Google Pitches Hollywood Studios on AI Training Licences Worth Millions per Character

Google has been approaching Hollywood's largest studios with offers to license their copyrighted libraries for training its AI models. According to unnamed sources cited by The Los Angeles Times, executives have pitched representatives from Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Universal, but none of them has formally agreed to anything.

The figures under discussion are substantial. Google could reportedly pay a studio such as Disney / Pixar around $40 million for the rights to generate outputs featuring a single copyrighted character. The total could climb into the billions as more characters are added, and studios might also take a share of the advertising revenue Google earns from AI-generated content featuring that intellectual property on platforms such as YouTube.

Buying a better story about AI

The Verge argues the value to Google goes beyond training data. If Gemini can produce studio-approved images of well known characters, generative AI becomes more familiar and less threatening to people who do not follow the technology closely. The piece notes that public sentiment, particularly among younger audiences, has turned negative after years of AI companies talking about disruption and job losses.

For the studios the calculation is harder. A licensing agreement would signal that the entertainment industry treats generative AI as a tool worth adopting. Faster production timelines and lower costs are what keep studios interested; the same shift would likely remove a significant portion of entertainment jobs.

The Verge's view is that once one major legacy studio commits and produces something it can show publicly, others gain a reason to follow. For now, it says, the AI industry needs Hollywood more than Hollywood needs AI.

Full report at The Verge.