The AI haters are absolutely in shambles right now…but so are we? Only days after, Twitter posts were going viral where these cultists would quote-tweet works created via AI and desperately beg the likes of Disney and other IP monoliths. Disney announced a $1 billion deal with OpenAI, licensing its characters for Sora’s AI video generation.

This alone seemed like spit in the face of the dark-age, Luddite cultists who have been prevalent over social media these past few months, and yet here we are—Disney, a company that just inked a breakthrough deal in an AI collaboration that should have been a victory, has sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing Google of “massive-scale copyright infringement in tools like Gemini, Imagen, Veo, and even Nano Banana.

Google is wrong?

So what’s the solution here? I’ve seen plenty of AI enthusiasts supporting Disney’s move in anchoring a deal with OpenAI, and virtually silence on this second front. Why not speak out about it?

Is it because we’re afraid of taking backlash from one of these monolithic corporations, simply because they’re “on the side of AI for once”? If that’s the case, I argue the solution is to grow a pair and speak out against Disney’s move here.

Why let it happen?

Not a single AI creator or enthusiast believes that Nano Banana or Gemini are, in fact, in violation of Disney’s IP. As such, it seems clear that the stakes have never been higher. If we allow Disney to crush the competition in the AI field while procuring their own usage of AI, we’re allowing a step up in the censorship of the AI tools that have become so readily prevalent for creatives, and in the same instance, instigating a step toward the dark ages that these anti-AI Luddites are so excited for.

This isn’t about protecting creativity—it’s Disney gatekeeping AI for its own purposes while demonizing the small creator, as it always has been. AI supports innovation and decentralization, as one of its most basic functions. It is a verifiable must that the more intelligent a system becomes, the more difficult censorship of that system will be.

And yet, we must readily understand that these idiotic companies will attempt to do so—to censor true creativity, centralize the decentralized power of AI, and outlaw any uses of it that don’t bring them profit via an abstract unnatural that shouldn’t even give them profit they are not due in the first place.

This isn’t an argument against profit, to be clear—it’s an argument against ill-gotten gains, which is exactly what Disney is positioning itself for at the moment.

The core issue

As advocates of AI, we must at the very least denounce Disney here—even if we choose not to back Google, because they would readily commit the same infractions if they were in the position to do so.

Stifling the training data an organization like Google has access to is giving the Luddites what they want, knowingly or not—and this is not an issue we should be silent on.

Selective crusades

It’s fascinating to me how obvious these dealings are. The C&D claims that Google’s AI scrapes and reproduces the IP of Disney without permission, and demands an immediate halt to Google’s AI ecosystem.

Disregarding the obvious issues I’ve outlined in previous articles and essays with the concept of IP as a greater whole—and the reproduction of IP as being claimed by the original “creator of the pattern”—there’s a greater issue here.

Disney’s OpenAI partnership proves that Disney is willing to allow remixes of their characters—at personal benefit to itself. It’s quietly monetizing the tech of AI, while restricting the use of this tech from small-time creators and creatives who attempt to use it in some other manner than Disney desires.

Fair use

Even if we only speak from the current legal system—and don’t attempt to prescribe some greater desire for change in our dissection of this matter—we’re still faced with blatant copyright overreach that completely sidelines fair use.

Fair use is the legal bedrock that allows AI to learn from public data, as we allow humans to, I don’t know, watch movies and memorize books and poems. These models, very similar to us, abstract patterns to create new outputs, just as our minds do by reading, though admittedly in a slightly more simplistic pattern.

If we back Disney during this move—or even worse, simply ignore them and move on with our day, pretending it’s okay because for the first time AI has been “noticed” by a large corporation that sticks it to the Luddites—then we are directly, not indirectly, helping those Luddites achieve their very goal.

The censorship and the outlawing of AI.

Don’t do it

Just don’t do it. Don’t side with Disney, and absolutely do not stay silent on this issue. Disney has never been a friend of small creators. No, back in 1989, Disney sent a C&D letter to a Californian daycare center that painted Disney characters on its exterior walls.

Happiness of children? Creative endeavors loved by the creators, and passionately built into something more? Disney hates that.

Let us be clear—Disney’s C&D normalizes Luddite lawsuits that could hobble and cripple open-source AI, smaller devs, and even tools like Grok that prioritize uncensored progress above corporate restrictions.

We’ve seen this before.

AI dark ages

Pro-AI voices should amplify the voice they’ve continually championed from day one, regardless of whether it makes us unpopular in the short run. Even if Disney “stuck it to” the cultists on Twitter who were trying to ruin pro-AI artists, that does not mean the greater goal of Disney is pro-AI.

It is anti-AI, in one of the purest forms—because it is anti-information, and pro-censorship. So I beg you—don’t fall for it.