OpenAI shows off life-like videos made with AI

Sora builds on the tech behind OpenAI’s image-generating DALL-E tool. It interprets a user’s prompt, expanding it into a more detailed set of instructions, and then uses an AI model trained on video and images to create the new video.

The quality of AI-generated images, audio and video has rapidly increased over the past year, with companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta and Stable Diffusion racing to make more capable tools and find ways to sell them. At the same time, democracy advocates and AI researchers have warned that the tools are already being used to trick and lie to voters.

In Pakistan, former prime minister Imran Khan has used AI to create a digital version of himself giving speeches, even though he is currently in prison. An ad supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s now-defunct campaign for Republican presidential nominee used an AI audio generator to mimic the voice of former president Donald Trump.

The tech companies say they are monitoring the use of their tools and have instituted some policies against using them to produce political content. But enforcing those rules may be difficult. In January, OpenAI suspended a developer that had made a bot of the Democratic candidate Dean Phillips, only after a report in The Washington Post. The developer had made similar bots of political candidates in the fall.

The rapid improvement in the technology is sending people in a wide variety of industries from Hollywood to the news business scrambling to understand how it might impact their work.

AI video generators have already caused a stir in Hollywood. Making films is expensive, time consuming and requires dozens or hundreds of people working together. Some technologists have theorized that AI could allow a single person to make a film with the same visual complexity as a Marvel blockbuster.

Clips posted by OpenAI show a variety of different scenes, including a woman walking slowly through a neon-lit street in Tokyo. The woman’s features look highly realistic, including individual hairs and skin blemishes. But the crowd behind her is more obviously AI-generated, showcasing blurred facial features and unnatural movements.

Still, the quality of the Sora videos, especially the ones meant to look like real life, is higher than what most other AI companies have been able to produce so far.