Bob Iger says Disney’s $1 billion cope with OpenAI is an ‘alternative, not a menace’: ‘We’d somewhat take part than be disrupted by it’

The two companies announced a three-year deal that would bring more than 200 characters to Sora with a period of exclusivity for part of the duration of the deal.

Disney CEO Bob Iger painted the team-up as Disney taking the next step in content with the newest technology and waived away concerns about whether the deal represents a threat to human creators.

“We’ve always viewed technological advances as opportunity, not threat,” Iger said. 

“It’s going to happen regardless, and we’d rather participate in the rather dramatic growth, rather than just watching it happen and essentially being disrupted by it,” he later added.

Iger also noted in an interview with CNBC that as part of the deal, Disney characters can be used in Sora videos, but it does not include rights to likeness or voices. 

“OpenAI is putting guardrails essentially around how these are used, so that really there’s nothing to be concerned about from a consumer perspective,” he said. “This will be a safe environment and a safe way for consumers to engage with our characters in a new way.”

Iger said the company would also feature some user-generated AI content from Sora on the Disney+ platform, which he said would be a great way to increase engagement with younger users.

Disney will receive warrants to buy additional equity in OpenAI as part of the deal and Iger said there would be future opportunities for the company to become an OpenAI customer including licensing from OpenAI. 

Starting last year, OpenAI started opening up Sora to more users and in September launched Sora 2, an upgraded version of the video generator catered more toward mobile. Controversy followed its September release because of the app’s ability to create convincing and realistic videos of people. In October, OpenAI paused AI-generated deepfake videos that featured civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. after his daughter, Bernice A. King complained they were being used in a “demeaning, disjointed” way.

Thursday’s deal also comes after Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google for allegedly using its intellectual property to train its AI models and in its services without permission. The company has previously sent similar letters to other companies like Character.ai. Iger told CNBC that Character.ai corrected the issue shortly after and noted that with Google, “the ball is in their court,” and Disney would wait to see how they react to the claim.

Altman for his part said Sora users have longed to use Disney characters in their videos and said he hoped adding them to the platform could “unleash a sort of whole new way that people use this technology.”

“We have underestimated the amount of latent creativity in the world,” said Altman. “But if you lower the effort, skill, time required to create new things people very quickly are able to bring ideas to life.”