Disney CEO Bob Iger says AI deals may allow Disney+ subscribers "to create user-generated content and to consume user generated content - mostly short-form - from others." What could go wrong? LÆMEUR Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment For as long as there has been technology, there have been attempts to let ordinary people shape stories with it. The proto-interactive 1960s project The Sumerian Game allowed users to make choices in an ancient setting that a system could then react to and incorporate. During the 1990s, developers began working on Facade, in which a player could talk to characters in conflict and, with help from an early form of AI, alter the characters based on what was said. And in the 2010s, a company called Interlude allowed people to change dozens of "channels" on a video for Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," shifting the story with it; a few years later, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch would expand the concept to feature form. Related Stories Business Netflix, Fox Muscle Into the Video Podcast Business Business Studios Are Spending Big Again -- Just Not On Hollywood But something new brews now. Unlike past efforts, which required a large investment of money and professional know-how - the everyday "shaper" was always working within the boundaries that credentialed programmers set up for them - the current AI models dangle a more subversive idea. In this new system, anyone can initiate a take on the story, in any direction, thanks to models trained on millions of pieces of media. The programmers have left the building, and the guardrails have fallen from its scaffolding. It is this scenario that Disney chief Bob Iger sketched out when he revealed Nov. 13 that the company would soon bring generative AI to Disney+ for subscribers to use, presumably in (on?) Disney+ movies and TV shows. "User-generated content," as he quaintly put it, would land on the platform in the near future. Given how Sora 2 has been showing the ease with which known personalities and moments can be recast - just a rough prompt yields a passably coherent minute of video - Iger's promise hardly seemed idle. The number of adults even over the age of 65 who have heard "a lot" about AI has doubled since 2023, according to a new Pew Research study. If Disney has its way, many of them, along with their younger co-subscribers, will be using it too. The country's biggest pure-play entertainment firm saying it will unleash AI tools on its nearly 200 million global streaming customers (whether using its own tech or someone else's) marks a seismic moment. In 2017, Iger announced, years after Netflix began eating his lunch, that it would try to grab back some of the sandwiches. Thus Disney+ was born. With this AI announcement, the company signaled it won't make the same mistake twice, becoming the first major entertainment firm to go all in on AI personalization. Any illusion from Disney's ongoing lawsuit with Midjourney that it was skeptical of AI has been washed away; what it's skeptical of is not controlling the AI itself. We shouldn't be misled by the length of these clips, either; Iger cited the play as "mostly shortform." He was partly hedging on a tech not yet evolved (AI starts to fumble continuity after a minute or two). But mostly he was trying to cast the move in TikTokian terms - a rubric audiences understand and Wall Street craves. In truth, there is no reason these offerings won't take a variety of formats. Professional shortform content pales financially compared with the longer stuff, and so as the technology gets better, the videos will almost certainly get longer. On one hand, of course, this is the next step on an inevitable escalator to the level of hyper-personalized automated content. But on the other hand, a certain irony ripples though the move. Just six years ago, Disney touted massive spends on original content for its new streaming service, and so it can seem strange to hear Iger offer as his selling point the idea that you could now rip it up. The consequences of this AI video moment go well beyond Disney. We are slowly becoming accustomed, cringey viral video by cringey viral video, to the idea that stories and personalities are not fixed entities, there to be interpreted as one likes but little else. Instead, AI companies condition us to think of them as far more malleable. However loathsomely some use the tech, to have Martin Luther King Jr. give a racist speech or place Stephen Hawking in an MMA ring, as two grotesque Sora spectacles had it recently, it still accomplishes something sneakily subconscious: instilling the belief that well-established narratives don't have to remain static. We can switch them up at will. In fact, OpenAI makes it look fun. Disney's challenge is how to port this mindset to establishe