The Motion Picture Association has issued damning a statement about the generative AI video platform Sora 2 and its ‘opt-out’ attitude to copyright. Launched on the 4th October, Sora 2 is the latest iteration in OpenAI’s video generation app which allows users to create moving images by typing in text prompts. Although currently only available ... Sora 2 | OpenAI needs to take “immediate action” over copyright infringement, the Motion Picture Association says
The Motion Picture Association has issued damning a statement about the generative AI video platform Sora 2 and its ‘opt-out’ attitude to copyright.
Launched on the 4th October, Sora 2 is the latest iteration in OpenAI’s video generation app which allows users to create moving images by typing in text prompts. Although currently only available to a select number of invited users, social media has since been sprinkled with clips featuring copyrighted characters – one video doing the rounds saw Rick and Morty advertising some form of cryptocurrency.
OpenAI didn’t seem too concerned about this, with news spreading that the company was adopting an ‘opt-out’ approach for copyright holders. In other words, if The Pokemon Company doesn’t like seeing Pikachu appearing in questionable AI-generated videos, a representative could fill in a dispute form and hope that OpenAI does something about it.
More disturbingly, Sora 2 also appeared to be able to generate fake scenes of terrorism and war crimes according to The Guardian – despite OpenAI’s insistence that guard rails were in place to prevent the app outputting violent or harmful images.
Within hours of launch, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote a blog post that his company would soon “give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters,” but rather optimistically stated that companies he’d spoken to were “excited” about Sora 2 and regarded it as “interactive fan fiction.”
Videos have already popped up showing SpongeBob SquarePants cooking up what looks like crystal meth and Sam Altman roasting Pikachu’s corpse, which doesn’t sound like the kind of thing rightsholders would be too excited about.
Read more: Tilly Norwood | We can still fight back against the rise of creepy AI actors
More recently, the Motion Picture Association – an organisation set up to advocate for creative people working in film, television and streaming – has written a statement in response to OpenAI’s latest project.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA boss Charles Rivkin wrote. “While OpenAI clarified it will ‘soon’ offer rightsholders more control over character generation, they must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service. OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue. Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI appeared to start cracking down on some copyright-infringing content about a day after Sora 2’s launch, with users taking to social media to point out that ‘content violation’ guardrails had prevented them from using certain prompts.
As Futurism pointed out yesterday, OpenAI’s strategy appears to be to launch a product and then worry about the damage afterwards. And while the company may eventually become wary about upsetting the owners of, say, Mario or Pikachu, smaller creators – who don’t have access to expensive lawyers – are likely to have their work stolen and regurgitated for years to come.
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YouTube multi-millionaire MrBeast has already expressed concern that his of work could soon be crowded out by thousands of AI-generated influencers – perhaps akin to the headline-grabbing Tilly Norwood. And if a creator like MrBeast is worried, then we should all be concerned about where this bilge-spewing technology will soon take us.
