OpenAI Is Cracking Down on ‘South Park’ and ‘Rick and Morty’ Videos

While the Terminator franchise didn’t really touch on Skynet’s potential for shameless copyright violations, A.I. has proven to be a real nightmare for intellectual property rights.

As we mentioned last week, the newest version of OpenAI’s text-to-video program Sora made it very easy for users to duplicate copyrighted material, especially cartoon franchises like South Park. The A.I.-generated South Park videos look and sound just like the real thing, except they’re not funny and likely used up the planet’s scarcest and most important resources. 

But hey, at least we got whatever the fuck this is:

It wasn’t long before people on social media were sharing Sora 2-generated South Park clips as if they were from the actual show, despite the “Sora” watermark that rarely appears on Comedy Central broadcasts. 

People even started posting Sora-made A.I.-generated videos of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman worrying about being sued by South Park over all the Sora-made A.I.-generated videos.

By the way, South Park wasn’t the only animated series to get the soulless slop treatment, Sora 2 also allowed fans of SpongeBob SquarePants, Pokémon and Rick and Morty to create their own unauthorized content. 

And this technology has now finally satiated the public’s need for a Rick and Morty episode that’s also a commercial for crypto.

OpenAI’s policy specified that “copyright owners must opt out of having their content appear,” effectively punting all responsibility to the rights holders being ripped off. But after social media became flooded with copyright-flouting videos made by Sora, OpenAI seemingly changed their tune to some extent, leading some users to complain that Sora has now “banned South Park episodes.”

“First, we will give rights holders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls,” Altman wrote in a blog post. “We are hearing from a lot of rights holders 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).”

Whether or not Trey Parker and Matt Stone will be among these unnamed rights holders who are supposedly “very excited” to have internet randos mess around with their life’s work remains to be seen.