Tag:

Sora

New Sora 2 AI Mario And Pikachu Videos Seem Primed For Nintendo Lawsuits

by admin October 3, 2025

Nintendo has earned its reputation for being fiercely protective of its IP, including the Mario characters and the Pokémon universe. However, OpenAI’s newly released Sora 2 has included so many Nintendo characters that it almost seems like it’s inviting a legal response from the Japanese gaming publisher. Sora 2 is an AI-powered video and audio production tool, meaning that you can feed a prompt in, much like similar image generators, to create a video from your description.

According to The New York Times, OpenAI has reached out to major copyright holders and Hollywood stars about being retroactively removed from Sora 2. It’s not clear if a similar effort was made to reach out to Nintendo, but the sheer volume of Pokémon and Mario-inspired Sora 2 content suggests that the AI model was heavily trained on Nintendo’s IP.

i got into sora 2 and the only conclusion I can draw is openai is trying to get sued. this is like 99% of what it shows you immediately upon entering the app pic.twitter.com/BkAXqchK2T

— George Crudo (@GeorgeCrudo) October 1, 2025

Nintendo’s properties aren’t the only ones that appear to have been fed into Sora 2. Others like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Portal have been mashed together as well.

How will Nintendo respond? It was only a year ago that Nintendo went after AI-generated Mario pictures. It seems unlikely that Nintendo will let Sora 2 pass without taking action, especially since the company is famously litigious.

A report earlier this year suggested that Disney is in talks with OpenAI, but the house of mouse decided to sue Midjourney over allegedly misappropriated movies and images. George R.R. Martin and a handful of other authors have previously launched their own lawsuit against OpenAI.

While more Japanese gaming publishers are embracing AI in game creation, OpenAI, Midjourney, and other AI-related startups aren’t acting in partnership with the affected companies. Nintendo has taken a cautious approach to AI, and Shigeru Miyamoto has said that the company won’t rush into AI like other developers. Outgoing Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser has stated that he believes AI will play a role in the creation of games, but he has also stressed the importance of maintaining a “human touch” in game development.

Source link

October 3, 2025 0 comments

An AI-generated Goku fires an energy beam off-screen.

Game Updates

OpenAI Boldly Uses Copyrighted Characters Like Pikachu In Sora 2

by admin October 2, 2025

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.

Source link

October 2, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

OpenAI’s New Sora App Lets You Deepfake Yourself for Entertainment

by admin October 2, 2025

On Tuesday, OpenAI released an AI video app called Sora. The platform is powered by OpenAI’s latest video generation model, Sora 2, and revolves around a TikTok-like For You page of user-generated clips. This is the first product release from OpenAI that adds AI-generated sounds to videos. For now, it’s available only on iOS and requires an invite code to join.

“You are about to enter a creative world of AI-generated content,” reads an advisory page displayed during the app sign-up process. “Some videos may depict people you recognize, but the actions and events shown are not real.”

OpenAI is betting that creating and sharing AI deepfakes will become a popular form of entertainment. Whether it’s your friends, influencers, or random strangers online, Sora frames generating deepfake videos as a form of scrollable fun. The app’s main feed is an endless serving of bite-size AI slop featuring human faces.

During the set-up process, users are given the option to create a digital likeness of themselves by saying a few numbers aloud and turning their head around as the app records. “The team worked very hard on character consistency,” wrote OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a blog about Sora’s release.

People have the ability to choose who can use their digital likeness in Sora videos. It can be set to everyone or limited to just yourself, those you approve, or mutual connections on the app. Whenever someone generates a video using your likeness, even if it’s just sitting in their drafts, you can see the full clip from your account’s page.

First Impressions

Many of the most-liked videos on my For You feed on Tuesday afternoon featured Altman’s likeness. One AI-generated clip depicted the OpenAI CEO stealing a graphics processing unit from Target. When the character gets caught, a voice that sounds like Altman’s pleads with a security guard to let him keep the GPU so that he can build AI tools.

Many of the videos generated during WIRED’s testing included rough edges and other errors. But Sora makes it incredibly seamless to create personalized deepfakes that often look and sound convincingly real.

To incorporate the likenesses of people in your videos, just tap on their faces on Sora’s generation page and add them as “cameos.” Then, enter a simple prompt, like “fight in the office over a WIRED story.”

Source link

October 2, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

OpenAI’s new video generation tool Sora 2 is here, but don’t worry, Sam Altman says it will avoid the ‘degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed’

by admin October 1, 2025

Sora 2, the latest model of OpenAI’s text-to-video tech, has now launched alongside a dedicated app. Besides spitting out all of the soulless, AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style animation one could ever want, Sora 2 can now generate live action clips with both sound and a frankly scary level of visual accuracy.

Granted, not all of the clips OpenAI shares in its announcement are flawless, with its AI-generated snippet of a practicing martial artist featuring a warping bo staff and smooshed phalanges. Still, OpenAI is keen to highlight Sora 2’s gains in depicting consistent body mechanics that adhere to the rules of the physical world; the twirling body horror of earlier models generated gymnastics clips may be a thing of the past.

The company also touts Sora 2’s ability to “directly inject elements of the real world” into its AI-generated clips. It elaborates, “For example, by observing a video of one of our teammates, the model can insert them into any Sora-generated environment with an accurate portrayal of appearance and voice. This capability is very general, and works for any human, animal or object.” If you’re so inclined to descend into the realm of deepfakes, the Sora app, powered by Sora 2, is available on the iOS store now.

OpenAI touts the app as not just a video generator but also a social environment.

“You can create, remix each other’s generations, discover new videos in a customizable Sora feed, and bring yourself or your friends in via cameos,” the company writes. “With cameos, you can drop yourself straight into any Sora scene with remarkable fidelity after a short one-time video-and-audio recording in the app to verify your identity and capture your likeness.”

One can see the whimsical appeal of sharing AI-generated clips of yourself riding ostriches and pulling off extremely dangerous stunts, but I also can’t ignore the risk posed by deepfakes. For one thing, US president Donald Trump shared an expletive-laden deepfake video on Truth Social literally the day before Sora 2’s launch (via Ars Technica).

The sombrero superimposed over representative Hakeem Jeffries is hopefully a telltale sign for most viewers that the remarks senator Chuck Schumer is depicted as saying in this clip (which was not created using Sora 2) are wholly fabricated. However, given that a Microsoft study suggests folks struggle to accurately identify AI-generated still images 62% of the time, it’s hard not to be concerned about deepfakes’ capacity for disinformation.

Videos generated with Sora 2 don’t even feature a tiny AI watermark, like those introduced in Gemini’s ‘Nano Banana’ image-editing update. OpenAI say they are ‘launching responsibly,’ with in-app features designed to “maximize creation, not consumption,” and address “concerns about doomscrolling, addiction, isolation, and RL-sloptimized feeds.” But comments made by company CEO Sam Altman on his own blog read contrapuntal even to this stated feed philosophy.

“It is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed,” Altman first admits.

As such, he shares that the app has various “mitigations to prevent someone from misusing someone’s likeness in deepfakes, safeguards for disturbing or illegal content, periodic checks on how Sora is impacting users’ mood and wellbeing, and more.”

Altman even goes as far as to say that, if OpenAI cannot sufficiently address aspects of the app that lead to negative social outcomes, then the company would discontinue the service.

But Altman also caps off a longer passage regarding how the Sora feed aims to show content that users are interested in by writing, “And if you truly just want to doom scroll and be angry, then ok, we’ll help you with that.” To me, this reads not only as a shrugging off of responsibility, but also fairly nihilistic; for all OpenAI’s talk about the Sora app’s safety features, what can be done if its users still choose to gaze into the abyss?

(Image credit: OpenAI)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also reference the existentialism and labour concerns the launch of the Sora 2 model will no doubt inspire in my freelance creative friends. Altman writes on his blog, “Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase.” And I would like to suggest that he may be right, just not how he thinks.

While Altman wants OpenAI’s app to be at the forefront of a tidal wave of creativity, my personal hope is that audiences get sick of realistic, computer generated imagery as a result of Sora 2’s proliferation. My blue sky thinking—however naive it may be—is the hope that, in response to audiences seeking out visual art that could only ever be made by humans, practical effects and puppets make a comeback in a big way.

Best PC build 2025

All our favorite gear

Source link

October 1, 2025 0 comments