The AI Company Commits to Enhanced Intellectual Property Control After Sora 2 Creates Videos of Well-Known Characters
The company is promising to offer rights owners with increased oversight over the creation of characters following its recently released application, Sora 2, generated a flood of clips featuring protected figures.
Sora 2’s Release and Initial Concerns
Sora 2, driven by AI, was rolled out last week on an exclusive basis. The application allows individuals to create brief clips based on a text prompt. Initial assessments of the AI-generated video feed revealed protected figures from popular shows such as animated series, South Park, creature-collecting franchises and sci-fi comedies.
Before the release of Sora 2, OpenAI allegedly informed artist representatives and production houses that if they did not want their copyrighted material replicated by the AI tool, they would have to opt out.
“We’ll work with rights holders to block characters from Sora at their request and respond to takedown requests.”
The company explained that content owners can flag copyright infringement using a “copyright disputes form”, but individual artists or studios cannot have a universal exclusion.
Leadership’s Reaction and Upcoming Plans
Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post that the organization had been gathering input from the community, rights holders and other groups, and would implement changes as a result.
He mentioned that rights holders would be provided more detailed management over the creation of characters, similar to how users can opt-in to share their own likeness in the application, but with extra safeguards.
“We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of ‘interactive fan fiction’ and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all).”
Addressing Edge Cases and Revenue Plans
The CEO stated that OpenAI would “let rightsholders decide how to proceed” and that there would be some unusual instances of content that bypass the platform’s guardrails that ought not to.
He added that the organization would also “have to somehow make money” from content creation, and already the system was seeing people producing much more content than anticipated per user. This could mean compensation to rights holders who allow their characters to be generated.
“The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon,” Altman said. “Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we want both to be valuable.”
Altman finished by noting that there would be a rapid pace of evolution, similar to the early ChatGPT days, and there would be both successful choices and occasional errors.
