YouTubers divided over OpenAI’s video tool Sora: ‘It’s scary’
Last week, OpenAI, a US company, introduced a new tool capable of creating lifelike video clips from minimal text inputs, sparking concerns among content creators that their jobs may soon be taken over by artificial intelligence.
Reactions to the tool called Sora have varied from overwhelming enthusiasm to alarm about the future direction of the industry.
YouTuber Marques Brownlee called AI doing its job “scary” and “threatening.”
On the other hand, Caleb Ward, one half of the AI duo Curious Refuge, told his YouTube followers that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on the tool.
Still, both Ward and Brownlee agreed it was a huge moment for their industry.
“I can’t stress enough how big a deal this is for filmmaking and the creative world,” said Ward, who recently went viral with a trailer he created for a Wes Anderson-esque Star Wars film.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in its announcement that Sora was not yet available to the public.
The announcement did not specify the use cases, but said that “several visual artists, designers and filmmakers” had been selected to help test it.
– “Like an amoeba” –
The company accompanied its statement with sample videos, including a stylish woman walking down a Tokyo street, a cat waking its owner in bed, and a group of charging woolly mammoths.
The internet immediately lit up with respect and praise, as is usual for OpenAI products.
“I was shocked by their quality,” Anis Ayari, an artificial intelligence engineer and streamer known as Defend Intelligence, told AFP.
He suggested that the tool could one day be used to create fully virtual performers.
But there were also plenty of dissenters who felt the videos were still firmly stuck in the “uncanny valley,” where flaws in otherwise photorealistic images can make viewers uneasy.
Commenter Ed Zitron wrote that in OpenAI’s cat video, “the owner’s hand appears to be part of the pillow and the cat’s paw explodes from his arm like an amoeba.”
He wrote in his newsletter that AI video tools were too expensive and resource intensive to be truly useful.
And clip styles couldn’t be harmonized, making the tools useless for creating anything but small snippets.
– AI Fatigue –
Sora enters a hot market where Google, Stability AI and several other smaller players are already in the game.
YouTube itself announced last September that it was developing a tool that would allow content creators to create artificial intelligence-generated videos and wallpapers.
However, the tools already available have not taken the world by storm.
French streamer FibreTigre said it had experimented with AI video tools, but stopped experimenting.
He said he was concerned about the ethics of using tools trained for other artists’ work, and ultimately the programs didn’t do their job well enough.
“They’re just ugly,” he said of the AI videos.
He said he could see a future where viewers would be “very tired” of artificial intelligence and cherish anything that isn’t artificial.
