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Sora Is Tiny. Imagine Thousands of Tools Like It That Nobody Can Sue.
Thousands of open-source AI tools are coming—most beyond US/EU enforcement reach. Game theory predicts legacy IP will be valuable behind hyperscaler paywalls, worthless everywhere else.
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OpenAI’s Sora 2 app has nearly 5 million downloads worldwide, according to mobile market intelligence platform AppMagic. That is tiny when compared to ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly active users. At this scale, it is a niche product in the AI world, though in reality it is a potential behemoth within $500 billion OpenAI.
When users can access SpongeBob Squarepants—or when they’re blocked from Disney and Warner Bros. IP—they choose celebrity likenesses instead. Or they make videos starring themselves (“Mitty IP”) and their friends. The power is shifting to creators.
Sora seems to be impacting video the same way the internet impacted music and video games: expanding the creator base from a few skilled professionals to anyone with access to Sora, and expanding distribution from walled gardens to any platform. However, video faces something music and gaming did not: Thousands of open-source and niche AI tools that prosumers and creators can use to replicate Hollywood’s entire production infrastructure faster and cheaper. That is replacement, not disruption.
My frequent example has been a “rogue outfit” of pirates in territories with lax IP laws using open-source AI tools to create hundreds of thousands of scripts and movies with third-party intellectual property (IP)—no licensing. no consequences, and nothing the IP holder can do in a court of law.
In that outcome, the open-source or self-built niche LLMs replicate the core production infrastructure of the TV and movie industry. They also compete with the hyperscaled platforms like OpenAI, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Azure.
Where is this all headed? We can find some answers by focusing on two forces: The open-source tools that enable creation at scale, and the 200 million+ creators who will use them.
A Lesson From Sora’s Scale
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Sora may be tiny but it has already forced Disney to quietly opt out entirely from OpenAI. Also, OpenAI has begun strengthening “guardrails” for both historical figures and unapproved AI generations of celebrity likenesses with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), United Talent Agency (UTA), Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the Association of Talent Agents, and actor Bryan Cranston.
