No, Jerry Beck, Nothing Good will Come Out of Disney's OpenAI deal

 Recently, I heard the news that Disney will be investing a billion dollars into OpenAI. This deal will enable for Sora 2 to provide access to 200 Disney characters for users to use in their videos however they like. Let's see, that amounts to Pixar, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Marvel, Star Wars, what else? To some animation pundits bullish about the potential prospects of utilizing this technology, this sounds like a cure for the American animation industry's current creativity crisis. 

Jerry Beck, co-founder of Cartoon Brew and a longtime animation affecionado and historian, thinks so. He argues that it is something that Walt Disney, a known tech and art pioneer, would support. 

Yet a very quick look at a few samples of what people have made with Sora 2 proves otherwise.

As a word of warning, there's a lot of these videos out there. Be prepared to see some truly wild clips in one of these many compilation videos:

Let's see: Fat people breaking through floors, animals with projectile rocket diarrhea, disrespectful videos of famous dead people (including presidents, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Queen Elizabeth II), obviously not satirical fake Pixar movie trailers about adult content/controversial incidents, and surreal game shows involving sapient animals, crazy cat videos, among many, MANY other things. True Artstation content right there.

Yet Jerry Beck does not seem very much aware that generative AI is largely being wasted on such pointless gag videos. All our electric bills are going up not because we're indirectly investing our hard-earned money into creating something that will better us as a whole, but because so many people these days are latching onto those programs like they're very expensive sugar daddy toys, and the corporations are just eating all the craze articles up. It is very likely he may have heard all the stories about Disney's reaction to some of this AI-generated content, but ironically, it's hard to take the article seriously when Disney is vehemently opposed to garbage like this: 

Oh my.

Oh, oh my.

But do you think people will make anything different?

I doubt it.

Postmodern human nature is very much at play here. It seems that many Americans these days seem more obsessed with trying to take what exists and mar it to their individual liking. Generative AI is the perfect example of what I like to call "FEC Tech" (Free, Easy, Convenient Technology). It is a kind of tech that gets everyone interested who is unskilled and does not want to invest the necessary time into learning the old crafts that are the alternatives to it. Who wants to learn animation, draw, write, or play an instrument when they can just let a program do it for them?

Shame on Disney for now taking back their claims to oppose the evils of generative AI. They used to really care.

But will anything meaningful come out of this beyond the everyday heaps of garbage we're already getting from AI?

Maybe. But it will be hard. Again fewer people will want to learn how to actually make something, but instead use AI to recreate the stories of their dreams without really getting the gist of the whole process.

Take for example, the infamous Zootopia abortion fan comic, "I Will Survive". That has been adapted through AI:

Except for some frames,

Why does Nick look like he got a hand amputation?

What the actual **** is going on here? And what happened to young Nick's arms?

It looks surprisingly good. Considering that the Zootopia franchise proper is becoming a metaphor for PG-rated racism where our dynamic predator-prey animal cop duo goes to each city in the Animal Kingdom States of America to fight for justice, it honestly seems scary that there are certainly people out there who have real drives to accomplish something, and with real talent, compared to the highly restrained writers and directors at Disney.

But I still don't see how Disney's OpenAI deal will change anything for the better. If anything, real, genuine talent, the kind that struggles to find the right mentors and the right nurturing communities, have to contend with their voices being lost in an increasingly unnavigable vast ocean of garbage that only exists either because some people really want to put that out there, or have huge egos and desires for fame without any real work being put into it.

I honestly don't think someone like Walt Disney would support this technology. I do know that Walt was indeed a pioneer of technical innovation, but I don't think he would throw away human potential in favor of embracing a technology that is still largely unreliable and flaw-ridden. The old Disney's greatest achievements came from the work of real hands. People who were willing to accept the burden of long hours, inadequate pay, and enormous challenges in the quest to produce some of the finest works of modern art imaginable. Accepting AI as the ultimate means to solve all the problems of inefficiency and scale would be a betrayal to them.

Jerry Beck, if you really want to know how dangerous your argument is, just take a look at YouTube, or any other social media platform. And then look at all those articles about companies seeking to supplant their real working crews. Just some food for thought.