Sora Adds Consent Controls After Pikachu, Mario Deepfake Chaos

Hey there! It’s Aaron.

Sora became the #1 app in 24 hours, then immediately flooded with unauthorized deepfakes.

OpenAI's response? Consent controls and revenue sharing. The kind of safeguards creators have been asking for.

Here's everything that shifted this week:

CATCH OF THE DAY

Sora’s Growing Pains

Last week, Sora 2 felt like the day AI learned how to direct. This week, it’s learning there are consequences.

After a week of viral chaos, with everything from Pikachu to Michael Jackson deepfakes flooding the platform, OpenAI’s Sam Altman finally stepped in with what can only be described as a “parent talk.”

His latest blog post basically says, “We love the creativity, but maybe let’s not turn this into the AI version of The Purge.”

And to be fair, he’s got reason to panic.

Sora hit #1 in the App Store within 24 hours in the US and Canada, beating both Gemini and ChatGPT even though it was invite-only. That’s not a launch; that’s a stampede. (Invitation-only, and it still beat ChatGPT. Wild.)

Users flooded in and started generating videos faster than OpenAI could blink. Altman admitted people are producing far more videos than expected, many of them for small audiences.

It’s a fascinating problem: creators are using world-class AI tools not to go viral, but to make personal stories. Beautiful, but also expensive. As Altman puts it, “We’re going to have to somehow make money for video generation.”

So OpenAI’s making two moves: part damage control, part business survival.

First, rightsholders will soon get full opt-in with actual preferences for how their characters or likenesses are used. Not just “in or out,” but real controls: what genres, what tone, what contexts. Individual users can also set restrictions on their own cameos, like blocking political uses or certain words.

Second, OpenAI plans to roll out revenue sharing for rightsholders who allow their creations to appear in user-generated videos. Translation: if someone’s making videos with your character, you get a cut.

But this isn’t just about fairness; it’s about survival. Altman’s betting that if you treat rightsholders as collaborators instead of adversaries, they’ll start seeing Sora not as a threat, but as an opportunity.

He even called it a new form of “interactive fan fiction”, a kind of participatory creativity where fans can build inside the worlds they love. (Which, honestly, sounds like corporate-speak for “please don’t sue us,” but the idea’s not wrong.)

There’s also a cultural undertone that’s easy to miss. Altman gave a nod to Japan, saying the team was “struck by how deep the connection between users and Japanese content is.”

That’s not throwaway praise; it’s recognition that anime and gaming fandoms are driving much of Sora’s creative use. It’s also a quiet hint at who OpenAI’s courting next: the world’s most passionate storytellers.

For creators, this moment feels familiar. It’s the same growing pains we saw in the early days of ChatGPT… wild experimentation, massive adoption, and a company sprinting to keep up with its own success.

The difference this time is that the stakes are visual. When text misbehaves, you get a weird paragraph. When video misbehaves, you get a fake person saying something they never said.

And that’s where things get complicated. Our legal system wasn’t built for AI remixing at scale. Sora is moving faster than copyright law ever could, and for now, OpenAI is writing the rules as it goes, hoping the courts don’t rewrite them later.

Still, it’s hard not to be impressed. In less than a week, Sora has gone from chaotic sandbox to the foundation of a possible new creative economy. The fact that OpenAI is even attempting revenue sharing, usage controls, and global fandom diplomacy (all within days of launch) is wild..

Sora’s not just moving fast; it’s trying to move right. In tech, that almost never happens.

The Final Byte

Sora’s first week was a fever dream of deepfakes and delight. Its second week? A masterclass in growing up under pressure.

OpenAI isn’t just cleaning up a mess, it’s trying to figure out who owns what in the age of AI remix culture.

And if this experiment works, we might look back on this moment as the day AI storytelling stopped being a free-for-all and started becoming an industry.

See you in the next one,

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