protects the owner. The artist gets a seat if the owner offers one.
Food on the Table
None of this should surprise anyone who has spent time with the men who run Hollywood. A month after the Sony hack, I bumped into the chairman of one of the big studios at a party and asked why Hollywood had not stood up for free speech. “You’re wrong,” he said. “Hollywood is not about that; it’s a business. My job as a chairman of a studio is not to defend freedom of speech but to ensure that my employees have food on their dinner tables at the end each day and that my investors are happy.”
Swap free speech for artists and he could be addressing Tuesday’s Demo Day. Disney’s language is already drifting his way. In February Josh D’Amaro, then its incoming chief executive, said human creativity “never gets replaced“. By August, AI “amplifies what our storytellers can do – it doesn’t replace them“. On Tuesday he promised that Disney would be “very aggressive“. David Min, a Disney vice-president, says the aim is to keep “the artist involved along the way”. He also says the point is to fit these companies into existing workflows and “help expedite that“.
Disney has announced no job cuts tied to any of this, and a lyric video is hardly Fantasia. But the sums are easy to do. An old song earns again between releases, a few hours replace a few weeks, and the investors are happy. The chairman’s employees, and their dinner tables, are left to wonder how many of them that arithmetic still needs.
Hercules had to go the distance. Disney’s shareholders would prefer he took the shortcut.
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