OpenAI launched Sora 2 on Wednesday, the new version of its AI short video generator, which now provides synchronised sound. The result has sparked questions as to whether studios will take this to court says THR.
Within 48 hours, the Internet has gone wild as people have been experimenting with ideas, from the widely seen Pikachu in “Saving Private Ryan” video to one in which OpenAI’s Sam Altman appears as a 1960s-era James Bond.
Puck’s Matt Belloni typed in “South Park’s Cartman doing the ‘you can’t handle the truth’ monologue from A Few Good Men” and received a video of just that – one that fairly convincingly captures the animation style and voice work from the show.
According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI has indicated that copyright characters will be removed if IP-holders file an opt-out request. Sora also won’t generate images of recognisable public figures without their permission.
However, it also indicates companies with characters at risk of copyright violation are unable to file a ‘blanket opt-out across all of an artist or studio’s work.’ Instead, IP-owners will have to report violations on a character-by-character basis.
Varun Shetty, OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, tells THR that the company is “working with rights holders to understand their preferences for how their content appears across our ecosystem”.
For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators, which has led to lawsuits from authors, news organisations, artists and studios. Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Universal all sued Midjourney earlier this year for allowing users to produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters.
OpenAI and other tech companies have been lobbying the Trump administration to clarify that using copyrighted material to train AI models is fair use.
