Just a few weeks back, I wrote that we are probably still some way from being able to create a movie from a natural language prompt. Now, it seems that it may happen a lot sooner than I suspected. OpenAI – creator of ChatGPT, the chatbot that started the current generative AI craze -just announced its own text-to-video model, Sora. To say the results have stunned the AI community is an understatement. Although we can’t yet use it for ourselves, videos demonstrate a close-to-photorealistic sequence of a woman walking in a city and a goldrush-era US town, generated from simple text prompts. According to people I’ve spoken to, this puts them two or three years ahead of where they were assumed to be when it comes to generative video. This is just one more sign that the AI revolution is going to take place at a far quicker pace than many are anticipating. But generative video – while undoubtedly technically amazing – creates ethical and societal challenges that go beyond those posed by the automated creation of text, images and sounds. So, let’s take a look at what it is, what it does, and perhaps most importantly, what it means for a world in which it will inevitably become more and more difficult to tell the difference between the real and the digitally generated. Basically, Sora is to video what ChatGPT is to writing, and Dall-E 3 is to image generation. You type what you want to see, and it appears, in full motion, in front of your eyes. None of the videos that have been shown as of yet have any sound, but given advances in AI sound and music generation, we can only assume that this will be coming soon.Generative AI video creators aren’t entirely new. I’ve outlined a number of them that have appeared in the last year or so in the piece I linked to at the start of this article. Mostly, though, while they generate text, overlays and effects, they don’t produce actual video animation. However, there are a few exceptions, like Runway. At this early stage, impressive though it is, it isn’t going to give us the next Toy Story from a prompt. But the potential is virtually unlimited. Filmmakers can use it to visualize concepts and scenes or generate special effects. Teachers can create immersive historical recreations, and manufacturers can use it to create prototypes and demonstrations.
Full opinion : Will OpenAI’s text-to-video generator, Sora start a whole new era of artificial generative Video?
