OpenAI, faced with brutal backlash in Hollywood last month, which manipulated images of celebrities and dead newsmakers without consent, is now drawing more attention to its practice.
This week, Chicago tech company Cameo sued OpenAI for trademark infringement.
Founded in 2017, Cameo is known for providing services where fans can hire celebrities create personalized videos with congratulations and other greetings to your friends. The company said its posts have generated more than 100 million views and more than 10 million Moments from customers over the past year.
But last month, when OpenAI announced an update to its text-to-video tool Sora, it launched a new feature called Cameos.
With this feature, people in the Sora app can scan their faces and then allow other people to use their faces in AI-generated environments. Some celebrities such as YouTube influencer and boxer Jake Paulwho is an investor in OpenAI, took part in the deployment. In less than five days, the Sora app has become popular over 1 million downloads.
That has created confusion in the market, Cameo said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
“OpenAI not only uses Plaintiff's valuable CAMEO® trademark, but does so in a manner that directly competes with Plaintiff and threatens its very existence,” Cameo said in its complaint. “By using Plaintiff’s own trademark, Defendant is luring users away from Plaintiff’s authentic, custom celebrity-branded service CAMEO® to Defendant’s artificial intelligence-driven “Cameo” service to create fake but highly realistic celebrity videos.”
OpenAI said in a statement: “We are reviewing the complaint but do not agree that anyone can claim exclusive ownership of the word 'cameo'.”
Cameo co-CEO Steve Galanis said in a statement that his company tried to resolve the issue with OpenAI, but “they refused to stop using the Cameo name for their new Sora feature.”
In its lawsuit, Cameo said it has several trademark registrations in the United States, including the word Cameo as a downloadable software for creating video messages for entertainment, educational, inspirational or greeting purposes featuring celebrities.
“In order to protect the fans, the talent and the integrity of our marketplace, we felt that, unfortunately, we had no choice but to file this lawsuit,” Galanis said.
