OpenAI, an artificial intelligence firm, unveiled a new tool that can create incredibly lifelike 60-second videos from a simple text cue. This represents a significant improvement over AI videos and “deepfakes,” which have already been used to trick voters.
According to a statement released by OpenAI on Thursday, the new tool, named “Sora,” would initially only be accessible to a select number of filmmakers and artists as well as “red teamers,” or academics who look for methods to exploit AI tools maliciously.
Sora expands upon the technology used in OpenAI’s DALL-E tool, which generates images. After interpreting a user’s request and developing it into a more comprehensive set of instructions, it creates a new film using an AI model that has been trained on photos and video.
Over the past year, firms such as Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Stable Diffusion have been racing to create more competent tools and find methods to market them, resulting in a significant increase in the quality of AI-generated images, music, and video. However, proponents of democracy and AI experts have cautioned that voters are already being misled and tricked by these instruments.
Such audio and video content has previously been produced, and other businesses have developed their own text-to-video artificial intelligence producers. AI start-up Lumiere is being tested by Google, while Meta has a model named Emu. Filmmakers may already use Runway’s goods to create movies. However, Sora’s videos were longer and of higher quality than anything previously observed, according to analysts and specialists in AI.
“I didn’t expect this level of sustained, coherent video generation for another two to three years,” said Ted Underwood, a professor of information science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While he cautioned that OpenAI probably chose videos that show the model at its best, he said that “it seems like there’s been a bit of a jump in capacity” from other text-to-video tools.
The software companies that provide the tools claim to be keeping an eye on how people are using them and have put in place restrictions prohibiting the use of their products to create political content. However, enforcement is erratic. Only after a Washington Post article, did OpenAI suspend a developer in January who had created a bot portraying Democratic candidate Dean Phillips. Similar political candidate bots had been created by the developer earlier in the fall.
People in a wide range of businesses, from the news industry to filmmaking, are scrambling to grasp how the rapid advancement of technology can affect their work.
In Hollywood, AI video creators have already generated some buzz. Filmmaking is a costly, labor-intensive process that needs dozens or even hundreds of workers. According to some techies, artificial intelligence (AI) might enable one person to produce a movie with the same level of visual sophistication as a Marvel blockbuster.
“They won’t need a team of 100 or 200 artists over a three-year period to make their animated feature,” he said. “To me, that’s exciting.”
In Hollywood, AI video creators have already generated some buzz. Filmmaking is a costly, labor-intensive process that needs dozens or even hundreds of workers. According to some techies, artificial intelligence (AI) might enable one person to produce a movie with the same level of visual sophistication as a Marvel blockbuster.
The Oxford Internet Institute’s Mutale Nkonde, a visiting policy fellow, finds it thrilling that text may be easily converted to video. However, she is concerned about how these tools could inadvertently reinforce societal biases, how they might affect people’s livelihoods, and how they might transform hate speech or accounts of horrific real-life incidents into horrifyingly realistic visuals.
According to Nkonde, recent strikes by the writers’ and actors’ guilds started to raise issues with the use of actors’ likenesses in AI-generated scenes and the usage of AI language tools in screenwriting. However, she claimed that features like Sora create additional concerns, like as whether or not human extras will even be required. “From a policy perspective, do we need to start thinking about ways we can protect humans that should be in the loop when it comes to these tools?”
The movies produced by Sora, particularly those designed to resemble real life, are of a higher caliber than most other artificial intelligence businesses have managed to create thus far.