With OpenAI's Sora, the AI video flood is here
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OpenAI is putting its powerful video creation tool, Sora, in the hands of basically every one of the millions of people who pay for ChatGPT, the company said yesterday.
Why it matters: We're about to witness an at-scale experiment in what it means for people to create and consume large quantities of video content that is photorealistic but fake.
The big picture: OpenAI released Sora precisely because it wants the results of that experiment.
- "We're introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it's used responsibly as the field advances," the company wrote in a post introducing the new product.
Catch up quick: When OpenAI gave the public a sneak peek at Sora last February, the clips the company showed caused jaws to drop — but also triggered an allergic reaction in Hollywood.
- Many artists view the advent of AI-generated video as a fraud and an insult. Just as with text-based AI, many creators also believe OpenAI trained its tool using copyrighted works.
What they're saying: "We don't want the world to just be text," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a live-streamed announcement yesterday. Video is "important to our culture."
The company said in a statement that the latest Turbo version of Sora, which will be offered as a standalone product to ChatGPT Plus and Pro customers, is "significantly faster" than the version the firm previewed. It lets users generate videos up to 20 seconds long.
An early review by Marques Brownlee, who got to play with Sora before the release, details some of what OpenAI admits are the "many limitations" of the tool.
- In particular, Sora's videos regularly seem to have problems handling basic physics. Objects appear and disappear, particularly when something else moves in front of them.
OpenAI isn't trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes here. In Monday's live-streamed launch, Sora team leaders said the tool was "not about generating feature-length movies" but instead provides a "co-creative dynamic" so users can explore new ideas.
- The company imagines Sora not as a filmmaker but as a filmmaker's sounding board.
- The new version of the tool lets you drop your own images in as prompts. There's also a timeline editor that lets you add new prompts at specific moments in a video.
- In a demo at Monday's Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco, OpenAI also showed off a feature — still in private testing — that allows users to narrate videos using AI-generated versions of their own voices, in multiple languages.
The company said it understands that putting Sora into so many hands could cause problems.
- Altman said OpenAI wants to prevent illegal use of the tool, "but we also want to balance that with creative expression."
- Users' ability to upload images of people will be "limited at launch," OpenAI's blog post said.
- Moderation of user content in Sora will be "starting a little conservative," but if it "doesn't quite get it right, just give us that feedback," Altman said.
Friction point: Sora will be available globally, except in Europe and the U.K. for now — presumably because of stringent EU privacy laws.
OpenAI's competitors are also moving fast with AI video-making offerings in the meantime.
- Google last week rolled out its Veo video generator to business partners, and Meta is developing Movie Gen — but neither is yet available to the general public.
Zoom out: Today's online world isn't exactly experiencing a shortage of brief videos.
- Logged-in Sora users can view a bottomless feed of "featured" Sora-made videos, alongside the prompts that created them.
- OpenAI suggests aspiring video producers will want to use this feed as a source of inspiration, and doubtless they will — but this viewing mode also feels a lot like TikTok or YouTube.
Some observers Monday applauded Sora's capabilities, while others predicted it would deluge us with AI "slop."
What we're watching: OpenAI aims to prevent outright illegal uses of Sora to create child sexual abuse material, impersonation and other problematic material.
- But even if the company succeeds, internet users have a way of pushing the boundaries of new tools like this until every possible awful output has been demonstrated.
The bottom line: Sora's evolution will give us all an early glimpse of how our social and political systems handle broad exposure to AI-made video.
Go deeper: Video-making AI tools are moving into general use
