Sora Update #1
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
Translation from snake speech bs: We've been threatened by Japanese artists via their lawyers that unless we remove the "Ghibli" feature that earned us so much money, and others like it, we're going to get absolutely destroyed in court.
Sickening
Not only do they consider it art, they call what you and I consider art "humanslop" and consider it inferior to AI.
It's easy to get too chronically online and focus on some tiny weird thing you saw when in fact it's just a tiny weird thing
Art is overwhelmingly not a charity project from artists to the commons.
No, you almost never see art that wasn’t meant to be sold. Public art pieces are commissioned (sold), art in galleries were created by professional artists (even if commercially unsuccessful) 99.99999% of the time.
Surely if this wasn’t true, you could point to a few specific examples of art — or even broad categories of art — that weren’t made to be sold and that you have personally seen?
Going back to the origin of this, stating that Ghibli style videos generated with SORA (which the OP initially called "content") are equivalent to Studio Ghibli movies because they are both "art made to be sold" would be wild. A film like Spirited Away took over 1 million hours of work, if making money was the main goal it would have never happened.
"they want their to be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold" is a clever trick but one is not related to the other. One could want their art to be appreciated and never sell it, but virtually no one would see this art for a variety of reasons including the fact that marketability increases visibility and that there is very, very little amateur art that is worth looking at, much less promoting to a larger audience.
It seems you agree that in fact art (that anyone sees) is overwhelmingly made to be sold.
I didn't say anything about their "main motivation" and neither you nor I (nor even the artist, frankly) could say much about what someone's main motivation is.
What we can say is that nearly all of the art anyone sees was in fact made to be sold, which is the specific claim that I made.
See comment above.
Here, I'll restate it:
> Almost every piece of art you've ever seen (by virtue of you seeing it) was made to be marketed and sold.
> Art is overwhelmingly not a charity project from artists to the commons.
The Sistine Chapel: Content, not art
The Mona Lisa: Content, not art
The Guggenheim: Content, not art
David: Content, not art
Geurnica: Content, not art
Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67: Content, not art
I understand why the original comment said it, and my response is a simple explanation as to why the original comment was very obviously incorrect.
Because most art isn't in a gallery or store. You quite literally aren't seeing it.
> Almost every piece of art you've ever seen (by virtue of you seeing it) was made to be marketed and sold.
Different places have different cultures, apparently your coworkers aren't to know anything about you beyond what's necessary for them to work with you, but across the whole world, not everywhere is like that, and it seems unnecessary to state that you don't live in such a place in that way.
This scenario is irrelevant to my main thesis anyway, which is that people principally do not develop artistry to the levels required for strangers to care about it without doing so as a professional pursuit.
That you get to see the exhaust and byproducts of such a professional pursuit isn't a point against it.
Paradoxically, it signals indifference or disregard about the actual contents of a work.
> I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.
There's usually more useful information in what Sam Altman specifically doesn't say than what he does.
> Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
> We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users.
> The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we want both to be valuable.
Secondly, to make a prediction about the future business model - it sounds like large companies (disney, nintendo, etc) will be able to enter revenue sharing agreements with OpenAI where users pay extra to use specific brand characters in their generated videos, and some of that licensing cost will be returned to the "rightsholders". But I bet everyone else - you, me, small youtube celebrities - will be left out in the cold with no controls over their likeness. After all, it's not like they could possibly identify every single living person and tie them to their likeness.
2. They might get into trouble charging users to generate some other entity's IP, so they may revenue-share with the IP owner.
They're probably still losing money even if they charge for video generation, but recouping some of that cost, even if they revshare, is better than nothing.
Or, in other words: here’s Sam Altman saying to Disney “you should actually be grateful if people generate tons of videos with Disney characters because it puts them front and center again.”, but then he acknowledges that OpenAI also benefits from it and therefore should pay Disney something. But this will be his argument when negotiating for a lower revenue share, and if his theory holds, then brands that don’t enter into a revenue share with OpenAI because they don’t like the deal terms may lose out on even more money and attention that they would get via Sora.
Neither has most of the stuff Sam has said since basically the moment he started talking.
It is possible, perhaps, that he is actually a very stupid person!
(i) they will need to start charging money per generation (ii) they will share some of this money with rightsholders
So it's not about reimbursing "rightsholders" they rip off. It's about giving a pittance to those who allow them to continue to do so.
Sorry, trying to give a pittance to them.
It has left me wondering if, instead of just charging users, they would start charging "rightsholders" for IP protection. I could see a system where e.g. Disney pays OpenAI $1 million up front to train in recognition of Mickey Mouse, and then receives a revenue share back from users who generate videos containing Mickey Mouse.
Wasn’t he literally scanning eye balls a couple years ago?
Now, the OpenAI will be lecturing their own users, while expecting them to make them rich. I suspect, the users will find it insulting.
Generation for personal use is not illegal, as far as I know.
> enable generating ghibli content since users are ADDICTED to that style
> willingly ignore the fact that the people who own this content don't want this
> wait a few days
> "ooooh we're so sorry for letting these users generate copyrighted content"
> disables it via some dumb ahh prompt detection algorithm
> dumb down the model and features even more
> add expensive pricing
> wait a few months
> launch new model without all of these restrictions again so that the difference to the new model feels insane
Don't worry, you can write "dumb ass" here without needing to use algospeak. This isn't Instagram or TikTok and you won't be unpersoned by a "trust and safety" team for doing so.
P.S. No need for a space after your meme arrows :-)
the blind greed of copyright companies disgusts me
Saying 'disney/laws bad because I want billionaire corporation to have access to something they know they don't but built their business model around using anyway.' isn't saying anything but 'I want what I want'.
If anything society should take this slow and do it right, not throw out hundreds of years of thinking/decisions/progress because 'disney' and 'cool new tech'.
We should not bend/throw away laws because billion dollar industry chose to build a new business model around ignoring them. Down that path lies dystopia.
Copyright stifles cultural evolution and suppresses creative expression by preventing ordinary people from subverting, reinterpreting, and otherwise reusing cultural icons.
The original 28 years of copyright would be enough for everyone from small artists to Disney to see massive ROI on works of art.
Art from 1998 is irrelevant or has already made the creator rich, so it's clear that even 28 years is an overshot.
Refusal to share when it costs nothing is simply greed. Let the people create and innovate. Let our culture evolve.
> People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
What did OpenAI expect, really? They imposed no meaningful generation limits and and "very small audiences" is literally the point of an invite-only program.
Of course, another reason that people don’t publish their generated videos is because they are bad. I may or may not be speaking from experience.
Day 2+ I haven’t used the app again.
And on that note can I add how much I truly despise sentences like this:
> We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of "interactive fan fiction" and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all).
To me this sentence sums up a certain kind of passive aggressive California, Silicon Valley, sociopathic way of communicating with people that just makes my skin crawl. It’s sort of a conceptual cousin to concepts like banning someone from a service without even telling them or using words like “sunset” instead of “cancel” and so on.
What that sentence actually fucking means is that a lot of powerful people with valuable creative works contacted them with lawyers telling them to knock this the fuck off. Which they thought was appropriate to put in parentheses at the end as if it wasn’t the main point.
To me that's Sam Altman in a nutshell. I remember listening to an extended interview with him and I felt creeped out by the end of it. The film Mountainhead does a great job capturing this.
I wish big exploitative tech companies would fight them over copyright of code but almost all big exploitative tech companies are also big exploitative ML companies.
Oracle to the rescue? What a sick, sad world.
Sam's sentence tries to paint what happened in a positive light, and imagines positive progress as both sides work towards 'yes'.
So I agree that it would be nice if he were more direct, but if he's even capable of that it would be 30 years from now when someone's asking him to reminisce, not mid-hustle. And I'd add that I think this is true of all business executives, it's not necessarily a Silicon Valley thing. They seem to frequently be mealy-mouthed. I think it goes with the position.
This is what I don’t like about HN, manufactured outrage when one dislikes the messenger. No substance whatsoever.
When users are given such a powerful tool like Sora, there will naturally be conflicts. If one makes a video putting a naked girl in a sacred Buddhist temple in Bangkok, how do you think Thai people will react?
This is OpenAI attempting balancing acts between conflicting interests, while trying to make money.
[1]-https://www.novonordisk.com/content/nncorp/global/en/news-an...
The messenger isn’t some random, disconnected third party here.
In addition, the training process attempts to reproduce the copyrighted training data as perfectly as possible, with the intent to rent the resulting model out for commercial gain afterwards. Many argue that this is not fair use, but another instance of copyright infringement.
And if the previous infractions weren't enough, OpenAI's customers are now generating mass videos of copyrighted characters.
So, while it may be common corporate speak, it is still snake-tongued weasel-blather that downplays the illegality of their actions.
Even content like Spongebob and Rick and Morty is now being rejected after having flooded the feeds.
This is a non-starter, unless you own a "license to AI" from the rights owner directly, such as an ad agency that uses Sora to generate an ad it was hired to do.
For example, I had no problem getting the desired results when I promoted Sora for “A street level view of that magical castle in a Florida amusement area, crowds of people walking and a monorail going by on tracks overhead.”
Hint: it wasn’t Universal Studios, and unless you know the place by blind sight you’d think it had been the mouse’s own place.
On pure image generation, I forget which model, one derived from stable diffusion though, there was clearly a trained unweighting of Mickey Mouse such that you couldn’t get him to appear by name, but go at it a little sideways? Even just “Minnie Mouse and her partner”? Poof- guardrails down. If you have a solid intuition of the term “dog whistling” and how it’s done, it all becomes trivial.
My comment was intended more to point out that copyright cartels are a competitive liability for AI corps based in "the west". Groups who can train models on all available culture without limitation will produce more capable models with less friction for generating content that people want.
People have strong opinions about whether or not this is morally defensible. I'm not commenting on that either way. Just pointing out the reality of it.
And not just by name. Try to get it to generate the Hulk, even with roundabout descriptions. You can get past the initial (prompt-level) blocking, but it’ll generate the video and then say the guardrails caught it.
(The "takers" also do not have copyright protection.)
Even if you take away copyright, there are plenty of incentives to create. Copyright is not the sole reason people create.
Permissive licenses are great in software, where SAAS is an alternative route to getting paid. How does that work if you're a musician, artist, writer, or filmmaker who makes a living selling the rights to your creative output? It doesn't.
That’s one of them, but I really don’t have to be specific about the reasons. I just have to point out the existence of permissively licensed works. You said:
> Great, you've just removed any incentive for people to make anything.
This is very obviously untrue. Perhaps you meant to say “…you’ve just removed some incentives for people to make some things”?
- owners of large platforms who don't care what "content"[0] is successful or if creators get rewarded, as long as there is content to show between ads
- large corporations who can afford to protect their content with DRM
Is that correct?
Do you expect it to play out differently? Game it out in your head.
[0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...
Consider that even DRM'd content is on torrent sites within hours of release.
I'm not sure for most (specifically smaller, who need the most protection) creators this would actually change very much. Media typically makes money in it's first few years of life, not 70 years on.
This is a highly complex question about how legal systems, companies, and individual creatives come in conflict, and cannot be summarized as a positive creative constraint / means to celebrate their works.
In fact, copyright should belong to the people who actually create stuff, not those who pay them.
Most of the (obviously infringing) video I've seen is stuff well within the past 30-50 years.
Also, no copyright doesn't mean information free for all.
I still can't generate a fake video, pretend it's real, and then claim you're a criminal or you eat babies or something. Because that's libel.
Why do we have libel laws? Because the alternative is that you piss off Walmart or something and then they go and tell all employers that you're a pedophile and then you starve to death, with the cherry on top of having a tainted legacy. So we definitely need the libel laws.
But that's a problem. The whole premise of Sora is that it generates fake video with the intention of making it as real as possible.
No matter how you cut it, Sora's business model, and moral model, is on shakey grounds.
Marvelous ability to convolute the simple message "rightholders told us to fuck off"
Today, Sora users on reddit are pretty much beside themselves because of newly enabled content restrictions. They are (apparently) no longer able to generate these types of videos and see no use for the service without that ability!
To me it raises two questions:
1) Was the initial "free for all" a marketing ploy?
2) Is it the case that people find these video generators a lot less interesting when they have to come up with original ideas for the videos and cannot use copyright characters, etc?
Woke: AI slop tictoc to waste millions of human-hours.
Don't forget the power it consumes from an already overloaded grid [while actively turning off new renewable power sources], the fresh water data centers consume for cooling, and the noise pollution forced on low-income residents.
What surprises me a bit is that they'd take this TikTok route, rather than selling Sora as a very expensive storyboarding tool to film/tv studios, producers, etc. Why package it as an app for your neice to make viral videos that's bound to lose money with every click? Just sell it for $50k/hr of video to someone with deep pockets. Is it just a publicity stunt?
Because it’s not good enough, I would assume. Hard to see it actually being useful in this role.
I suspect OpenAI’s costs to be higher if anything since Google’s infra is more cost-efficient.
Though again, caveat: Those are API prices. The real prices could be both lower (if there is a profit margin) or higher (if they are subsidized).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434298
Generally speaking, API costs that the consumer sees are way higher than compute costs that the provider pays.
EDIT: Upper limit on pure on-going compute cost. If you factor in chip capital costs as another commentator on the other thread pointed out, you might add another order of magnitude.
Workers getting paid a flat rate while owners are raking in the entire income generated by the work is how the rich get richer faster than any working person can.
Seems more like selective, intentional ignoring of the problem to me. It's just because if they start to pay up, everyone will want to get paid, and paying other people is something that companies like this systematically try to avoid as much as possible.
If a service has real value people actually want, then it doesn't require ads. If the service needs ads to be viable as a business, that's a strong indicator the product or service isn't very good or useful.
I can't tell if this is face saving or delusion.
Why should AI generated videos not have revenue sharing.
In the end what matters is whether people enjoy the video, it does not matter if its AI created or human created.
The fact that LLMs are trained on humans data yet the same humans receive no benefits from it (cannot even use the weights for free, even if they unwillingly contributed to it existing), kind of sucks.
What alternative is there? Let companies freely slurp up people's work and give absolutely nothing back?
So this is why you have to be careful about usage numbers. The only true meaningful number is about those who are contributing towards revenue. Without that OAI is just a giant money sink.
I also don't think the "Sam Altman" videos were authentic/organic at all, smells much more like a coordinated astroturfing campaign.
I would be actually moved if there was some genuine in the line of "We are sorry - we wanted to make a PR stunt, but we went to hard." and offered real $ for that. (Not that I believe it is going to happen, as GenAI does not like this kind of precedence.)
Once again, Scam Altman looking for excuses to raise more money. What a joke…
> person should be able to block a video someone shares without their consent
That is already implemented.
Ok... how is that supposed to work? I don't have an OpenAI account, there are no permission controls for me. Someone else could easily upload a picture of me, no?
So unless you've posted a video of yourself online saying every number from 1 to 99 they won't be able to copy your likeness
My partner likes to cosplay, and some of the costumes are quite extensive. If they want to generate a video in a specific outfit will they need to record a new source video? The problem exists in the other direction, too. If someone looks a lot like Harrison Ford, will they be able to create videos with their own likeness?
I wonder how this extends to videos with multiple people, as well. E.g. if both my friend and I want to be in a video together.
But at that point you might as well just use WAN 2.2 Animate and forget about Sora.