Roundup: OpenAI's Sora

A revolutionary text-to-video tool?

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay (with added cat face from Canva)

OpenAI did it again… or did they? Sora, a text-to-video model created by the American artificial intelligence research organization, has the capability to produce videos in response to descriptive prompts, elongate existing videos in both forward and backward directions, and generate videos from static images.

As of February 2024, it remains unreleased.

News outlets have written a lot about the new tool, here is a selection of articles I found particularly interesting (or amusing!).

The new generative tool from OpenAI, Sora, has the potential to revolutionize marketing and content creation (link)

The advent of Sora offers opportunities for businesses across various sectors. In the foreseeable future, two key areas could be poised for significant applications. The initial area pertains to marketing and advertising. Another domain where Sora could make an impact is in training and education. (Via Omar H. Fares/The Conversation).

According to some filmmakers, OpenAI's Sora doesn't mean the end of Hollywood (link)

Film concept artist and illustrator Reid Southen expressed, “A lot of people are saying Hollywood’s over, Hollywood’s done,”. “I don’t really think that’s the case for a lot of reasons. Production pipelines are too complicated. And these videos are a little too sloppy with too many issues, especially with temporal consistency and artifacts like extra limbs and things like that.” (Via NBC News).

Understanding access and potential costs of Sora (link)

Uncertainty surrounds the release date, access methods, and notably, the potential cost of Sora. (Via Christian Ray Drapete/Medium).

The chief AI researcher at Meta claims that OpenAI's "world simulator," Sora, leads to a dead end (link)

Yann LeCun contends that generative models will struggle with sensory inputs due to the significant challenge of prediction uncertainty, especially with high-dimensional continuous sensory inputs. (Via Matthias Bastian/The Decoder).

Tyler Perry suspends $800M studio expansion, citing concerns regarding OpenAI’s Sora (link)

The filmmaker attributes the halt in expansion specifically to Sora. “I have been watching AI very closely and watching the advancements very closely. I was in the middle of, and have been planning for the last four years, about an $800 million expansion at the studio, which would’ve increased the backlot a tremendous size — we were adding 12 more soundstages. All of that is currently and indefinitely on hold because of Sora and what I’m seeing. I had gotten word over the last year or so that this was coming, but I had no idea until I saw recently the demonstrations of what it’s able to do. It’s shocking to me.” (Via The Hollywood Reporter).

The potential negative impacts of Sora on journalism and society (link)

Two AI experts from the Poynter Institute caution that if Sora lives up to the quality depicted in the Sora demos, we must brace ourselves for a surge of fake videos. (Via Ren LaForme, Tony Elkins and Alex Mahadevan/Poynter).