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Could AI-generated videos of celebrities upend the creator economy’s old guard? That’s the question posed in a recent lawsuit filed by video messaging app Cameo against OpenAI—the latest legal action thrown at the AI juggernaut this year. The newest version of OpenAI’s Sora 2 video-generation app includes a feature that allows users to generate synthetic video of themselves on demand. To promote the feature, celebrity likenesses, such as investor Mark Cuban and the creator Jake Paul, are already available on the app, enabling select Sora users to flood their friends’ inboxes with personalized greetings from the rich and famous. For the company Cameo, Sora 2’s latest feature is particularly grating—largely because it’s also called Cameo, says Steve Galanis, CEO of the creator economy app, founded in Chicago in 2017. “I’m not concerned about competition. If that model beats our model, I don’t like to lose, but that’s okay,” Galanis tells Inc. “What we’re very specifically fighting is calling it what they did. So forget the technology, forget the business model.” The complaint, filed Tuesday in a California Federal District Court, says that by using the same name for its new feature, Sora 2 poses an “imminent, existential, and potentially lethal threat” to Cameo’s business. Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation Though Sora 2’s Cameo is only in beta and available via invite to users in select markets, synthetic celebrity videos have swarmed social media since the app’s update on September 30. The wave of fake videos has ensnared Galanis’ company in the kind of confusion that’s only become more common in the age of deepfakes and online deception. He says that customer service queries for Sora 2’s Cameo that users have entered into ChatGPT serve links back to the original Cameo. Sora 2’s update also has social media users falsely attributing the synthetic celebrity videos to Cameo, Galanis claims. “From a customer confusion perspective, as these videos are coming out, people are tagging Cameo on TikTok and Instagram with these Sora videos.” This problem will only compound if the product is rolled globally, the Cameo chief argues. “Millions of AI slop videos coming over our search results could be existential to our business.” The complaint seeks an unspecified amount of injunctive monetary relief, and alleges a variety of offenses, including trademark dilution, trademark infringement, and unfair competition. Galanis says that Cameo sent OpenAI a cease and desist letter earlier this month, but Sora’s celebrity feature was still released with the same name. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has steered his company to titanic prominence in the field as the company reportedly gears up for an IPO at a $1 trillion valuation. Altman wrote on his personal blog earlier this month on the heels of the Sora update: “We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly.” An OpenAI spokesperson tells Inc: “We’re reviewing the complaint, but we disagree that anyone can claim exclusive ownership over the word ‘cameo.’” “They’ve been a bad actor here,” Galanis says. “The genie is not going back in the bottle, these technologies are here to stay. But I do think that when they’re rolled out in a really disgusting way like that, it turns a lot of people off,” Galanis tells Inc.
