Generating children doing NSFW is very illegal, in several jurisdictions even cartoons depicting children in a sexual setting is highly illegal. I would not take that risk if I were them.
I had a manager who preferred monospaced font, it definitely made it easier in a lot of cases. I also notice a number of them make i l and I and 1 distinct enough.
Except for ancient typefaces like Courier, which predate their use in computers, most monospaced fonts that have been created during the last 40 years have been intended for use by programmers or in command-line interfaces.
Therefore having non-ambiguous characters has been an explicit design requirement for them, at least since the Apple Monaco font.
Yeah in my case I want the coding models to be less stupid, I asked for multiple file uploading, it kept the original button and it added a second one for additional files, when I pointed that out “You're absolutely correct!” Well why didnt you think of it before you cranked out code, I see coding agents as really capable Junior devs its really funny. I dont mind it though, saved me hours on my side project if not weeks worth of work.
I mean, they are, so presumably you mean more quickly ? There's a HN article about this after Mozilla fired loads of Rust hackers, and a larger fraction of the Firefox codebase is in Rust than was then, which was in turn more than in 2021 when I first was interested.
It's possible that if Rust had remained "secret sauce" for Mozilla it would have hurt its usage elsewhere, impossible at this distance in time to be sure. There is, for example, far less Rust in Chromium (less than 4%) than in Firefox (more than 12%).
The language surely has many cons, like any language out there. And maybe it wasn't a good fit for Mozilla products. But Mozilla the organisation doesn't really looks that great in term of governance. Given Rust is now even integrated officially in Linux kernel, I have strong doubt that the technical caveats are the main factor of misalignment with Mozilla priorities.
13 years to get to v0.0.1 is a success? Look at how much progress Ladybird has made in a fraction of that time. Remember that these people are constantly starting rewrites of C and C++ projects (when they're not demanding others do it) in Rust "for safety" (and "oops it's MIT now"), even of ancient Unix utilities with minimal attack surfaces like the "date" command, yet when it comes to a browser rendering engine, which entails computationally-intensive, aggressively-optimized rendering of untrusted input--a massive attack surface, and the very thing for which Rust was supposedly designed--they somehow can't get the right combination of enough Rust zealots (and Adderall) to get past the finish line.
Success isn't a binary thing. It's true that Servo has long struggled to make progress, and that can be seen as a failure. It's recent progress can also be seen as a success.
Your life might improve if you stop believing that Rust devs belong to a cult of your own imagination.
Measuring success of a project against a bar that the project didn't set is like complaining that an F1 car is hard to park: that's not what it was meant to do.
Servo was meant to be a test-bed for new architectures that might or might not be usable by Firefox. It was never meant to become Firefox' new web renderer, and it wasn't until more recently and long after the Mozilla-pocalypse that a new team took over the project with a goal of productionalizing the project as a whole. Stylo, for example, was integrated into Firefox 57 and allowed for parallel CSS style calculation, an effort that was tried unsuccessfully multiple times in C++.
Mozilla was the primary steward of Rust for most of the time that the Servo project was active. So if you want to lay Servo’s failure at the feet of the Rust language, it’s pretty hard to cast Mozilla as the blameless victims of… whatever it is that Rust users as a whole did to make Servo fail.
TS decision to choose Go was primarily, because they could take the existing code and do a near 1-1 translation. You can frame that as an architectural concern, but it's really only one that applies when your attempting to migrate an existing program to a new language. The Go rewrite has some negative outcomes as well, most concerning is the performance of the WASM builds is worse than the old JS/TS version.
A TS compiler from scratch built in Rust would be fine.
> You can frame that as an architectural concern...
"Go also offers excellent control of memory layout and allocation (both on an object and field level) without requiring that the entire codebase continually concern itself with memory management."
"The TypeScript compiler's move to Go was influenced by specific technical requirements, such as the need for structural compatibility with the existing JavaScript-based codebase, ease of memory management, and the ability to handle complex graph processing efficiently. "
If memory management and ability to handle complex graph processing efficiently isn't related to architecture to you I don't know what to tell you.
> If memory management and ability to handle complex graph processing efficiently isn't related to architecture to you I don't know what to tell you.
Rust can do complex graph processing, as well as efficient easy memory management, but it's going to do it in a different structure than a GCed lang would. Hence my statement that 1 to 1 translation was the primary factor.
> CTRL+F "rust" on the Go issue and see how many results you get.
Yes and so what? There's 35 for .NET or 74 for C#, yet you don't see people claiming the C# cult was harassing the TS team.
Sure, and Rust is the most used language for modern TS/JS tooling, outside of TS/JS. There would have been substantial ecosystem benefits had Rust been chosen.
> "Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.
This is true, as for "Open Ended" I use Beads with Claude code, I ask it to identify things based on criteria (even if its open ended) then I ask it to make tasks, then when its done I ask it to research and ask clarifying questions for those tasks. This works really well.
This will not end well for Disney, there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged. This feels like another circular investment where Disney is hoping to make money back I'm sure. On the other hand, assuming they do the freemium stuff, I look forward to making a few videos of my daughters favorite Disney princesses "talking" to her.
I actually straight up don't think they give a shit anymore.
I think decorum works in an environment where decorum is the norm, but we have entered a political moment where that is no longer the case. And I think that this kind of thing bleeds so heavily into culture that they no longer give a shit about having their characters next to it.
They have enough plausible deniability; they did not create the content. I think that's enough for them, in this moment.
When I became a parent I was really surprised at how much crap Disney puts out. My previous exposure had just been their blockbuster movies which showed a close attention to detail. But you scratch under the surface and it's an endless pile of awful quality clothing, crappy lunchboxes, that kind of thing. To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.
And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care. And I think it does have an impact: my kids tired of Clubhouse very quickly and have little connection to Mickey and friends. Compare that to say, Dreamworks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse which they loved.
Disney is propped up by its tentpole features but their bench is incredibly weak. There are only so many Blueys you can buy to make up the difference.
If I never hear the theme to "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" again, it will be too soon.
We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.
I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.
> And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character.
≤4-year-olds do not care: there's bright colours and motion, and some semblance of story. The point is not to give some kind of lesson, but to distract/entertain (and probably release dopamine). See also Paw Patrol, Spidey Amazing Friends, PJ Masks, etc. None of these seem to have made any attempt at having a 'layer' that appeals to adults.
In some ways I equate this animation style with the algorithmic social media system: meant for 'quick hits'.
> See also Paw Patrol, Spidey Amazing Friends, PJ Masks, etc.
These shows are honestly fine. They all depict kids working together as a team, solving problems, and navigating socializing with each other. (And in the case of Paw Patrol, some environmentalism. And a few terrible puns.)
It's not like the Smurfs, Rocket Robin Hood, The Mighty Hercules, He-Man, Care Bears, etc. that I watched growing up were that much better.
Meanwhile Prime Video has shows that are basically cartoon cars going through a carwash for an hour. And YouTube has much, much worse junk like rapid-fire 60 second unboxing videos, and morons fake-reacting to various colours of slime.
Bluey is just one show. Disney has an entire network and platform to fill with content. There's not a lot of producers making Bluey level content, yet the vacuum still needs to be filled. Bluey level content also costs more to create than the one step above AI slop to fill that void. Just like not every song on an album will be a banger, there will always be fluff/fill/padding.
On a foreign language scale, Bluey and Peppa Pig are around B1- or A2+.
Or in other words: a typical adult needs about one year of self study (or nearly 6 months of more focused intensive study) before they can fully understand a show like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
And maybe half that for substantial understanding. (3 months intensive, 6 months typical self study to reach A2+ / watch Bluey with substantial understanding but not complete understanding).
If I were to guess at Mickey Mouse clubhouse, it's damn near A1 or A0+, it's so repetive and slow that you can learn some words from it.
Yeah, that's a lot more boring than the 'advanced' shows like Bluey or Peppa Pig.
Also note that children are not aware of tools (ie hammers or screwdrivers) yet. So simple learning exercises to know that hammer hammers nail but not screws is the kind of thing needed at pre-school level.
I'd imagine that the appropriate age for Mickey Mouse clubhouse is under 3. Bluey/Peppa Pig are closer to 6 or 7+ year old material.
Or in foreign language levels: B1-ish / 2+ on the American scale.
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Seriously. Just switch the shows to a different language and the level gap becomes blatantly clear.
In perhaps more Techie terms: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse level of understanding is achievable with Duolingo. Peppa Pig / Bluey (and similar level shows) are so far beyond Duolingo that I bet most Duolingo users will NEVER be able to achieve Bluey-level understanding in a foreign language (and that deep textbook + 1000ish vocab study memorization needs to be done before Bluey can be understood).
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Maybe the vocab estimate is easiest to understand. Bluey feels like a show that uses 1000 words with mastery (and maybe 2000 hard words as learning exercises in the show).
Mickey Mouse clubhouse uses maybe 250 words with mastery and maybe uses the top1000 list as learning/teaching words.
How (and why??) does Mickey Mouse clubhouse make an ENTIRE song consisting of a single word? (hotdog?) Because it's written for people where 'Hot dog' is a difficult word and needs repetition.
Fluff/filler on a banger album will still be decent. And it may even be someone's favorite. The point is that quality is fairly consistent. Not that everything is "peak".
The only real bastion of hope in an ocean of slop is that demand for curwtion will be better than ever. People who want quality will tire of swimming and pay larger premiums for someone to pick out thr nuggets in the rough. Basicslly, the new HBO.
It's been there for at least 40 years or so. Like, direct to DVD shows how they'll crank things down for a quick buck. So this isn't surprising in the grand scheme of things.
But this past 5-10 years has indeed been quite the drastic dip. You'll have little bits of nuggets here and there because they still have some amazing artists (the '20's mickey mouse shorts are amazing). But you know we're in for a vast decline when they are starting to make even their premier content take shortcuts, play safe, and stifle creativity.
> Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling
I think it’s important to remember that you probably aren’t their target audience. Their audience expects to see simple characters with simple stories. The CG doesn’t need to be advanced, so having it fast to produce is the goal. It has to hold the interest of a toddler for 25 min without annoying the parents too much. Shiny and simple rendering is probably what they are going for. You can certainly argue about the educational qualities of the show, but I think entertaining was their primary goal for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
Also, this show hasn’t been made for years, has it? You’re looking at a show that was produced from 2006-2016. The oldest shows would be almost 20 year old CG. The newest is still nearly 10 years old. At the time it was fresh, the CG was pretty good, compared to similar kids shows.
My kids were young right in this window, and we watched a lot of Disney.
Disney definitely hit a CG valley though that you can see with some of their shows that switched from a 2D look to a more 3D rendering. Thankfully we aged out of those shows around 2015, so it has been a while. Disney has always been a content shop where quantity has its own quality, so I’m sure I’d have similar opinions as you if I was looking at the shows now. But at the time, it wasn’t bad.
I’m not sure how the OpenAI integration will work. I can see all sorts of red flags here.
Right now the deal is structured as Disney pays OpenAI. That's going to invert.
Once OpenAI pays Disney $3B/yr for Elsa, Disney is going to go to Google and say, "Gee, it sure would suck if you lost all your Disney content." Google will have to pay $5B/yr for Star Wars. And then TikTok, and then Meta... door to door licensing.
Nintendo, Marvel, all of the IP giants will start licensing their IPs to platforms.
This has never happened before, but we're at a significant and unprecedented changing of the tides.
IP holders weren't able to do this before because content creation was hard and the distribution channels were 1% creation, 99% distribution. One guy would make a fan animation and his output was a single 5 minute video once every other month. Now everyone has exposure to creation.
Now that the creation/consumption funnel inverts or becomes combined, the IP holders can charge a shit ton of money to these platforms. Everyone is a creator, and IP enablement is a massive money making opportunity.
In five years, Disney, Warner, and Nintendo will be making absolute bank on YouTube, TikTok, Meta platforms, Sora, etc.
They'll threaten to pull IP just like sports and linear TV channels did to cable back in the day.
This will look a lot like cable.
Also: the RIAA is doing exactly this with Suno and Udio. They've got them in a stranglehold and are forcing them to remove models that don't feature RIAA artists. And they'll charge a premium for you to use Taylor Swift®.
Anyone can make generic AI cats or bigfoot - it's pretty bland and doesn't speak to people. But everyone wants to make Storm Troopers and Elsa and Pikachu. Not only do teenagers willfully immerse themselves in IP, but they're far more likely to consume well-known IP than original content. Creators will target IP over OC. We already know this. We have decades of data at this point that mass audiences want mass media franchises.
The "normies" will eat this up and add fuel to the fire.
Disney revenues are $90B a year. I would not be surprised if they could pull a brand new $30B a year off of social media IP licensing alone. Same for Nintendo and the rest of the big media brands. (WBD has a lot more value than they're priced at.)
>Now that the creation/consumption funnel inverts or becomes combined, the IP holders can charge a shit ton of money to these platforms. Everyone is a creator, and IP enablement is a massive money making opportunity.
This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available. Trying to charge premiums for slop never works. Just ask McDonald's 2-3 years back. The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element. We already made it very cheap for people to make content. No amount of Mickey or Star wars is gonna undo the fact that people like looking at other people. Animation slop will find its audience, but it's not gonna overthrow TikTok with real(ish) people making people slop.
If Disney tries to pull out of Google, they will double down on Shorts. This won't work on most companies. It's a best a nice hook into Disney+.
> This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available.
The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions. There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
Looking at the top videos on YouTube this week, 7 of the top 10 are all "Pop IP" content: Candy Crush the Movie, Miley Cyrus, "I wanna Channing All Over Your Tatum", Superman Drawn, Star Wars Elevator Prank, We are World of Warcraft, Red Bull.
People love and drown themselves in pop culture and corporate-owned IP. Whether that's music, games, anime - they love corporate-owned IP.
If this content gets pulled en masse, YouTube is fucked. YouTube has been getting all of this for free. That's something that could be done today, but it's just non-obvious. When you package that with the "creation enablement", it's a packaged good that can be licensed or sold enterprise-to-enterprise.
Disney is about to wet their toes. Nintendo has already been experimenting with it. The concept is right there in front of them, and as distribution channels and content creation merge into one uniform thing - it'll be obvious.
> The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
> The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element.
It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element.
People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Vivienne Medrano, Glitch Productions, Jaiden Dittfach, and many others have minted huge franchises on YouTube - views, merch, Amazon/Netflix deals, etc. The problem is that it takes them ages to animate each episode, whereas filming yourself on your smartphone is quick, easy, accessible, affordable, low-effort, low-material, and low-personnel.
Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
>The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions.
Okay, free with ads is "free" to consumers. That will get swamped by tiktok. Subscription is premium. People won't pay for slop. Those are both covered.
>There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
Yes. But who's making a profit? You can only shuffle money for so long, and we're hitting the breaking point of that. Ads won't invest into platforms they suspect are filled with bots and don't give ROI. Companies won't invest once saying "AI" isn't a get rich quick scheme. Customers won't invest once they run out of money.
It works, until it doesn't. Then it's suddenly freefall and people will act like they didn't hear creaking for 5- 10 years.
>When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
YouTube isn't really known for "IP content". That debate ended in 2010 with Viacom. They in fact rampantly remove traces of IP content.
Meanwhile, they have a monopoly on video hosting and control payouts in an opaque way to millions of non-IP creators. unless you think it's the end of premium media as we know it, Disney is still going to host trailers on YouTube and Vevo will host music videos. There's no reason to go anywhere. Disney+ and YouTube can exist simultaneously.
>To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
Yeah, in complete agreement. Short term monies, long term damage. Media has a "lingering effect" where results on the prequel will pass into the sequel and vice versa. So you can still have a profitable but panned release simply because previous movie was that well received.
>It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element. People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Do you think that if we had the same amount of animation as we did live action content that they'd be consumed equally? I'm a huge animation fan and very skeptical.
Even in art spaces, people will engage more with the presence of a human face. Females more, but even males get a noticeable boost You can chalk it up to lust or familiarity or anything else, but there seems there's some deeper issue at work than simply "there's more live action slop for now".
If we do get more animation slop, I think it will veer a lot more towards hyperrealism instead, for similar reasons. I always see it as uncanny, but it doesn't seem to hinder as much on others. It'll just be trying to mimic live action at the end of the day.
>Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
Sure. Animation is more engaging with kids. Kids aren't profitable, though. Their parents are. Unless its with ads, but advertising targeting kids has so much red tape.
I dont see a profitable model out of a media empire focusing on kids. Even Nintendo gets a lot of its money off of merchandising despite selling premium games with rare sales.
The animation quality of mickey mouse clubhouse was appalling when I first had kids. They seem to have decided to care about that, as the animation on mickey mouse clubhouse + is a marked improvement.
> To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.
That explains the surprisingly mediocre Darth Vader toy I saw over the weekend, and the "the only Star Wars part of this trailer is the lightsaber"-ness on the ads for the new Star Wars game.
In the same way more people interact with the Tifa senate meme than played FF7 (any version), sure.
We let "engagement" get way too far in the way of IP's that already won brand awareness. Ad views are NOT off putting a view from even the unprofitable streaming platform. Let alone a theater ticket. It's pretty much the opposite of Nintendo's model to keep everything premium for as long as possible.
"there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged"
Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.
The other thing I'd point out is that people kind of seem to forget this, but it isn't a requirement that AI video be generated, then shoveled straight out without modification. Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness). You can use the blessed Disney video generator to generate something, then feed it into another less controlled AI system to modify it into something Disney wouldn't want. Or a video of a Disney character doing something innocent can be easily turned into something else; it's not hard to ask the AI systems to put something "against a green screen", or with a bit more sophistication, something that can be motion tracked with some success and extracted.
"A front camera shot of Cinderella crouching down, repeatedly putting a cucumber in and out of her mouth. She is against a green screen." - where ever that video is going, Disney isn't going to like it. And that's just a particularly obvious example, not the totality of all the possibilities.
Just putting controls on the AI video output itself isn't going to be enough for Disney.
> Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things people would like to do with Disney characters. Or a YouTube search for Elsagate.... Elsagate shows the level of effort that people are willing to put into this (a strange combination of laziness, but extreme effort poured into enabling that laziness).
I still wonder what motivates the people behind that sort of thing. It'd be easy to understand if it were just porn, but what's been described to me is just... bizarre.
I always figured it was an engagement optimization thing—there were people mass producing content using popular characters and just throwing tons of stuff at the wall, and the ones that veered unsettling/bizarre wound up getting lots of engagement so they kept doubling down on it. That kind of feedback loop is certainly responsible for many other curious traits of online content that is circulated in algorithmically-curated feeds.
The tighter the loop between content creation (e.g. when you can generate unlimited content essentially for free) and the ability to measure its success (engagement), the more social media becomes a sort of genetic algorithm for optimizing content to be the most addictive possible at the expense of any other attribute.
There won't be one single reason. For some it is a dark sense of humour perhaps twisted a little too far off track, that perhaps they should keep in their own head or at least just between very close friends. For some it is simply money without caring that it might upset people: get enough engagement and ad impressions and it is worthwhile if you can ignore the moral aspect. Money might not be the objective at all, there are people who just want the attention, or the appearance of attention, and fake internet points (youtube views and such) sate their need at least temporarily. For some it is simply deliberate griefing, for all the reasons that is a thing generally. Or some mix of the above. None of it healthy IMO, but explainable.
In a few cases it is a dark in-joke between a small set of people that just happened to have used a public host for distribution, that unexpectedly went more viral.
There are people in this world who will do anything for money. They will destroy your children mentally if it makes them a single dollar, they will traumatize them and cause lasting damage. We have created a world in which these people have free access to our children.
Generative AI and getting everyone on the planet online is going to contribute massively to this. You’re already seeing a massive rise in sextortion scams, pig butchering scams, scams of all kinds.
Whatever the reason is (maybe online doesn’t feel “real” to people or something), a person with an internet connection where $100 is a great monthly income will do anything to make that money, even if that means endangering someone else’s children or mentally scarring them. Combined with poor enforcement in places like Nigeria and India, we’re already in the midst of a scam epidemic.
I'd like to give those people the benefit of the doubt, and state that I believe they don't start out intentionally trying to damage children. They're simply trying to maximise their own earnings, and don't give a shit about what collateral damage occurs in response to their actions, as long as earnings go up.
They'll optimise for whatever causes numbers to increase. Children just happen to sometimes be what makes that happen.
They aren't trying to pervert the children. This isn't some cabal.
It's just money.
It's just people trying to get children's eyeballs to collect minuscule ad revenue.
It's the same as the people who abuse their kids for a Youtube channel, or the russian companies that put out 10 """DIY""" shorts a day which are just fake.
Youtube rewards constant churning content creation, so that's what is done
Yes, spiderman and Elsa on YouTube is a prime example. It's just slop for kids, they're not even in the same universe. But kids like spiderman, and they also like Elsa, so... here we are.
It's probably a lot of kids just being silly. Sure there are plenty of adult trolls, but whenever I see people bewildered at unruly online behavior, I think it's because they cannot see the age/maturity level of the troll. I can absolutely see why people would find this funny.
Well, bizarre is the point. Surely you do understand that this is the content to gather kids views, because there is a ton of kids on the internet, and they can be monetized. I don't know what kind of research they do on their audience and if they purposefully want to traumatize kids as much as possible, but I suppose all this shit does capture kid's attention more than just Disney characters fucking.
Disney is the same company as it was 20 years ago. In fact, it's the same company as it was 100 years ago. They only care about profit. They do just enough brand management to preserve the profit motive.
To be fair to Walt Disney, he cared about a lot beyond profit and believed in advancing technology and society in a way modern corporate leaders absolutely do not. He was no saint but he's a far cry from modern CEO's.
To be fair, Walt Disney partnered with his brother Roy Disney, and they co-founded and ran the Walt Disney Company (and the iterations before it). These iterations of the Disney Company were never just Walt Disney.
Yes, but if you watch any documentaries about early Disney and listen to those people talk everything was about Walt's vision even after death they would ask "What would Walt want or do?" He was a figure whose influence and vision is on another level in American History (both good and bad) and early Disney was Walt no matter who was in charge on paper or even if Walt was still alive. That only started to change under Eisner. Roy was the one who kept Walt grounded so ambition shrunk but they stayed the course Walt set.
I think that, given the times, we might rate him a little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at par with the norms of his time, which we could now look back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in society.
He also normalized and romanticized the American Expansion and displacement of Native Americans. He's a very complicated and flawed figured who irrevocably changed the course of this nation. Even Walt recognized that Walt Disney the man and Walt Disney the icon were two different people, and he was flawed in ways as a man the icon who appeared weekly in everyone's living room was not.
Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.
Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.
This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.
Yes, perhaps if we deflated Disney’s moral rot by a diversified basket of other morally-rotted goods, I suppose we’d be able to conclude that Disney is perhaps the same company.
Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.
I firmly disagree and think this shallow take dishonors a pretty great man. While not perfect, Disney gave us the bedrock of American children's culture which has been a soft tool for the US for generations. Not to mention technology and other advancements. I'm not a Disney nut, but the man was one-of-a-kind and an impressive industrialist who instilled a great culture of innovation and a deep love of children and play. All things I value.
Yep, Disney was also a leading producer of racist tropes and content during Jim Crow. Historical clips of Mickey Mouse characters putting on minstrel shows with blackface alongside other racist stereotypes like crows can easily be found online[0]. Not to mention Song of the South[1], a film Disney produced based on Uncle Remus stories following slaves who happily live on a Georgia plantation. Disney has, of course, done their best to scrub these entries from history, but they played a major role in depicting racist tropes to kids for decades.
We all acknowledge that Walt Disney was a flawed person, I don't think anybody here disagrees. To me, what sets him apart from other corporate leaders isn't Walt's moral character, but rather his ambition to influence the direction of humanities development, both culturally and technologically. He was about a lot more than just making number go up.
One could argue that the company reoriented itself so purely towards children's art and kitsch because they needed to get themselves into a market segment where they could completely sanitize their output of these kinds of embarrassments.
I read your comment as saying that we should blame the people who create the demand for Disney's products, and the voters who elect the politicians, instead of Disney and the politicians. Not so?
The context is messy, but my comment's in the context of rejecting blame on Disney alone for "losing their way" when they have had the same way (read: $$$) as before and they're delivering products people want.
Fwiw I think the all US presidents since Clinton were elected on a non interventionist/pacifist campaign. Blaming the voters when every one of them (less so with Biden) violated those promises is a bit unfair, if you still believe in democracy.
Almost every one of them was elected again, often by wider margins (the only exception losing to another one of them) after deatroying any illusion innthat direction you might argue was produced by their campaign positions, so I don't think you can absolved the American electorate here, even if one agrees that their campaign before taking office met your description.
Bush sure wasn't anti-interventionist for the second term after entering the Iraq War 2.0. Even Obama campaigned to persist the "necessary" Afghanistan war.
I don't recall George W. Bush ever actually promising to stay out of wars and interventions. It's been standard for the two parties to criticize each-other on grounds of doing interventionism badly or going too far towards one extreme regarding foreign policy, but nobody has run as a real pacifist or isolationist because they would lose in a landslide. It especially doesn't help that pacifism and isolationism are associated with activist fringes in both parties who often lean into crank theories or make friends publicly with adversarial states.
Blaming the voters seems completely sensible when they reelected W in 2004. The man's Vice President was Dick freakin' Cheney. You can't seriously tell me the people voted for pacifism and got screwed over.
I don’t have an opinion on him, despite the suggestiveness of my comment. He’s more illustrative of a spirit that Disney at a time did not have an appetite for.
Stephen A Smith has done as much to harm ESPN's brand than any other figure. Please don't assume my biases from whom I failed to mention – I could have used SAS instead of Pat and my point would have been the same.
Perhaps I should have expected that the conversation would get pulled this way but it's not where I wanted it to go.
But this was also just a short-lived political environment as well, where companies pretended to care about the current thing because it was politically expedient. How long did it take for them to do a 180? I mean they didn't believe in any of that stuff even a little.
It's definitely not a war you're going to win simply via copyright claims to the big chat interfaces. This stuff will happen regardless. Especially as more open high quality LLMs role out.
They might as well have some direct say in the matter with the big companies by creating relationships and profiting via licensing.
They will be DMCA'ing the social media posts which is nothing new.
The big models will and already have copyright filters on, people are just working around them which will always be a battle. They also don't host the videos they create themselves on OpenAI/Grok.
As I said in my comment these videos are not all going to be via the mainline Grok/ChatGPT interfaces and alternative video generators will eventually become widely accessible to the public.
It won't move the needle if users have access to unfiltered Wan, Comfy, local, etc. as that's unlikely to be how most users will create content.
The majority of creation will happen directly through the powerful platforms themselves - YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Sora. This is the first time where platforms will be able to embed extremely powerful creation tools directly into the platform, and this will undoubtedly begin to take over for the majority of content produced.
Platforms and IP rights holders won't police the 1% of external user uploads. They'll negotiate deals with the platforms in bulk. If they don't license Elsa, Marvel, Pokemon, etc. then the platform wholesale will lose access to the IPs.
Platforms will have to pay. These are probably billion dollar deals. YouTube getting Pokemon exclusively for the next three years? Easily billions. Why even chase random internet users when you can just collect the gigantic platform check from one deal?
It'll look kind of like the cable tv / network model with occasional renegotiations. Or gaming consoles and exclusives. Or networks and sports.
Pretty sure Youtube is constantly being sued for copyright violation by now.
The question is what will happen when "the platform" is a model downloaded on torrent sites and just generates movies from a prompt. On the plus side: excellent compression ratio. On the down side: discussion with your kids about how at the end Snow White did not transform into a gigantic mech and blew up the Evil Queen with rockets. Must be your old memory, dad!
It only works until Mickey Mouse shows up on your Tiktok feed lynching an African American and doing a sieg heil salute. Are you sure Disney wants that or would not care about that??
There are clearly plenty of people who feel the same way as you, and for those people what I’m about to ask might have such an obvious answer that it could feel like I’m being rhetorical or feigning ignorance to provoke an emotional response, but it’s truly honest:
Why should Disney care?
To which you might say “because people care”, so:
Why should people care?
Back when I was a spud I used futuristic text-to-speech synthesis to make my computer say “Eye am Bill Gaytes my farts go FERT FERT FERT” - Should Bill Gates be offended? What about the people who like him? What about the Intel processor I used to create it? Or the company behind the TTS software? Would anyone think they’re involved and endorsed it? I guess the real question is: are we catering the world to people who can’t make that distinction?
People care because it's entirely unconscious. Even if you choose not to care, you can't, because you've already seen it.
The way advertisement works is that it's brain hacking - it's just associations. Over time your brain associates a brand with a product or products, and then simply by having this association in your brain you're more likely to buy the product.
This also works for negative advertisement.
Think about it. Suppose you did see mickey mouse saluting Hitler, or maybe you saw mickey mouse stick a jar up his little rat ass.
When you see mickey mouse, undoubtedly, even if just for a second, your mind will think about what you saw before. You might discount it immediately, but the damage is done. You still feel that emotion, even if only for a split second, and you have been influenced by it.
Appropriate example, more than some may realize. Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler were good friends. Walt would send him a real of cartoons every month. Adolf and his senior leaders would watch it at the resort in the Alps. One may still be able to find the silent films that one of his mistresses filmed showing them watching cartoons on the projector with his senior leaders. Adolf was big into art and appreciated the work Disney created. There was a project about 15 or so years ago to use computing power to figure out what Adolf was saying based on his muscle movements since she was filming from behind him at an angle. I can't remember what the project was called. I saw it on a TV program.
The advertising mechanism you outlined proves too much. Every parody, every satirical cartoon, every unflattering depiction creates profit risking associations? The idea that negative association might originate from AI generated Mickey doing something vile does not seem categorically distinct from the hand drawn rule 34 that has existed for decades, or from South Park episodes, or from bathroom stall drawings. Memories, sure, but I’m not sure the details of the studies support the idea that seeing childish or satirical works that are obviously not created or supported by the IP holder will have that kind of negative cognitive association. Actual acts done by the company, or willing associations with unsavory acts - absolutely. But there’s a wide distinction between taking a cartoon episode out of syndication because Epstein was a guest character voice, and fretting over a 3rd grader typing “Daffy but with boobs and stuff” into photoshop-o-matic.com. The question is whether fleeting cognitive residue constitutes actionable damage or simply the background noise of living among other minds who create things.
Kids making their computers say profane things about famous people or even making crude jokes at the expense of the disabled themselves created “negative associations” with the technology, and potentially with the companies producing it (if the effect is somehow unaffected by context), but the developers did not restrict access and blind people gained a tool that fundamentally altered their ability to navigate the world.
Now? Parents of a terminally ill child who cannot afford a trip could place their daughter in a photo with Elsa. Therapists working with autistic children who connect only with specific Disney characters could generate personalized social stories and visual supports. Teachers in underfunded schools could create engaging materials without licensing fees. Placing a real person alongside Mickey Mouse, or just making a Disney character give a thumbs up and “Happy Birthday, Billy”, required Disney's permission, professional artistic skill, and significant money. That gatekeeping is dissolving and I can’t imagine the positive impact it could have in people’s lives…apparently assuming Billy doesn’t get access to the prompt input first and ruin it for everyone.
This used to be a "zing", but don't think it is anymore. Try to make a new profile somewhere and select a few topics of interest. You will get suggested the most engaging "relevant" content. For me, I made a cycling Instagram and my feed instantly got filled with girls showing of cleavage in lycra with cycling hashtags.
...have you ever thought about the way you're using the app, then? Because I, personally, get nothing else other than dumb memes and posts from people I follow.
Look, I've gotten cartel beheadings and beatings on a YouTube search query for Jack Russell terriers.
Don't throw shade. If you haven't gotten "How the fuck did that get there?", consider yourself lucky I guess. Best I can figure, terriers have some unintentional shared vector space with much more unpleasant content.
This is a good point. Instead of policing what trolls will use it for, the same AI should be able to detect racist content and prevent it from spreading
Given that only one of the dogs can talk, you're set to get only one answer. Though I suspect that the ability to talk bestows bodily shame, based on this anecdotal evidence.
Not necessarily AI with 'hard guidelines' AI tools that pass output to a filter with 'hard guidelines' is definitely feasible.
Take the input as normal, pass it into Sora 2 and execute it as you would, pass the output through a filtering process that adheres to hard guidelines.
Of course, when talking about images, what is a 'hard guideline' here? Do you take the output and pass it through AI to identify if there's x y or z categorys of content here and then reject it?
Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
That said, there are a lot of other models out there that care about neither licensing nor alignment. So those will allow you to make racist content. Then you can do whatever you like with that generated content.
A lot of IP owners will learn that there is more than one way to skin a cat. It's easier than people think to turn children's characters, like say, Hermoine, into a raging racist. And there's very little technically speaking that they can do to stop it.
But yes, on OpenAI specific properties, they can definitely stop it dead in its tracks. They can even get better at stopping it over time. In fact, the more users try to generate it, the better the system will get at stopping it.
I'm sure that's what Disney's lawyers specified in the contracts and what their execs expect. However, judging by how LLM controls have gone in the past, I'm fully expecting to see a slew of awful content featuring Disney's characters in the days after this launches. OpenAI also probably won't ever be able to actually stop people from generating harmful content with the characters, but the volume of awful stuff will probably eventually slow down as people get bored and move onto the next controversial thing.
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
Yes, because AI's so far have been oh so resilient to jailbreaks and oh so great at picking out the potentially "not aligned with corporate values" content...
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
Don’t believe for a minute that whatever filters it uses will be sensitive enough to the way racist content is constructed to stop people from doing just that.
Given the creativity of the jailbreaking community I will be very impressed if OpenAI manage to reliably prevent Sora from creating disagreeable content with Disney characters.
I don't think that you will ever be able to generate Disney characters with the Sora app. Sora is both a model and an app. Instead I think that there will be a heavily guardrailed specialized app where you can do some highly restricted things for the opportunity for the content to show up on Disney+. Think of it as "Disney art! Powered by Sora".
> Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.
It's not racist, it's an historically accurate depiction of 1930s Germany under the authority of a significant leader who may or may not be controversial today
Once you make the content it's just content, no? How the hell are you going to ban racism? A lot of racism is "dog whistle" stuff anyway -- it's designed to convey a message to people who already know what is being suggested while seeming innocuous to any enforceable standards of decency... The racists will surely have no trouble bending the models to produce Disney content that is in practice used to promote and celebrate racism.
> There is no way the character licensing survives an hour of contact with the public, unless it is _extremely_ restricted. I can't imagine a worse job than trying to "curate" the torrent of sewage that is going to get created. Deadpool is pretty much the only Disney-owned property this makes sense for.
And I say this as someone who _likes_ using Sora.
My impulse is to agree, and I'm almost wondering whether Disney figured that they'd have more restraining influence by getting in legitimately than by having generative AI companies wink and look away from rampant trademark violations because Disney won't pay them to care.
I assume that they mean that OpenAI will now be obligated to pay a lot of that money back to Disney as some kind of licensing fee. No idea if it's true, but that's the only way his comment makes sense.
There is a lot of YouTube content that is basically people playing with toys like Paw Patrol and having them interact in doll houses. I'm not a fan of this for my kids, and there will be a ton more of it. And yes, there will be political slop as well.
On the other hand there was a video about what happened to Mickey and Goofy in Vietnam... I'm probably okay with an updated version of that.
The “lewd texting with LLM” will be a tool for writing actual pornography, and in workflows for image and video pornography, even if the image and video generation doesn’t happen on OpenAI’s platform (in fact, people are using ChatGPT and other major AI engines as tools in that already, but loosening the filters were facilitate that even more on OpenAI’s platform.)
OpenAI knows that, and the people interested in that capability know that, even if many of the other people seeing the marketing about it don't.
> The “lewd texting with LLM” will be a tool for writing actual pornography
Sure, but does that mean "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn"? A bit like saying W3C is getting into porn because the web is used for porn, together with other things. Even when I try to think of parent's comment in the most charitable way, I don't think that's what they meant.
Personally I prefer if my tools stay as tools, and let me do professional work with them regardless of what that profession is.
> Sure, but does that mean "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn"?
Yes, it literally means they have indicated to the customer base that is looking into making porn.
It may not mean they have indicated it to some other audiences.
> A bit like saying W3C is getting into porn because the web is used for porn, together with other things.
No, its a bit like saying the W3C is getting into porn if the W3C had announced changes in the platform whose main market appeal was to people making porn, but announced it in a way that glossed over and minimized that.
If, on the other hand, the web had a steady state of being used for porn, you wouldn't say the W3C is getting into anything, you’d just say “the internet is for porn” (which has, of course, rather famously been said, and even sung.)
The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts, story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.
> The initial claim was "OpenAI has indicated they're getting into porn", letting writers write the scripts, story-lines or dialogue for pornography does not mean OpenAI suddenly "does porn". In that case Google and Microsoft with their Docs and Office are also "getting into porn", which would be a ridiculous claim.
Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable function is to facilitate porn production is only the case for the OpenAI action and you have presented nothing analogous for the entities you are trying to hold up as comparable.
> Actively announcing a change of policy whose marketable function is to facilitate porn production
Where exactly did this happen though? And how am I supposed to prove a negative? It's up to you to present evidence that this is something OpenAI actively promote as a use case for their tools, something I personally haven't seen, but I'm open to changing what I think is happening if proof can be presented that this is the case.
This might end well for Disney. This provides a different marketing angle to bring in younger people to Disney. The filters will block a lot of the sexual violence content. The original cartoons are deemed racist by some so this won't open a door already opened.
But it is another circular investment to throw on the AI bubble pile.
If just the news of the deal boosts Disney stock enough to pay for the deal, then yes. Or if it boosts OpenAI valuation because they now have Disney IP enough to pay off on Disney's investment, it is basically Disney producing content indirectly.
Who cares? Online trolls make inappropriate videos with characters. Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it.
It's so exhausting that companies are overly cautious about everything and let a tiny niche of internet culture drive these decisions. If you get obscene material in your social media feeds, you will continue to see this kind of stuff except maybe with some Disney IP. If not, it will have no impact to your life.
But practical things that affect 99% of people like you mentioned will be better, like your child wants to hear Mickey wish him happy birthday. So I applaud this.
I agree with you completely but I'm absolutely shocked that Disney would agree to this. They are extremely protective of how their IP is used. Famously so.
Sad I had to scroll this far to find a comment that wasn't pro-censorship of Fan Art because a character they saw on the internet offended someone's Protestant values.
Great time to research if those choices are still valid or if there's a better way. In any regard, its just an overview, not a total rewrite from the AI's perspective.
Not to mention people lose accounts because someone reported them as underage, and now they don't want to fully dox themselves over this. Who can blame them considering discord's own support ticket system was hacked which included people who had to validate their age.
Seems both TV and Music are affected, I wonder if it's some storage service somewhere just totally degraded. I love CloudFlare for their total transparency reports about outages. I wish every other company would follow the same standard.
Must be a partial outage then? I was using Music earlier today as well. On my phone I download most of my music so I might never notice an outage though.
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