Sam Altman says that intellectual property is a lot trickier for video: 'The video feels much more real and lifelike' (www.businessinsider.com)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that intellectual property issues are “a lot trickier” for AI‑generated video than for still images, saying video “feels much more real and lifelike” and triggers stronger emotional and rights‑holder reactions. His comments came amid a wave of viral, unauthorized Sora videos—OpenAI’s TikTok‑style video generator—featuring characters like SpongeBob and Pikachu in graphic or out‑of‑context scenes. Altman said many rights holders want more granular guardrails for character and content generation, and announced OpenAI will soon give rights owners tighter controls over how their properties appear in generated videos. For the AI/ML community this highlights immediate policy, product and technical priorities: developers need robust access controls, content‑ID-like filters, provenance tracking, detection/watermarking, and rights‑holder APIs to enforce permissions or licensing rules at generation time. The episode underscores legal and safety risk management for multimodal models, the social importance of emotional realism in video, and a likely near‑term shift from blanket restrictions to fine‑grained licensing and monetization workflows. Altman also predicted attitudes will evolve—initial resistance may give way to demand for more inclusion under negotiated terms—meaning engineers and policy teams must build flexible, auditable controls into video generation systems.