404 Media

2025-12-11 16:48:39

Disney Invests $1 Billion in the AI Slopification of Its Brand

The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel movies. As media empires consolidate, nostalgia intensifies, and AI tools spread, Disney’s blockbusters feel more like an excuse to slam recognizable characters together in a contextless morass.

So of course Disney has announced it signed a deal with OpenAI today that will soon allow fans to make their own officially licensed Disney slop using Sora 2. The house that mouse built, and which has been notoriously protective of its intellectual property, opened up the video generator, saw the videos featuring Nazi Spongebob and criminal Pikachu, and decided: We want in.

According to a press release, the deal is a 3 year licensing agreement that will allow the AI company’s short form video platform Sora to generate slop videos using characters like Mickey Mouse and Iron Man. As part of the agreement, Disney is investing $1 billion of equity into OpenAI, said it will become a major customer of the company, and promised that fan and corporate AI-generated content would soon come to Disney+, meaning that Disney will officially begin putting AI slop into its flagship streaming product.

The deal extends to ChatGPT as well and, starting in early 2026, users will be able to crank out officially approved Disney slop on multiple platforms. When Sora 2 launched in October, it had little to no content moderation or copyright guidelines and videos of famous franchise characters doing horrible things flooded the platform. Pikachu stole diapers from a CVS, Rick and Morty pushed crypto currencies, and Disney characters shouted slurs in the aisles of Wal-Mart.

It is worth mentioning that, although Disney has traditionally been extremely protective of its intellectual property, the company’s princesses have become one of the most common fictional subjects of AI porn on the internet; 404 Media has found at least three different large subreddits dedicated to making AI porn of characters like Elsa, Snow White, Rapunzel, and Tinkerbell. In this case, Disney is fundamentally throwing its clout behind a technology that has thus far most commonly been used to make porn of its iconic characters.

After the hype of the launch, OpenAI added an “opt-in” policy to Sora that was meant to prevent users from violating the rights of copyright holders. It’s trivial to break this policy however, and circumvent the guardrails preventing a user from making a lewd Mickey Mouse cartoon or episode of The Simpsons. The original sin of Sora and other AI systems is that the training data is full of copyrighted material and the models cannot be retrained without great cost, if at all.

If you can’t beat the slop, become the slop.

“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, said in the press release about the agreement.

The press release explained that Sora users will soon have “official” access to 200 characters in the Disney stable, including Loki, Thanos, Darth Vader, and Minnie Mouse. In exchange, Disney will begin to use OpenAI’s APIs to “build new products” and it will deploy “ChatGPT for its employees.”

I’m imagining a future where AI-generated fan trailers of famous characters standing next to each other in banal liminal spaces is the norm. People have used Sora 2 to generate some truly horrifying videos, but the guardrails have become more aggressive. As Disney enters the picture, I imagine the platform will become even more anodyne. Persistent people will slip through and generate videos of Goofy and Iron Man sucking and fucking, sure, but the vast majority of what’s coming will be safe corporate gruel that resembles a Marvel movie.

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Floods Social Media With Videos of Women Being Strangled

X and TikTok accounts are dedicated to posting AI-generated videos of women being strangled.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}