Disney Asks Fans To Generate The Magic, Quietly Takes A Cut

Disney announced last week that it is exploring ways to integrate artificial intelligence into Disney Plus, the company’s video streaming platform. According to the announcement, the company wants users to use its AI to create short-form content, which would then be hosted on the platform for others to consume. ^{[1] [2]} The same announcement flagged that Disney is also planning to add games to Disney Plus, in a move the company openly compares to what Netflix has done with its own platform. ^[3]

Reactions online landed exactly where one would expect. Even the creator of a Disney animated series publicly told her followers to unsubscribe from Disney Plus and pirate her work. ^[4] The pitch is refreshingly direct. If the platform is going to train on the culture that made it, the culture is going to walk. The math is not complicated. Subscribe, fund the next round of automation, or pirate the back catalog and skip the next round. The subscriber chooses.

According to reports, fans would effectively be able to make fanfic — short works of fiction written by fans using existing characters and settings — and post it on the platform, though the announcement does not necessarily state that AI would be required to make UGC, or user-generated content. ^[5] Which is, in fairness, the part worth pausing on. Fanfic will exist whether or not AI is used in the process. It existed before the platform. It will exist after. The real question, of course, is what Disney wants to be: the host, the host’s cut, or the host’s cut of the host.

The pitch, in the loosest sense, is to feed your favorite characters to the ever-hungry AI gods and call it innovation. The AI gods, as the framing goes, are hungry. A god does not pay royalties. A god does not credit the labor. A god consumes and, in some traditions, demands more. Disney, by the announcement’s own logic, is feeding the gods and asking the congregation to bring the offering. Mickey in one hand, the cut in the other.

Disney, the company that built its empire on the labor of named animators, writers, composers, and storyboard artists, is now asking unnamed users to do some of that labor for it, with a tool the company also wants a cut of. The company has, naturally, had to address the elephant in the room. Concerns about AI taking jobs. Concerns about AI in general. Concerns about AI, as one can only put it, sucking souls. Concerns that a corporation built on the labor of named artists is now proposing to let strangers generate the next chapter of that labor for free, or for a small fee, or for the privilege of posting it on Disney’s servers. Concerns that the magic kingdom would prefer to wave away.

Random users, of course, can be fully trusted with Disney IP, or intellectual property — the copyrighted characters, worlds, and stories that define the brand. Mickey Mouse in a true-crime short. Elsa in a corporate training video. The possibilities are as endless as they are regrettable. Zero potential for anything inappropriate. None.

Netflix did not invent gaming on streaming, but it did normalize the idea that your subscription is a kind of buffet, and Disney is now wandering over with its own tray.

Personally, I have made a career out of fanfic. Not the Disney kind. The political kind, the kind where you take a real cabinet and a real policy and let the implications do the writing. After all, none of this is, in the technical sense, fanfic. It is closer to a derivative work — a new creation built on top of an existing one — which in industry terms means Disney probably owns a percentage, somewhere, retroactively. The whole exercise, frankly, is a fanfic of John Oliver.

The announcement is what it is. The AI gods are hungry. Make of that what you will.