A still image from a video generated by OpenAI’s Sora, as seen on the company’s website. Photo courtesy of OpenAI
OpenAI on Monday launched a new video tool powered by artificial intelligence and that has generated controversy in recent months.
The company’s Sora Turbo product makes it much easier and faster for users to generate high-definition videos lasting up to 20 seconds and has been available since Monday. Advertisement
“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,” OpenAI said in an online announcement.
“We hope this early version of Sora will enable people everywhere to explore new forms of creativity, tell their stories and push the boundaries of what’s possible with video storytelling.”
Users can use the A.I.-powered technology to incorporate existing digital information and extend, remix, blend or generate new content from text.
A storyboard tool enables users to control the outcomes for every frame while adding text, images or video, and two community feeds provide new and continually updated content.
OpenAI said it is blocking content that is illegal or otherwise highly controversial, such as child sexual abuse materials and sexual deepfakes.
Still, the app has faced criticism long before it was released to the public with some experts alarmed about how A.I.-generated video could be used and others concerned with legal issues regarding things like copyright. Advertisement
Twenty artists who had early access to the Sora app in November opposed the Sora app in an open letter to OpenAI and accused the tech firm of using artists as a way to make the app appear more accepted among the global artist community.
“Artists are not your unpaid R&D,” they said. “We are not your free bug-testers, PR puppets, training data, validation tokens.”
The artists addressed the open letter to “A.I. corporate overlords” and included a leaked code for Sora. Just weeks later, the company rolled out the product to the masses, possibly influenced by that leak.
“We are being lured into art-washing to tell the world that Sora is a useful tool for artists,” the artists had said.
OpenAI in February announced the roll-out of the text-to-video Sora app as a follow-up to its ChatGPT chatbot tool for generating textual content.
Sora said artists would be part of its development team for the Sora app that is intended to compete with Meta’s Make-a-Video tool, which was previewed by Facebook’s parent in a 2022 white paper but has seemingly not been released to the public.
At the time, UPI reported that the success of Meta’s model would be likely to spur an increase in investments by other companies into videos generated by A.I. Advertisement
OpenAI in March also rolled out its A.I. tool called Voice Engine, which can clone someone’s voice after hearing several seconds of audio. The company has said Voice Engine can help people who have lost their voices and be used in other beneficial ways.
