In an interview, the team also said the company was not yet releasing Sora to the public because it was still working to understand the system’s dangers. Instead, OpenAI is sharing the technology with a small group of academics and other outside researchers who will “red team” it, a term for looking for ways it can be misused.
“The intention here is to give a preview of what is on the horizon, so that people can see the capabilities of this technology – and we can get feedback,” Mr Brooks said.
OpenAI is already tagging videos produced by the system with watermarks that identify them as being generated by AI. But the company acknowledges that these can be removed. They can also be difficult to spot. (The New York Times added “Generated by AI” watermarks to the videos with this story.)
The system is an example of generative AI, which can instantly create text, images and sounds. Like other generative AI technologies, OpenAI’s system learns by analysing digital data – in this case, videos and captions describing what those videos contain.
OpenAI declined to say how many videos the system learnt from or where they came from, except to say the training included both publicly available videos and videos that were licensed from copyright holders. The company says little about the data used to train its technologies, most likely because it wants to maintain an advantage over competitors – and has been sued multiple times for using copyrighted material.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.
Sora generates videos in response to short descriptions, like “a gorgeously rendered paper-craft world of a coral reef, rife with colourful fish and sea creatures”. Though the videos can be impressive, they are not always perfect and may include strange and illogical images. The system, for example, recently generated a video of someone eating a cookie – but the cookie never got any smaller.
Dall-E, Midjourney and other still-image generators have improved so quickly over the past few years that they are now producing images nearly indistinguishable from photographs. This has made it harder to identify disinformation online, and many digital artists are complaining that it has made it harder for them to find work.
“We all laughed in 2022 when Midjourney first came out and said: ‘Oh, that’s cute,’” said movie concept artist Reid Southen in Michigan. “Now people are losing their jobs to Midjourney.” NYTIMES
