Since the launch of Sora 2, the system has been willing to generate video of just about any famous person doing just about anything. Over the last couple of weeks, OpenAI has been clamping down on many examples of this, but this particular one caught my eye:

In an unsigned statement on X:

The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (King, Inc.) and OpenAI have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr. King’s image. So at King, Inc.’s request, OpenAI has paused generations depicting Dr. King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures.

While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, OpenAI believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used. Authorized representatives or estate owners can request that their likeness not be used in Sora cameos.

Sam Altman, writing two weeks ago:

We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups. We of course spent a lot of time discussing this before launch, but now that we have a product out we can do more than just theorize.

We are going to make two changes soon (and many more to come).

First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls.

He continues:

Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we [sic] want both to be valuable.

There’s nothing like a zillion dollar company flying by the seat of its pants.