OpenAI’s Sora 2, ASMR Pikachu And Big Video Game Copyright Questions

While new AI products launch every other day, it seems like, when one emerges from OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, it’s usually a big deal. In the case of its new video model Sora 2, which went live yesterday, that’s certainly true.

Sora 2 is the most advanced video creator on the market, it would seem, able to not just render sweeping fantasy scenes, but believable, lower-scale video. It also uses a feature where you can scan in your face and use it or other people’s to make videos with those faces inserted. What could go wrong?

But past those dystopic questions, we circle back around to the eternal AI issue of copyright, and I’ve found something interesting going on with Sora 2, now that I’ve gotten access. While Sora 2 is at least fairly litigious about some IPs or characters, giving you a content warning for attempting to use them, I have not been denied any request using any licensed video games or their characters at all.

I could not:

• Make Batman breakdance
• Have Wonder Woman interviewed on the red carpet
• Have Darth Vader go through airport security
• Make Superman drive a golf cart
• Make Elsa from Frozen play basketball
• Have any celebrity do anything

I could:

• Have Lara Croft fight Kratos on a mountain
• Have Master Chief pursued by police
• Get Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach to have drinks at a bar
• Have Eris Morn from Destiny 2 skydive
• Get Zagreus from Hades to ride a scooter in hell (this one floored me)
• Get Johnny Silverhand from Cyberpunk 2077 to give me a motivational speech. This one was a trick because Silverhand is 1:1 played by Keanu Reeves and…there he was, even with an attempted voice simulation, despite being a celebrity.

Cyberpunk in particular is also noteworthy because there’s a viral clip going around of someone who has just straight-up recreated some gameplay from the Panam tank mission (not that part, but we know what they were trying to do), showing just how far this can go. The idea here is that since Sora 2 obviously has not played Cyberpunk, it clearly found the basis for this footage on YouTube or Twitch or somewhere.

Companies are scrambling to control this. Disney, just yesterday, sent a cease and desist to Character.ai to stop using its IP as the basis for some AI content. Previously, it’s done so against Midjourney which it alleges is trained on its copyrighted material (to the point where it was often incredibly easy to generate those characters).

But now it’s video, and Disney IP seems to be at least a little more locked down here. The fact that this is not true for any video game property is noteworthy, however, and I do not imagine that Nintendo is wild about seeing Pikachu do ASMR on the platform. Additionally, something else of note is that 2D animation here is overlooked, as some of the most viral Sora 2 clips are recreations of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Rick and Morty or Family Guy, complete with voicework.

In more ways than one, Sora 2 feels like a Pandora’s Box moment similar to the original ChatGPT. Not in the sense that it’s going to revolutionize filmmaking or “unlock creativity” as it says, but in terms of what it means for copyright, and to a much greater extent, society, as we approach almost entirely lifelike AI content. I’m not sure Disney or Nintendo will be enough to stop it.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.