Is OpenAI’s Sora Terrifying for Filmmakers or a Great Tech Demo?

Prompt: Hollywood loses its minds over an advanced new generative AI model called Sora that can create lifelike, movie-trailer quality videos from a few short lines of text in minutes.

That scenario unfolded last week when OpenAI, the San Francisco-based tech company behind the text-generating app ChatGPT and the image-generating tool DALL-E, teased its latest project, text-to-video AI model Sora. (The name is a Japanese word meaning sky that the creators chose because it “evokes the idea of limitless creative potential.” Or maybe they’re “Kingdom Hearts” fans).

After seeing what Sora could do, Tyler Perry was the biggest name to sound the alarm. He told THR he put an $800 million planned expansion of his Atlanta studio space on hold. “Jobs are going to be lost,” he said.

The Sora videos are striking. Woolly mammoths march toward you in cascading snow. People walk through a snowy, bustling Tokyo street as the camera swoops over the buildings. “A gorgeously rendered papercraft world of a coral reef, rife with colorful fish and sea creatures.” That last one is a specific prompt written by OpenAI to create this impressive, 20-second video clip.

Filmmakers and developers within the AI community see Sora as a huge leap forward and significant step for generative AI, a tool already capable of things once viewed as distant possibilities.