Disney Scraps Deepfake Dwayne Johnson After Lawyers Panic About The Public Domain
from the public-domain-to-the-rescue dept
Disney spent 18 months negotiating to create a digital version of Dwayne Johnson for the live-action Moana film. Johnson agreed. The technology was ready. Then Disney’s lawyers killed the whole thing—not because of privacy concerns or actor rights, but because they worried parts of the film might end up in the public domain.
This is exactly what we predicted would happen. While everyone obsessed over whether AI training infringes copyright, the more fascinating question was always what happens when AI-generated works can’t get copyright protection at all. Early cases established that copyright only covers human-created works, and the Copyright Office has since clarified that most AI-generated images have no copyright protection (with limited exceptions depending on human creativity added). This should be a boon for the public domain.
Remember the Hollywood strikes from a few years ago? Actors demanded stronger copyright protections, convinced that was their shield against AI replacement by the studios. At the time, I argued they had it backwards. The lack of copyright in AI-generated works actually served to protect actors better than any new law could—because copyright-obsessed studios would never risk having their precious IP fall into the public domain.
Turns out I was right. A new report reveals that Disney—the company that spent decades lobbying to extend copyright terms to protect Mickey Mouse—abandoned a deepfake Dwayne Johnson project purely over public domain fears.
Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed, what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns. They also worried that the studio ultimately couldn’t claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it, people involved in the negotiations said.
Disney and Metaphysic spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract and work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it’s released next summer.
This is kind of hilarious on multiple levels. As predicted, that one simple trick (AI-generated works being in the public domain) actually acts as a tool against Hollywood relying on AI tools. The actors who called for stronger copyright got it backwards. Stronger copyright would, as always, give more power to the studio who would control the copyright and use it to squeeze more out of actors for less.
The fact that it’s public domain actually gives the actors much more power over how studios can use AI.
Of course, studios shouldn’t be so damned afraid of using public domain works. If some bits of the movie are not covered by copyright it’s not going to diminish people’s interest in seeing the full official release via authorized means. It might just mean that some clips are used by fans to remix it in fun ways, possibly driving more attention.
This is the beautiful irony of copyright maximalism eating itself: Disney’s own obsession with controlling every frame of content now prevents them from using the very technology they hoped would let them replace human performers. The actors who called for stronger copyright protections got exactly what they needed—just not how they expected.
Once again, weaker copyright serves creators better than the iron grip of the middlemen who profit from aggregating and controlling their work.
Filed Under: ai, copyright, dwayne johnson, moana, public domain
Companies: disney
Comments on “Disney Scraps Deepfake Dwayne Johnson After Lawyers Panic About The Public Domain”
Next up. Ai can steal your work. Disney replicates real person against their will and that person loses the right to their own face, body, and voice.
Because this is 100% what Disney and every rich person will pay to have legalized.
Re:
I imagine that something like this will happen sooner or later. Once AI gets good enough to follow a human provided script to make whole movies, with some human editing to fix things, why bother to have actors at all? You can just use AI to generate fictional people entirely (similar to the fictional AI social media celebrities they’ve already made). Video games like The Sims already let you design fictional people, I’m sure someone will allow you to make AI avatars of fictional people sooner or later that you can have AI use in deepfake scenes.
Copyright or not, the cost savings of just using AI this way instead of paying actors will be too great to ignore. IMO only the writers really safe from AI long term, since creativity is subjective so AI can never definitively “beat” a human at it.
Re: Re:
But computers wouldn’t have to write better stories than human writers; they just have to write well enough to extract money from the public. And people have long been complaining that the most-popular films are unoriginal, poorly written, and so on.
So I’m not sure the writers are as “safe” as you think. I guess we’ll find out the next time they all go on strike.
Re: Re:
Because famous, talented actors draw in customers. I doubt you’d get many cinema-goers to show up for a movie where the credits looked like this:
Re: Re: Re:
Disney targets a lot of animated films at young children, who generally have little idea who’s famous—and the actors would only be doing voices, anyway. There have also been many popular films with little-known actors, nobably Star Wars.
I wouldn’t put it past Disney to get a few big-name voice actors to bring in the parents, and use A.I. for supporting roles, to replace motion-capture, and so on.
Re: Re:
And how many of those have broken through to the mainstream in the same way as even a reality show celebrity?
AI might be good enough to produce slop that rivals any mediocre indie movie, but it’ll never be able to produce anything that gets Marvel-level money and/or attention. Hell, for all the glazing that AI evangelists have done for generative AI, there is precisely nothing produced entirely or near-entirely by a generative AI model that has managed to capture the imagination of millions in the same way as a good book or TV show or movie or song or painting or digital artwork. AI is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness because AI only ever duplicates and never innovates.
AI “art” will never replace human art. An AI image generator can never tell you why it made the choices it made in putting together an image because it’s programmed to create a mosaic of other people’s works; even if an image looks like it was painted with an actual brush, the AI didn’t actually run a brush across a canvas, so it can’t tell you why those specific brushstrokes were made. An AI text generator can write a short story in the style of Hemingway, but it can’t tell you why it made certain word choices because it’s programmed to guesstimate what words might come the closest to imitating the style of Hemingway without understanding why Hemingway made the choices he made in his writing and his editing.
The day that AI replaces humans in creative fields is the day Idiocracy stops being a satire and starts being an actual documentary. Don’t bet on it ever happening—you will die broke and disappointed.
Re: Re: Re:
Idiocracy’s been seeming very much like a documentary since January 20, 2025.
Is that important? There are hundreds of revered painters who also can’t tell us that, on account of being long-dead. And probably many living painters who also couldn’t tell us why, except that it felt right. For most famous art, “intent” is just critical speculation.
I presume you’re talking about current “A.I.”, which is generally not considered “intelligent”; it’s just a marketing term. But there’s no reason to think it’s impossible to have actual artificial intelligence, capable of innovation.
Re: Re: Re:2
In the sense that even being able to ponder that question and wonder what a person’s thought process was in painting those strokes, as opposed to knowing an AI artificially generated an algorithmic impersonation of a brushstroke as part of a best-guess autofill mosaic that tries to look like a painting? Yes, it is important.
Impossible? No. Improbable? Oh, fuck the hell yes. Other than AI evangelists metaphorically kissing the asses of their favorite AI models, nothing I’ve seen from any AI has me convinced that we’re going to end up with AI models putting people completely out of work in creative fields at any time in the near future. (As of right now, they can’t even generate anything more than a few seconds of video footage at a time, and even that still needs massive cleanup from human artists to make it look remotely decent.) And I’m sure as hell not convinced that we’re going to ever see—at least in our lifetimes—an AI model that suddenly becomes self-aware like it’s Skynet or some shit.
AI is the logical next step of the same kinds of idiots and grifters who evangelized NFTs as a “game changer” that would revolutionize the world. And like NFTs before them, the AI bubble will burst and take out everyone who isn’t grifting and rugpulling with one eye towards the exit. If you’re in the bubble, get out of it. If you’re not in the bubble, stay out of it. And if you’re watching The Bubble, I hope it’s the MST3K version.
Re: Re: Re:3
Why not just say “like the A.I. bubbles before it”? Wikipedia says we’ve already had two major “A.I. winters” (being periods of greatly reduced interest after bubbles burst), and many smaller ones. It’s an apparently perputual grift.
The grift, though, is more about timing and capability than possibility. Intelligence isn’t magic, and I see no reason to think that nobody will ever put together enough processing power to create it. The grifters say it’ll happen any time now, and you’d better not miss your chance. But it took the Mechanical Turk nearly 230 years to go from grift to reality.
(I find it weird that everyone’s trying to jump right to human-level intelligence. Shouldn’t we have something like an A.I. nematode first? It’s a few hundred neurons, and we could easily compare behavior against the real thing.)
Well, art’s always meant different things to different people. Personally, I don’t see much difference between that (again, assuming a “real” artificial intelligence rather than the current shit) and one human artist impersonating another, which also happens. Except that we’d potentially get a full log of the thought process.
Re: Re: Re:4
Artists adapt the old into the new and find new ways to express their ideas through experimentation and improvisation (i.e., fucking around). An AI can’t do that because an AI isn’t programmed to fuck around—it’s programmed to deliver an algorithmic best-guess response to the input it’s given and nothing more. It can’t feel the way a brush stroke feels against a canvas or mix colors together in weird combinations that ultimately create an effect it didn’t see coming; it can only ever (try to) replicate what it’s told to replicate by placing pixels together according to an algorithm.
A human artist can take inspiration from a wide variety of styles and, over time, merge them into something that is uniquely their own style. Show me an AI generator that can do the same thing without being nudged by LORAs or style prompts or whatever.
Re: Re: Re:5
I think we’re disagreeing about the definition of “artificial intelligence”. I say that if it’s limited by its programming, it’s not yet intelligent.
One could also say that’s all genetics encode; nematodes and fruit flies don’t seem to do much more. But humans have gone beyond our “programming”.
I can’t; I don’t believe such things exist, or will anytime soon. But I don’t see anything short of a “Butlerian Jihad” that will stop humanity from eventually having machines that feel, and that “fuck around”.
Your argument is more a way to test whether A.I. exists than to prove it can’t.
(ChatGPT can’t even count yet, as people keep showing, which makes it less “intelligent” than frogs and honeybees. But the company patches the obvious errors quickly in the hopes that people won’t really notice. Its marketing as “intelligent” is as bullshit as the “Open” in its company’s name.)
Re: Re: Re:6
No, my argument is that content generators powered by large language models—colloquially referred to as “AI generators”—will never replace humans in any artistic field because no matter how good an AI generator gets at replicating existing works, it can never innovate by bringing together disparate influences into a new style or using a specific technique in a new or unforeseen way. Whether the generator is “intelligent” or somehow sentient is beside the point; that the generator can only ever produce algorithmic best-guess mosaics that have no artistic weight behind them is the exact point. When’s the last time you saw an AI-generated image or video that compelled you to want to see more from the person who prompted its creation in the same way that seeing a picture drawn by a person whose style fascinates you in any way compels you to want to see more of that person’s work?
AI-generated “art” will never replace human-made art. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a grifter who’s trying to take your money and run before you figure out you’ve been rugpulled.
Re: Re: Re:7
Ah, okay; I thought you were using it in the sense of “artificial intelligences which are generating stuff”. The colloquial use of the term “A.I.” is, as already noted, bullshit hype. (And accepting this definition by using the term without scare-quotes, to refer to stuff like ChatGPT, is feeding the hype.)
“Replace” is another term that could lead to misunderstanding. Does it mean humans would no longer create art? Humans will do that until they go extinct.
I believe that actual artificial intelligences, not being large language models and bearing little resemblance to the current marketing-defined “A.I”, will eventually exist (somewhere among the 300 sextillion stars believed to exist, in our universe that’s expected to continue for at least as many years). Humans might even be the species to create them, in which case A.I. art will co-exist with human art.
But don’t give me money for saying that. I don’t expect it to happen during either of our lifetimes anyway: maybe it’ll take decades, maybe millennia. There’s a good chance we’ll see some more A.I. winters, during which everyone who funded and hyped “A.I.” will be quite embarrassed to have done so.
Despite my pessimism, the hype occasionally leads to useful stuff (if not “intelligence”). It’s just that whatever used to be hyped as “A.I.” tends to stop being referred to as such, once it actually exists in daily life: voice recognition, video game bots, image classifiers, bank-fraud detection systems, and so on. (And I still maintain that film and television producers, caring little about “art”, will probably try to use them to supplant actors and writers—possibly as a negotiating tactic, possibly seriously.)
Re: Re: Re:8
I can’t believe I actually have to explain what “replace” means in this context, but sure, let’s do that: It means “replacing human artists with AI generators”. Oh, and is there any individual word in that phrase that you think you’re going to misunderstand? Well I don’t give a shit, I’m going ahead with my comment anyway.
Of course people will still make art; that’s what we do. But given how many people are already enamored with AI generators and their ability to (generally) crank out an image that someone wants to see with a simple prompt, human-made art would certainly be less wanted should the masses desire AI “art” in everything. Corporations are already using AI-generated “art” (albeit cleaned up by actual people) in advertising and such; if AI generators get good enough to not even require the cleanup, of course those corporations would get rid of their human artists and replace them with AI generators.
But what happens to the human artists? Do they start charging exorbitant prices for “human-made” art to cover the fact that they can’t make a living from selling access to their skills like they could before AI generators, or what? This is why a lot of people—but especially people in creative fields—are worried about AI “art” and how quickly it’s been taking over the Internet. If AI generators could ever be good enough to replace artists, writers, and even coders? Well, once that replacement happens, we’re going to see a lot of questions being raised about how the people who were put out of a job can/should be able to afford the cost of living (and holy shit that phrase is so depressing). The people who run this country both politically and financially don’t, and won’t, have any real answers that can’t be boiled down to “well, they should just die, then”.
Re: Re: Re:9
But that’s exactly what’s unclear. The condition has arguably been met if two artists in the world were laid off and then “A.I.” did similar work, which has almost certainly already happened. But you stated it as counter-factual, despite saying corporations have already used the technology.
Does someone literally have to be fired with the corporation saying “we’re replacing you with a computer”? What if they just don’t hire as many artists as they might otherwise have done? I don’t know that it’s “replacement” per se, but it’d be largely indistinguishable over the long term.
But that’s always been the case. How did vaudeville performers afford to live when the likes of Disney made them obsolete? Or the musicians put out of business by recorded music? Telephone operators, secretaries, makers of horse-and-buggy paraphenalia, “computers”…
Nobody ever any good answers in such cases, including politicians. But most of us don’t really expect any central authority to solve those problems, and we eventually end up belittling the plights of those affected—viewing them as having been ridiculously hyperbolic, as when Sousa famously complained about early record players in 1906:
(Hyperbolic, but not entirely wrong: people do hire disc jockeys for events that would have previously used live bands. Is that “replacement”?)
Re: Re: Re:10
A handful of companies may have stopped using human artists for the initial “creating art” work, but they still need some human artists for the “clean up the fucked-up-looking AI slop” work. One of two things is going to happen here: Either the cost of correcting AI slop will outpace the cost of using human artists from the get go and companies will go back to using human artists, or AI generators will get good enough/mass audience standards get low enough that cleanup becomes irrelevant. Guess which one is the best outcome for everyone in general, and you win a No-Prize!
If a corporation favors AI slop over man-made art and stops using human artists in favor of AI generators (with or without cleanup), it is replacing human artists with AI generators. Are you really going to split this specific hair until you cut open the scalp?
And in the cases outlined above, people learned to adapt to new careers and skills. So what happens when people who already have skills that could be used can’t use them to make money because AI generators do what they can but without all that pesky “pay me so I can afford a home” shit? And what happens when an attempt to learn a new skill becomes obsolete because AI generators put the people who are proficient in those skills out of work, too? (Example: A human artist who wants to learn to code will be left as obsolete as actual human coders if AI generators get good enough to create generally mistake-free code.)
The point I’m making is that companies using AI generators to replace human artists—and you know exactly what I mean by that now, so please don’t pick that nit again—don’t give a fuck what happens to the people they’re replacing, even if what happens is that those people end up without a way to make money and therefore afford the cost of living. A bunch of people from AI evangelists to techbros who’ve had their brains melted by group chats all keep saying that AI is going to take over all the jobs and do all the things people can do. But they never talk about what’s going to happen to all the people who are put out of a job by AI. That’s the real question here, and it’s one that politicians and CEOs and other rich motherfuckers haven’t answered. They probably won’t answer until the issue becomes too much of a problem for them to address in a timely and productive manner, even though they should be thinking about the answer before the problem gets that big.
In this case, we really should.
Records and CDs didn’t replace actual artists. AI-generated music could, if it ever gets good enough. I mean, AI-generated music is already plaguing Spotify and YouTube.
No. No, it is not. And if you’re going to insult my intelligence with another question like that, I’d prefer you didn’t bother to ask it.
Re: Re: Re:11
As you said: “people [learn] to adapt to new careers and skills”.
I don’t see why the “because” matters at all. Elevator operators were replaced by a bunch of relays; had history gone differently, it could’ve been “A.I.” (in its 1960s incarnation) or under-paid people in a poorer country.
When skills become obsolete, people learn new ones—and, yeah, it’ll suck if their new skills aren’t useful as expected—or retire, or maybe get handouts (from family or goverments). Sometimes they live in squalor, or become homeless.
But they never really have, and it’s rare that any authority has done anything about it. Maybe, as you say, they should. I’m not gonna hold my breath till we agree on the “how”. The idea of a “starving artist” is not new.
But they did, in some contexts. It’s easy to overlook when it happened before our time. In my opinion, electric lamps “replaced” lamp-lighters, even though there are still people employed as lamp-lighters.
Re: Re: Re:12
Do you think that’s a good thing? Do you think that’s something corporations should be pushing people towards? Do you think that’s going to help anybody but rich motherfuckers?
The idea that corporations could cut them out of the economy altogether by replacing them with artificially generated “art” is, though—and my point has been about those three questions I just asked and whether any people in power who would answer “no” to all three have truly thought about what happens to the people who are sent to the streets to die by corporations who no longer see a need for human labor.
No, they didn’t. Actual musicians still had to record albums and release them; if anything, records/CDs replaced the necessity of seeing an artist live to hear their music. (Though I will note that most musicians make their money through live tours instead of album sales, so don’t go saying shit about “records got rid of live performances” and insult your intelligence as well as mine, mmm’kay.) AI-generated music, if it ever gets good enough to be truly as good as any existing human artist/band, could conceivably replace those artists/bands—and if mass standards were to fall low enough that AI-generated music is seen as “better” than human-made music…well, what’s going to keep human artists/bands from even trying to make new music when a computer can be prompted to make “better” music?
And that’s the bigger problem I have with AI-generated “art” of any kind: If it ever gets good enough that the masses prefer that slop to human-made art, medium be damned, why should any human artist ever try to compete with it when they’re not going to succeed in the face of a mass-produced, masses-preferred, nigh-unstoppable AI juggernaut? Artists already have a hard enough time making a living through their art as it is; what reason would they have to even try if they’re always going to be outperformed by an AI generator?
You talk about “learning new skills” and all that shit, but you seem to forget that making art—actual, real, human-made art—is something people want to do. AI generation being popular to the point where human-made art is seen as “lesser” art isn’t going to motivate anyone to write, draw, play music, or literally anything else that requires the creative impulse. A big part of life is the joy of creation; the people who truly want to replace human artists with AI generators don’t give a fuck about that—or what happens to people when that joy is stolen from them by a fucking prompt.
Do you think that’s a good thing? Do you think that’s something corporations should be pushing people towards? Do you think that’s going to help anybody but rich motherfuckers?
Re: Re: That cuts both ways though
What studios, and the big unethical executives, have is financing and distribution.
If you don’t need to pay actors and people to make your movie, what exactly do execs bring to the table over a scrappy group of writers with a youtube channel?
I don’t love this tech but I think the studio execs are blinded by their own hubris if they think this works in their favor. Their money and power comes from gatekeeping and logistics.
Re: Re: Re:
The connections to people with the money necessary to pay actual human artists to clean up whatever slop that the studio’s preferred AI model generates.
I’m wondering how clever Johnson was being here. Did the actor and agent intentionally engineer a situation in which Johnson would get paid for an A.I. character, with the expectation that it’d never be used?
(Probably not, but I’m amused by the idea of the agent calling up Disney as soon as the check clears: “by the way, this is all gonna be public domain…”. It’s a trick that could presumably only work once.)
It’s not every day you run into an issue where none of the sides deserves any sympathy.
Of course Dwayne Johnson would be on board with AI replacing actors, since he stopped being Hollywood’s golden one, he’s been showing the world who he is.
Re: Of course he would
Because he doesn’t look like Maui from the animated movie, he signed on to let AI animate the character he was only going to voice (and maybe do some mocap for) instead of an army of underpaid CGI animators in Asia.
He’s constantly at like 6% body fat to maintain his cut physique. Maui is… not cut. He’s beefy. And he probably agreed to allow an AI replica so he didn’t have to gain and lose 40 pounds of fat, wear a silly wig, and have to spend hours each day in makeup to cover his tattoos and replace them with Maui’s.
The people he was putting out of work were traditional CGI animators and/or nutritionists and makeup artists,
Imagine a world where Kumail Nanjani didn’t have to spend months getting swole for a Marvel movie.
Re: Re:
He takes a mountain of steroids to look like he does and now has heart issues as a consequence, ageing gracefully and letting his body return to a less defined, more natural state would be better for him. He comes from an extended family of wrestlers who are pacific islanders, many of whom do look like Maui, they are not short of potential replacements for the role. They usually recast for the live action version of Disney films either way.
This isn’t about doing what’s right for Rock’s body, or saving other actors from having to work to get the superhero look, this is about taking roles well after he’s able to perform them and pulling that ladder up after him. Why take a chance on a young star when you can just slap AI Rockface on someone else’s body, as god knows, acting around stand ins and talking to tennisballs will surely elevate the performances of everyone else around him.
Re: Re: Re:
If you’re only considering health, perhaps. It might have a negative effect on Johnson’s career and finances.
Re: Re: Re:
Because we all saw how well slapping Rock’s face on a computer-generated character worked out in The Mummy Returns, and while the technology may have improved, the uncanny valley hasn’t gone away (as was proven by the two posthumous CGI-assisted cameos in Rogue One).
Re: Re: Re:2
Either I didn’t, or this “uncanny valley” (and the film itself) just didn’t make enough of an impression for me to remember.
But Wikipedia says “Like its predecessor, The Mummy Returns was a commercial success, grossing $435 million worldwide, becoming the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2001 and the highest-grossing film of the series.” Also: “Rogue One grossed $1 billion worldwide … and received [an] Academy Award [nomination] for … Best Visual Effects.” Perhaps I’m jaded, but I don’t imagine that mere artistic opinions will matter much in comparison.
I do remember thinking that the humans in Toy Story looked really fake, to the extent I couldn’t see this tech replacing traditional animation. Needless to say, I was wrong.
Abolish Copyright
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Homer (the Greek one, not the yellow dude from Springfield), Leonardo Da Vinci, Michaelangelo (sculptor, not the turtle), Mozart, etc. didn’t need copyright to live well.
Modern artists don’t either. There’s more than enough people wanting art to live off commissions, patreon, etc., even if you take AI into the account.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Speaking of Disney…Carano settled her lawsuit, presumably with terms very favorable to her.
You are like the Jim Cramer of law matters. You gain more betting against your predictions than with them. (the reverse Cramer fund lost only narrowly to Pelosi’s husband’s fund last year)
Re:
Can’t wait to see how much her transphobia rots her brain from the inside out like J.K. Rowling’s transphobia turned her into someone more obsessed with trans people’s genitals than even trans people.
Re:
Clever. Makeup an answer, then declare victory.
Re:
Why would you presume that? She needs Disney more than they need her. Those terms could well be “Keep ya damn mouth shut if you want a job with us”.
Re: Re:
I don’t expect her getting any roles for the foreseeable future since she isn’t an A-list actor, it is what usually happens when you try to fuck with the movie-industry regardless if you are right or not.
And what Bratty Matty don’t realize is that this wasn’t a win for Carano, it was just Disney finding it cheaper to settle than keep litigating against Musk’s money. As with everything, he is too stupid to realize the implications of money > truth.