OpenAI's Sora 2 Sparks Copyright Concerns with AI-Generated Videos of Popular Characters

No More Pikachu Oppenheimer? OpenAI Promises Rightsholders More Control Over Sora Creations

Based in London, Will is passionate about the intersection of tech and human lives, with bylines in BBC News, Vice, and more. Don't miss out on our latest stories. Add PCMag as a preferred source on Google. Since OpenAI released its Sora 2 AI video generator as an iOS app earlier this month, we've seen a surge of creative, bizarre, and even jarring content, ranging from fake interactions between deceased historical figures to depictions of iconic fictional characters, including Pikachu inserted into almost every movie imaginable, from The Lord of the Rings to Oppenheimer. The idea, according to CEO Sam Altman, is to make people smile -- and generate revenue for OpenAI. He insists that "this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value" for rightsholders, but in a new blog post, he acknowledges that they "want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all)." To that end, OpenAI will "give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls," Altman says. Details are scant, and Altman cautions users to "expect a very high rate of change from us." One idea it's trying, however, is a revenue-sharing arrangement with copyright holders. "The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon," Altman says. "Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we want both to be valuable." Altman's blog post notes "the remarkable creative output of Japan." However, Japanese politician Akihisa Shiozaki said on X that "there are serious legal and political issues" with Sora. "To protect and nurture Japan's leading creators and content industry, I think we should respond as soon as possible," he wrote, adding, "(It seems that Disney and Marvel characters are somehow not displayable)." How anime characters are used isn't the only potentially controversial issue that has emerged around Sora. OpenAI's testing reveals that Sora has a 1.6% chance of creating sexual deepfakes while using a person's likeness, despite the safeguards it has in place. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Horrific Sora 2 Video Shows Sam Altman Grilling a Dead Pikachu

"Alright Nintendo it may be time to assemble your famed lawyer squad." In case you missed it, OpenAI's latest video generating tool Sora 2 launched earlier this week, and instantly did gangbusters at the slop office. Users gleefully rushed to generate loads of feverish clips that place OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in all sorts of absurd scenarios -- which we covered extensively in another blog -- and with such ferocity that they've basically taken over AI corners of social media. And so rather than demonstrating a tool that will revolutionize the arts, as AI companies so often claim their image and text-regurgitating tech will do, the social media buzz around Sora 2 has been a delirious case in point of how people largely use it to churn out dumb and edgy memes and total nonsense -- slop, in the parlance -- not to mention potentially damaging misinformation, such as faking convincing surveillance footage of people committing crimes. But it's also raised the specter of another issue that could be fatal to the company's very existence: copyright infringement. As our first piece of evidence, we submit this alarming Sora-made video of Altman grilling a slain and disturbingly lifelike Pikachu. "Pikachu on the grill here," says the AI Altman, as what is unmistakably the iconic yellow Pokémon lies sizzling beneath his prodding tongs. "It's already got a beautiful char and it smells like somebody plugged in a chicken." "I'm gonna carve it into some thick steaks," he continues, briefly showing a closeup of medium-done Pikachu meat. "Crust on the outside, pink and juice in the middle. Cheers." This is far from the only Sora video spoofing Nintendo characters. Many others depict Mario and Luigi. Justine Moore, an investing partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, gushed that her favorite Sora trend was "putting Pikachu in every movie," sharing examples like "Saving Private Pikachu." Whatever a user's favorite Pokemon is, it'll be in their little video. Some of Sora's clips show that their creators are fully aware that their go-to slop machine de jour is making a mockery of copyright law -- in fact, maybe that's part of how they get their kicks. In a video that shows dozens of recognizable Pokemon bounding across a field, for instance, a deepfaked Altman watches on with a worried grimace. "I hope Nintendo doesn't sue us," the AI Altman says. The success of the generative AI industry has been predicated on having essentially free access to every piece of art, writing, and video that's ever been uploaded to the internet -- and major players are paranoid that they'll someday have to pay the price for that. In August, the Claude chatbot maker Anthropic pleaded to an appeals court that having to dole out damages to all the writers whose books it trained on without permission would "financially ruin" the entire AI industry, spelling out -- loud and clear -- the existential angst surrounding IP. Needless to say, then, that OpenAI is playing with fire. Nintendo in particular, as one of the biggest video game publishers in the world, is notoriously hard-nosed about protecting its intellectual property. Its iconic video game character Kirby, in fact, is named after its attorney who won a key copyright suit against Universal Pictures in the 1980s. It's ruthlessly pursued anyone it perceives as using its IP without permission ever since. And there's a whole graveyard filled with enthusiasts who shared copies of its game to play on emulators, a term for software that simulates old game consoles, or the developers that make them. It's even gone after emulators that preserved its games that were no longer for sale anywhere and were considered "abandonware" -- even though sharing these dead games, you'd think, would have no meaningful impact on its bottom line. Gamers have long resented Nintendo for its litigious streak. So it says something that some, after witnessing a deluge of AI bastardizations of Pokémon, are now hoping that the Japanese corporation will sic its legal team on OpenAI. Whether Nintendo decides to pursue legal action is unknown at this point. But just the other day, fellow IP powerhouse Disney issued a cease and desist letter to the chatbot platform Character.AI, demanding that it remove all its AI companions that imitate its copyrighted characters. Disney also brought a copyright suit against the image and video AI tool Midjourney in June -- so entertainment heavyweights have shown that they're willing to pick a fight with big names in AI.

OpenAI Boldly Uses Copyrighted Characters Like Pikachu In Sora 2

Have you ever wanted to see Zagreus from Hades riding a scooter? Me neither, but you can with Sora 2 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. 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. 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. 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.

'Pokémon Don't Sue Me': Sora 2 App Opens Floodgates to AI Videos of Pikachu, Mario and More - IGN

OpenAI's Sora 2 generative video app has gone live, and immediately it's been used to create countless videos featuring licensed characters, such as Mario, Pikachu and an array of other Pokémon. While videos featuring Pikachu in Saving Private Ryan, or Mario in Star Wars, might look surprising, a statement from OpenAI earlier this week suggested the company knew exactly what people would be getting up to when Sora 2 arrived -- and what the company's own algorithms had apparently been trained on. According to a Wall Street Journal report, OpenAI has already begun contacting movie studios and other intellectual property owners to discuss next steps -- and offer them the chance to retroactively opt out of their fictional characters being available within Sora 2's AI videos. But, for now, it's open season on Pikachu and his pals, as these initial results from Sora 2 demonstrate (thanks, Nintendo Life): Ever wondered what Pikachu would sound like if he could actually chat away in human speech (and wasn't secretly Ryan Reynolds)? Well, wonder no longer -- though you may regret listening to this. While characters are fair game, OpenAI has previously said that real-life people, whether that's users of the app or the those seeking to use the likeness of celebrities, will need to have manually opted in to having their appearances generated. Of course, OpenAI boss Sam Altman has allowed for his likeness to be used -- so here he is having a lightsaber battle with Pikachu: Alongside Pokémon, Nintendo's own Mario characters have been getting plenty of use. And then there's the final clip below, which mashes together Valve's Portal and Activision's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (and also Twin Peaks). Is any of this legal? "In short, we don't have a definitive answer yet," business lawyer and creator of the Virtual Legality podcast Richard Hoeg told IGN today. "There are indications in some quarters that training on protected materials is likely going to be deemed legal so long as the materials themselves were acquired for some lawful purpose (and not pirated). But on the output side, the Disney/Dreamworks lawsuit makes some good arguments for why/how the law should expect these platforms to police prompts for infringing requests, especially if they are already policing for something else (porn, bigotry, etc.). But all of those are still just arguments, not settled law.. Hoeg continued: "The law moves slowly, far slower than technology, which is why you see these tech companies racing ahead of it a bit. My best guess is that OpenAI is probably going to be okay long term on the training sets they used (assuming they weren't pirated), and that the 'opt out of training' option therefore won't do much of anything. Where they really need to concern themselves is on the output side and/or if they are marketing their software's abilities with protected content themselves." IGN has contacted Nintendo and The Pokémon Company for comment. Last week, the famously litigious The Pokémon Company formally responded to the use of Pokémon TV hero Ash Ketchum and the series' theme tune by the Department of Homeland Security, as part of a video showing people being arrested and handcuffed by law enforcement agents. "Our company was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content," a spokesperson told IGN, "and permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property." But while The Pokémon Company may not begin legal action over that usage, the firm is still keenly battling on against Palworld developer Pocketpair in its claim that the game infringed upon multiple patents. Earlier this week, former Capcom designer Yoshiki Okamoto sparked a backlash in Japan after suggesting that Pokémon and Nintendo's legal action against Palworld was justified, since Pocketpair's game had "crossed a line that should not be crossed."