It shouldn’t be surprising that Disney, the company that has become willing to degrade its boldest, most artistic endeavors for profit by churning out unnecessary sequels and bland live-action remakes, is talking to AI companies about letting fans make endless user-generated slop of their properties on Disney+. And indeed, the company that has changed IP law to keep Mickey Mouse out of the hands of the masses is now apparently doing just that.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney CEO Bob Iger said in the company’s latest earnings call that it is “in the midst of rolling out the biggest and the most significant changes — from a product perspective, from a technology perspective — since [Disney+] launched.” Part of this is a licensing agreement with Fortnite developer Epic Games to add “a number of game-like features” to the streaming service, and the other is working with unnamed AI companies to allow subscribers to create short-form video content based on Disney properties.
“The other thing that we’re really excited about, that AI is going to give us the ability to do, is to provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience, including the ability for them to create user-generated content and to consume user-generated content — mostly short-form — from others,” Iger said.
If you hear that and immediately think of how such an opportunity would obviously be exploited by people who want to make explicit or crude videos featuring Mickey Mouse and the rest of Disney’s characters, Iger says that the company is seeking an arrangement that would “reflect [Disney’s] need to protect the IP.” Good luck, bub. I expect the Zootopia stans to make short work of whatever safeguards you try to put on this garbage, and we’ll see Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps making out within the first hour.
It’s pretty damning that Iger uses the words “content” and “consume” when talking about these hypothetical AI slop videos, because that’s all AI-generated videos are: time-wasting, artless content meant to be consumed and discarded. For a company that has been so particular about how its characters are used in the past, this is such a bald-faced heel turn. Disney’s films and characters have been such a major part of pop culture for so long because the company has always been pretty stringent about how its characters were used or portrayed, which made the brand synonymous with quality control (just ask anyone who works at a Disney park about the rules they have to follow in-character), so just letting the reins loose for cheap slop is a real mask-off moment for the company’s priorities.
