Generative AI continues to plague every creative industry you care about, and despite the obvious copyright infringement and legal cases that surround it, companies like OpenAI keep training their models on licensed art. Sora, OpenAI’s video generation model, launched its updated “Sora 2” model on September 30. The app trains itself on copyrighted material by default, with the burden on copyright holders to actively opt out of it. As a result, there’s a lot of AI-generated slop leaking out onto the internet featuring huge characters you know and love.
I tested the AI model Sora 2 on classic anime, the result is hardly believable…
I can already see the hundreds of fanmades and parodies that are going to come out! Sora 2 is definitely a new step in AI anime.. pic.twitter.com/npWkSJjjML
— Naegiko (@naegiko) September 30, 2025
I am not going to be posting a ton of these or anything but just to get extent of the capabilities and copyright violations of Sora 2, here’s Zagreus riding a scooter through hell (sound on) pic.twitter.com/zCCNNppQ0k
— Paul Tassi (@PaulTassi) October 1, 2025
404 Media has some videos of Pikachu and what appears to be a Nazi version of SpongeBob SquarePants doing everything from ASMR to boxing matches. By default, Sora 2 can generate animated videos of almost any copyrighted material you prompt it with because genAI companies seem to think the rules governing how copyright IP is typically handled don’t apply to them. So now, companies like Nickelodeon and Nintendo will have to hit OpenAI up to tell the company to stop using their characters and iconography, rather than the other way around. It’s a bold strategy considering that Disney, NBC, and Warner Bros. are all suing Midjourney for using characters from their IP. Artists who work on the Magic: The Gathering card game have also sued Midjourney for scraping their artwork to train the generative AI model.
The Pokémon Company may not be taking immediate action against the Department of Homeland Security for using its characters in a video posted to social media, but I can’t imagine the litigious company is going to sit by while Pikachu’s image is used in AI slop that puts the mascot in a bad light. We’ve reached out to The Pokémon Company, Supergiant Games, and Toei Animation about their respective characters appearing in videos generated by the app.
On top of the slop featuring copyrighted characters, Sora 2 seems to let people make deepfakes of themselves or public figures. The new app has a TikTok-like feed that lets you endlessly scroll through the generated videos, and if you scroll long enough, you might see deepfakes of real people, despite OpenAI claiming it has safeguards in place to protect people from this. Some have even reported seeing some wild shit, like a blackface version of actor Scarlett Johansson performing in the musical Hamilton. OpenAI notably got into legal hot water with the actor last year when the company was using a voice that sounded very similar to her performance as an AI in the movie Her for its own ChatGPT AI chatbot.
I literally have seen someone posting on Twitter a version of Hamilton where Scarlett Johansson is in it.
On top of this likely costing OpenAI a dollar a second to generate, they are potentially going to get sued into a fine paste by multiple different parties
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron.com) 2025-09-30T23:13:44.116Z
The entire thing seems like a series of legal battles in the making, but it also has some artists and animators disheartened as the possibility looms that animation companies may be increasingly inclined to use it to cut costs at the expense of a human touch.
Man, sometimes i feel like giving up as a real animator when I look at this.
AI animation is advancing way faster than I expected. I knew it was coming, but not at this speed. In five years, it might be impossible for real animators to keep up. Honestly…holy shit. I’m genuinely… https://t.co/GIxgbIi97i
— Devil Artemis Animation (@DevilArtemisX) October 2, 2025
don’t let shit like this make you give up on pursuing art/animation
no matter what AI can do, nothing can take away the satisfaction/pride of knowing the work you’ve created was made entirely by your own hands.
and not because you wrote a quick little prompt on a keyboard https://t.co/TjiTfaf3g8
— kornkob🇦🇺🇱🇦 COMMS OPEN 3 SLOTS (@imkornkob) October 2, 2025
Personally, I think that even if these videos look better than they did a year ago, they still look like shit. Even the more fluid, action-packed scenes Sora generates still have clear tells of AI generation, like unnatural shifts and glitches in the animation. But for any who hope to use this to cut costs, quality is probably not a priority. Bigwigs who insist that AI is the future only do so because they’re the ones who stand to benefit from it, while the artists who create and the people who enjoy their work get the short end of the stick. Maybe some of IP lawyers will step in and try to put a stop to it all, but it sometimes feels like every time one AI slop machine gets taken down, another one sprouts up in its place.
