Disney & OpenAI give up on Sora while we're all just waiting on Kingdom Hearts 4

Artificial Intelligence continues to be quite the misnomer and universal grift. These AI companies promise the world and deliver weak substitutes for human creativity and ingenuity.

The poor bastards that can't be bothered to learn or do something for themselves are celebrating. Finally, they can create whatever garbage thought pops into their head with a prompt to an uncaring machine.

This was made most apparent when OpenAI dropped an app called Sora. It allowed users to generate short videos using a simple text prompt and publish them to a timeline.

The problem was, there were no real guardrails beyond not allowing NSFW content. The app was immediately filled with cartoon characters like SpongeBob SquarePants flying planes into the Twin Towers.

It was a mess, and apparently one Disney was happy to spend $1 billion to be a part of. Their plan was to license characters like Mickey Mouse to the app so users could generate videos of them. Some videos would even appear on Disney+.

The only feeling I have in this moment after Sora's death is one of relief. Disney backed out and took its money with it.

Apparently, OpenAI was losing tons of money on Sora, which is emblematic of the AI bubble we're all living in. To achieve something remotely close to satisfying for users and the industry, companies have to be committing blatant theft and operating at a level that costs billions.

I'm glad there are more people drawing clear lines between generative AI like Sora and useful tools. Some of those tools are also generative in nature, but are used within a controlled space where the user is theoretically knowledgeable enough to know when a hallucination occurs.

I keep calling back to Apple Intelligence in all of this, and with good reason. I expect Apple's approach of on-device AI that is private, ethical, and secure will win out in the end. If everything is running in servers powered by renewable energy controlled by Apple, or on everyone's Apple devices, it solves the finance and energy problems all in one go.

No, not that Sora

I wrote the news piece for AppleInsider on this topic yesterday, and made sure to stuff it full of Kingdom Hearts references. It seemed appropriate given that this involved a product named Sora and a collaboration with Disney.

The biggest difference between the soulless entity that was a generative video machine and the protagonist of a 25-year-old RPG franchise is the presence of a heart in one of them.

It's silly to say out loud, but in all seriousness, Sora from the Kingdom Hearts franchise is a highly representational character. He's the embodiment of human connection and has the power to forge relationships and genuinely care about every single person he interacts with.

Sora might actually be the opposite of generative AI. Which is why the app name was an annoying one.

Sora, the app, was an entity built on theft, deceit, and greed. It was an amalgamation of every piece of human knowledge scraped from every surface of the internet and jammed into a tool that could output video.

Kingdom Hearts is AI?

The funny thing is, no one in the Kingdom Hearts franchise seems to know exactly what the titular object is. Is it darkness? Light? Knowledge? Power? A place to be conquered? Or a way to become whole again?

One of the big bads in the franchise, Xemnas, decides that he's tired of looking for Kingdom Hearts or attempting to summon it using some weird incantation involving seven Disney princesses. So instead, he builds a fake one.

The hapless main character, Sora, goes around swinging his Keyblade, releasing hearts captured by the dark creatures called Heartless, only to have those hearts re-captured by the fake Kingdom Hearts.

In this instance, this gathering of human hearts, their love, their creativity, their hope, into this single moon-sized construct was going to open the door to knowledge and power. And somehow, this fabricated Kingdom Hearts makes me think of AI.

Xemnas fools his subordinates into thinking this fake Kingdom Hearts would be the answer to them becoming human again. Much like how AI is being sold as a way to unlock some secret creativity within people that claim they can't create art.

Of course, it is all a lie.

Just as the fake Kingdom Hearts, a collection of human knowledge and life, isn't some kind of savior of the broken, AI isn't either.

In the story, the fake Kingdom Hearts is stopped before it is completed, and Xemnas is defeated by the power of friendship. In the real world, OpenAI ran out of money and had to shutter Sora while Disney backed away quickly from a bad deal.

So, for the moment, we can only hope this victory actually means something. Because if Kingdom Hearts is anything to go by, we're about to be face to face with 13 embodiments of darkness attempting to erase existence, and the only one that can save us is some teen wearing clown shoes.

Perhaps the answer is in Kingdom Hearts 4, where the world of fiction is reality and also looks a lot like Shibuya, but it's actually a video game that Rex in Toy Story likes to play. Just release the damn game already.