The Walt Disney Company is officially backing out of its morally inept deal with OpenAI after the collapse of Sora. Disney, which initiated layoffs affecting several hundred employees globally, primarily within its film, television, and corporate finance units last June, previosuly pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora.
So much of what is being made today is already made to be crammed onto a 6-inch screen to sell you subscriptions and ads for countless betting companies and whatnot. Everybody involved at the top is trying to squeeze every bit of money from you in whatever way they can. And now there is this new thing, which is everywhere, and all these tech-bros keep wanting the death of creativity and are always tweeting about how this new AI tool will end movie studios or animation or replace real musicians.
Of course, these companies do not care; they just want to make the most amount of profit they can in the next six months and move on, and I, who is very young, feel like an old man yelling at the clouds when I say I am so sick and tired of seeing AI everywhere.
Letting an AI platform loose on characters like Mickey Mouse and Cinderella was never any “innovation.” It was a low-effort gamble that Disney’s most valuable assets, which have been carefully curated over nearly a century and feature thousands of hours of hard work from actual human beings who poured their sweat and tears, could be stretched into infinite, user-generated content.
A recent investigation from The New York Times into over 1,000 YouTube Shorts recommended to young children revealed that after creating a new account and watching popular traditional children’s channels, nearly half of the videos suggested by the platform featured AI-generated visuals. This suggests that either the algorithm heavily favours AI slop, that these slop creators know how to manipulate it, or that the content itself is astoundingly pervasive.
Disney, of course, is also probably aware that it is considerably easier to keep kids engaged with animation and wanted to make extra cash and generate more engaged streaming minutes without having to pay actual creatives or put any effort behind it whatsoever
And Sora, for all the hype, quickly exposed the limits of that vision. The early demos may have impressed Hollywood, but the reality was messier—uncanny, inconsistent, and often creatively empty. Disney wasn’t just experimenting with new technology; it was effectively endorsing a system built to mass-produce content that mimics artistry without actually engaging in it. That’s a far cry from the studio that built its reputation on meticulous craftsmanship and storytelling discipline.
Now, with Sora shut down and the deal scrapped, Disney is left with little to show for the experiment beyond a reputational bruise. OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, can pivot to its next frontier. Disney, meanwhile, has to reckon with why it was so willing to trade the long-term value of its characters for short-term relevance in the AI gold rush.
If anything, this episode should serve as a warning. Not every technological shift needs to be embraced at full speed—especially when it risks turning some of the most iconic figures in pop culture into disposable content.