OpenAI's Sora is Another AI Warning for Hollywood


You will doubtlessly have seen the short clips created by OpenAI’s new Sora text-to-video AI tool circulating online in recent days. They are not great, by which I mean it’s not all that difficult to tell they were made using artificial intelligence, in the same way that you can mostly tell when a still image has been made by Midjourney. However, the clips put out by OpenAI do give a clear indication as to the direction of travel. They hint at what might be possible in the not-too-distant future. No wonder writers and actors were freaking out last year.

I always worry that I’m being naive about the advance of AI. Look how quickly things have already changed. Maybe we should all just give up and sit on our AR headsets (sorry Apple, spatial computers) and let the robots entertain us!

However, I still firmly believe that humans want authentic work – written, audio or visual – created by other humans and it will be a long time before that changes. As the inevitable rise of AI-generated content accelerates, people will likely find more value in work made by their fellow humans. Furthermore, AI models are, at this stage at least, essentially only being built on work humans have already done. It is why firms are splashing the cash to get work from all sorts of sources, including universities (via 404 Media).

In the short term, those making movies for theatrical release have bigger things to worry about than the early days of a new tool from OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Through the first three days of Presidents Day weekend, films that have been released widely in theaters have grossed $764.1 million, down 15% from the same period last year, according to box-office tracker Comscore.

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The Addition

Charlotte Henry is a journalist and broadcaster who creates and runs The Addition newsletter and podcast; an award-winning publication looking at the crossover between media and technology.

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