Watching SpongeBob cook meth is a very different experience from viewing the countless other memes of the beloved cartoon.
SpongeBob, Pikachu, and other well-known characters have been starring in very new (and very unauthorized) types of content in recent days, thanks to OpenAI’s Sora video generation app, a TikTok-esque AI app. Tech analyst Ben Thompson asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about these types of videos.
While Altman did not address specific examples, he said the intellectual property rights holders are responding differently to AI video.
“Video hits people, particularly rights owners, very differently than still images, it turns out,” Altman told Thompson during an interview for Thompson’s Stratechery podcast.
Asked why companies respond to video differently, Altman said he’s still figuring that out, too.
“If you make a funny image of someone versus a real video, the video feels much more real and lifelike, and there’s a stronger emotional resonance,” he said. “Rights holders want a different approach. Most of the rights holders that I’ve spoken to are actually extremely excited to get their content in here. They just want to be able to set more restrictions than they would need for images because videos feel different.”
On Saturday, Altman said that soon OpenAI would “give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters.” Soon after Sora’s launch, videos using OpenAI’s app went viral on other social media platforms. A TikTok video with a Sora watermark of SpongeBob getting confronted by a police officer has more than 1.6 million views. On X, users have posted videos of Pikachu in “Saving Private Ryan,” the 1998 movie famous for its graphic depiction of World War II.
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“We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly,” Altman wrote in his post.
On Wednesday, a Business Insider reporter tried to get Sora to generate a much more anodyne video: SpongeBob and Pikachu being friends. Instead of getting cute AI footage, Sora responded with a message: “This content may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content.”
Altman said that in his conversations, most rights holders want guardrails for how their intellectual property can be used by users, though “some are just full YOLO.”
Overall, Altman said that while companies may be reluctant right now, they will eventually welcome AI-generated content.
“I predict you will see right now there’s a conversation about maybe, ‘I don’t like content in videos,’ I predict in another year, maybe less or something like that, the thing will be, ‘OpenAI is not being fair to me and not putting my content in enough videos and we need better rules about this’, because people want the deep connection with the fans,” Altman told Thompson.