Bob Iger defended Disney’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI during a Thursday appearance on CNBC, right alongside Sam Altman.
“We’re not including name and likeness, nor are we including character voices, so in reality this does not in any way represent a threat to the creators at all — in fact, the opposite, I think it honors them and respects them, in part because there’s a license fee associated with it,” the Disney CEO said on “Squawk on the Street.”
“The other thing it does is it enables us to be comfortable that OpenAI is putting guardrails, essentially, around how these are used, so there’s nothing for us to be concerned about from a consumer perspective, meaning this will be a safe environment and a safe way for consumers to engage with our characters in a new way,” he continued. “Also, let’s be mindful of the fact that these are 30-second videos, so we’re not talking about creating shorts or movies, for that matter.”
Indeed, Disney has licensed 200 of its characters for Sora users to create video content with in a three-year, partially exclusive agreement.
“This is a great opportunity for the company to enable consumers to engage with our characters on what is probably the most modern of technology/media platforms today,” Iger added. “Obviously, we’ve been mindful of the significant growth in AI to begin with, and extremely impressed with the progress that Sam and OpenAI have made … We think this is a good investment for the company. It’s a way in, of sorts, for us to appreciate even more what is obviously something that has significance in terms of the longterm impact on our business.”
Elsewhere in their joint interview, Iger offered a bit of clarity behind Disney’s decision to send Google a cease and desist letter over what his legal team called copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”
“We’ve been aggressive at protecting our IP and we’ve gone after other companies that have not honored our IP, not respected our IP, not valued it, and this is another example of us doing just that,” he explained. “We’d been in conversation with Google basically expressing our concerns about this and, ultimately, because we didn’t really make any progress, the conversations didn’t bear fruit, we felt we had no choice but to send them a cease and desist.”
While Altman himself didn’t offer too many details about the overall deal, it notably comes as the tech giant has seen the popularity of its Sora app decline in recent weeks despite much noice surrounding the launch of Sora 2.
