‘It’s frightening’: YouTubers split over OpenAI’s video tool Sora

PARIS: US firm OpenAI debuted a tool last week that can generate highly realistic snippets of video from just a few lines of text, leading content creators to wonder if they are the latest professionals about to be replaced by algorithms.

Reactions to the tool, called Sora, have ranged from headover-heels enthusiasm to alarm over the future direction of the industry.

YouTuber Marques Brownlee called it “frightening” and “threatening” to see an AI doing his job.

On the other hand, Caleb Ward, one half of AI filmmaking duo Curious Refuge, told his YouTube followers he could not wait to get his hands on the tool.

Yet both Ward and Brownlee agreed that it was a massive moment for their industry.

“I can’t stress enough how big a deal this is for the filmmaking and creative world,” said Ward, who recently went viral with a trailer he created for a Wes Anderson-style Star Wars movie.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in its announcement that Sora was not yet available to the public.

The announcement did not specify use cases but said “a number of visual artists, designers and filmmakers” had been chosen to help test it.

The firm accompanied its statement with sample videos including a stylish woman walking along a Tokyo street, a cat waking up its owner in bed, and a group of charging woolly mammoths.

The internet immediately lit up with awe and praise, as is common with OpenAI products.

“I was shocked by their quality,” Anis Ayari, an AI engineer and streamer known as Defend Intelligence, told AFP.

He suggested the tool could one day be used to create entirely virtual presenters.

But there were also plenty of dissenters who felt the videos were still firmly stuck in the “uncanny valley”, where glitches in otherwise photorealistic images can leave viewers feeling queasy.

Commentator Ed Zitron wrote that in OpenAI’s cat video “the owner’s arm appears to be part of the cushion and the cat’s paw explodes out of its arm like an amoeba”.