Disney says Google AI infringes copyright “on a massive scale”

Summary

Content silos for AI The generative AI boom has treated copyright as a mere suggestion as companies race to gobble up training data and remix it as “new” content. A cavalcade of companies, including The New York Times and Getty Images, have sued over how their material has been used and replicated by AI. Disney itself threatened a lawsuit against Character.AI earlier this year, leading to the removal of Disney content from the service. Google isn’t Character.AI, though. It’s probably no coincidence that Disney is challenging Google at the same time it is entering into a content deal with OpenAI. Disney has invested $1 billion in the AI firm and agreed to a three-year licensing deal that officially brings Disney characters to OpenAI’s Sora video app. The specifics of that arrangement are still subject to negotiations. The launch of the Sora app earlier this year was widely derided by the entertainment industry, but that’s nothing a little money can’t solve. OpenAI required copyright owners to opt out of having their content included in the service, but it later reversed course to an opt-in model. The Disney deal is OpenAI’s first major content tie-in for AI. Meanwhile, Google’s AI tools don’t pay any mind to copyright. If you want to create images and videos with The Avengers, Super Mario, or any other character, Google doesn’t stand in your way. Whether or not that remains the case depends on how Google responds to Disney’s lawyers. There’s no indication that Disney’s licensing deal with OpenAI is exclusive, so it’s possible Google and Disney will reach an agreement to allow AI recreations. Google could also choose to fight back against this particular interpretation of copyright. Most companies would channel Character.AI and avoid a fight with Disney’s lawyers, but Google’s scale gives it more options. In either case, we could soon see the AI content ecosystem become a patchwork of content silos not unlike streaming media. If you want to generate an image featuring...