Welcome to a Consequence Chat, where Consequence staffers debate the biggest stories in pop culture. Today, we look at the Sora, the new text-to-video AI generating software. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length.
Wren Graves (Features Editor): Today’s subject: Sora. Not to be confused with the fish people from Zelda. Not how Mario feels after missing a jump. Sora, the new text-to-video generative program from OpenAI. It’s not available for public use, but OpenAI has released almost 50 sample clips, ranging from about 10 seconds to a minute. This stuff was at the heart of last year’s film strikes, and we’re starting to understand why it has the potential to change Hollywood. With this technology and others like it, we could be on the cusp of a whole new era.
Sora is a text-to-video generator supported by a large language model. OpenAI is saying that it is designed to be a “world simulator”, but while it doesn’t appear ready for heavy metaverse lifting, it’s already interesting. Users can write prompts like, “Cat wakes up her sleepy human,” plus descriptors — photorealistic, or animated, or black and white — and it will pop out a clip. Doesn’t seem to be a clip you can edit, like OpenAI’s still image generator, DALL-E. But still, a whole clip, and as far as we can tell, it’s going to be much, much faster than humans coding graphics.
We’ll talk about the clips themselves in just a bit. But it was trained on a large data set, and they’re not telling us much about that data. As with ChatGPT and Dall-E, it probably includes some copyrighted work. To discuss with me whether that’s actually a big deal is Liz Shannon Miller. Liz, what are some of the legal and ethical issues with the way the data set for generative AI is collected?
Liz: It just sucks. It sucks, sucks, sucks. It’s like, what? Why? Why?
Wren: Stay tuned for our fair and balanced look at AI.
Preview clip from openai.com/sora. Prompt: “Historical footage of California during the gold rush.”
