In one hyper-realistic nine-second video, we were shown skydiving (and grinning) with pizzas as parachutes.
In yet another, Mike was caught in a “Matrix”-style duel against Ronald McDonald, using cheeseburgers as weapons.
“I’m genuinely blown away,” Eli messaged Mike about the cheeseburger video, before liking the content. Mike kept sending videos — which included him ballroom dancing with his dog and sitting on a throne of rats — to other New York Times colleagues (all of whom found the clips slightly disturbing).
The app we used was not TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, the current leaders of short-form video. It was Sora, a smartphone app made by OpenAI that lets people create such videos entirely from artificial intelligence. Sora’s underlying technology debuted last year, but its latest version — which is faster and more powerful and can incorporate your likeness if you upload images of your face — was released on an invitation-only basis this week.
After we spent less than a day with the app, what became clear to us was that Sora had gone beyond being an A.I.-video generation app. Instead, it is, in effect, a social network in disguise; a clone of TikTok down to its user interface, algorithmic video suggestions and ability to follow and interact with friends. The powerful A.I. model that Sora is built on makes it simpler to produce clips, giving people an almost unlimited ability to generate as many A.I. videos as they want.
It was also disconcerting.
Almost instantly, Sora’s early-access users were spinning up videos made with copyrighted material plucked from pop culture. (We saw more “Rick and Morty” and Pikachu videos than we would have liked.) And when Mike posted one Sora video to his personal Instagram page, a half-dozen friends asked if it was him in the video, raising questions about whether we might lose touch with reality.
Worse still, being able to quickly and easily generate video likenesses of people could pour gasoline on disinformation, creating clips of fake events that look so real that they might spur people into real-world action. While some of this was already possible with other A.I. video generators, Sora could turbocharge it.
It is early days, and there is no guarantee Sora will have legs. But OpenAI appears to have created the type of product that companies like Meta and X have sought to build: a way to bring A.I. to the masses that people can share, enticing one another to create posts and regularly use their apps and services.
The race to create similar apps is heating up. Last week, Meta released a social media feed in its dedicated A.I. app called Vibes, which uses an A.I. video generator from the start-up Midjourney. Google hosts Veo, its version of a similar product.
With the social internet moving people from sharing text messages to posting photos and now to watching billions of hours of video, tech executives say A.I. video tools will be formative to the next generation of social media. (...)
Hollywood has spent the past 36 hours concerned over how Sora could make it simple for users to rip off likenesses with no compensation. A day after the app’s release, executives at the talent agency WME sent a memo to agents saying they would fight to defend their clients’ work, according to a copy viewed by The Times.
“There is a strong need for real protections for artists and creatives as they encounter A.I. models using their intellectual property, as well as their name, image and likeness,” the memo said. WME said it had told OpenAI that all of its clients were opting out of having their likenesses or intellectual property included in Sora’s videos.
Still, Sora’s broad appeal was immediately clear. Neither of us knows the first thing about creating videos, yet all it took was a kernel of an idea, two or three minutes of processing time and a boatload of computing power to spit out a video of Mike arm-wrestling Eli for the title of “best tech reporter.” (Eli won.)
Not everyone was charmed. After Mike showed his partner an eerily realistic Sora video of himself playing the psychopathic character Anton Chigurh from the 2007 film adaptation of the book “No Country for Old Men,” she had a simple request.
“Please never, ever show me this kind of video again,” she said.
[ed. Fake everything, here we come. In the future, a premium will be placed on human interactions (including relationships), certified human-produced products (eg. art), and anything else that derives clearly from human-related efforts. Because it'll be hard to tell. See also: this post about Tilly Norwood (DS).]
“There is a strong need for real protections for artists and creatives as they encounter A.I. models using their intellectual property, as well as their name, image and likeness,” the memo said. WME said it had told OpenAI that all of its clients were opting out of having their likenesses or intellectual property included in Sora’s videos.
Still, Sora’s broad appeal was immediately clear. Neither of us knows the first thing about creating videos, yet all it took was a kernel of an idea, two or three minutes of processing time and a boatload of computing power to spit out a video of Mike arm-wrestling Eli for the title of “best tech reporter.” (Eli won.)
Not everyone was charmed. After Mike showed his partner an eerily realistic Sora video of himself playing the psychopathic character Anton Chigurh from the 2007 film adaptation of the book “No Country for Old Men,” she had a simple request.
“Please never, ever show me this kind of video again,” she said.
by Mike Isaac and Eli Tan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sora
