OpenAI said in its announcement that Sora is not yet available to the public.
US company OpenAI last week launched a tool that can generate highly realistic video clips with just a few lines of text, leaving content creators wondering whether they are the latest professionals to be replaced by algorithms.
Reaction to the tool, called Sora, ranged from enthusiasm to alarm at the future direction of the industry.
YouTuber Marques Brownlee called seeing artificial intelligence doing its job “scary” and “threatening.”
On the other hand, Caleb Ward, one half of the AI filmmaking duo Curious Refuge, told his YouTube followers that he can’t wait to use the tool.
However, both Ward and Brownlee agree that this is an important moment for their industry.
“I can’t stress enough how important this is to filmmaking and the creative community,” said Ward, whose recent trailer for the Wes Anderson-style Star Wars movie went viral.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in its announcement that Sora is not yet available to the public.
The announcement didn’t specify use cases, but said “a number of visual artists, designers and filmmakers” have been selected to help with testing.
“Like an amoeba”
The company included sample videos with its announcement, including a stylish woman walking down a Tokyo street, a cat waking its owner in bed, and a herd of charging mammoths.
The internet was immediately filled with awe and praise, which is common for OpenAI products.
“I’m blown away by their quality,” Anis Ayari, an artificial intelligence engineer and Defend Intelligence streamer, told AFP.
He suggested that the tool could one day be used to create fully virtual presenters.
But there are plenty of dissenters who believe these videos are still firmly stuck in the “uncanny valley,” where glitches in otherwise realistic images can make viewers sick.
Commentator Ed Zitron wrote that in OpenAI’s cat video, “the owner’s arm appears to be part of the pad, with the cat’s claws exploding out of the arm like an amoeba.”
He writes in the newsletter that AI video tools are too expensive and resource-hungry to be truly effective.
And the editing styles couldn’t be coordinated, making the tools useless for creating anything other than small snippets.
AI fatigue
Sora enters a market that’s heating up, with Google, Stability AI, and several other smaller players already getting into the game.
YouTube itself announced last September that it was developing a tool that would let creators create AI-generated videos and background images.
However, existing tools have not yet taken the world by storm.
French anchor FibreTigre said he had tried artificial intelligence video tools but ended the experiment.
He said he was concerned about the ethics of using tools trained on other artists’ work, and ultimately the programs didn’t do their jobs well.
“They’re so ugly,” he said of the AI videos.
He said that in his view, audiences in the future will have “huge fatigue” with artificial intelligence and will cherish anything that is not artificial.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
