Since its release earlier this year, OpenAI has continued to evolve its new Sora technology and introduce it to many potential users. That includes a range of big movie studies, where OpenAI debuted Sora to Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery, and Universal—despite the dust still settling from last year’s writer and actor strikes. For the film and entertainment audiences, OpenAI has touted Sora’s ability to translate text-prompt data into a minute or less of high-quality video. Before these previews, Sora’s availability was limited to “red team” testers, who were searching for misinformation and bias, as well as critical errors and risks. In late March, Sam Altman, one of OpenAI’s founders, took Sora “on the road” to woo Hollywood into adopting its latest advances—or at least the leaders bold enough to do business with him given writers’ concerns about the technology taking their jobs.
In this first of a two-part blog series, we explore the impact of the Sora technology on the creative industry, especially among industry film giants, who—if enticed to use the technology—could reinvigorate many of the concerns around copyright and intellectual property protections previously voiced by creators, particularly in acting and writing roles. Sora’s evolution stands out as unique from its predecessors in generative AI chiefly due to its much-heightened degrees of visual definition and detail. Building on the foundations of their 2023 generative image model, DALL·E 3, which artificially generates an image based on text input, OpenAI’s Sora combines DALL·E 3’s diffusion model with a transformer neural network to turn pixel fuzz into sequenced images, increasing performance abilities by processing data in chunks. Although Sora is still demonstrating certain imperfections in areas of object permanence and long-range coherence, the model’s grasp of object interaction and spatial relationships far exceeds the capabilities of its predecessors and therefore changes the entertainment industry in fundamental ways.
