Artificial intelligence: Now conjuring up convincing videos
A Hollywood-quality movie may soon be only a few text prompts away, said Steven Levy in Wired. OpenAI last week unveiled its latest, world-rattling technology: a text-to-video app called Sora that can produce photorealistic clips lasting up to a minute. The company hasn’t released Sora to the public yet, but the artificially generated videos it created for its demo were stunning. In one, the “detailed prompt sounded like an obsessive screenwriter’s setup,” involving people walking through “beautiful, snowy Tokyo” while “gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind.” The resulting video was “a mindblowing exercise in world-building,” showing a couple strolling past busy shops in a detailed streetscape that is unmistakably Tokyo. Perhaps even more impressive is that “Sora does not merely churn out videos that fulfill the demands of the prompts.” It improvises, in a way that suggests “a flair for storytelling.”
“Good grief,” said Loz Blain in New Atlas. We’d better grapple with the speed at which this technology is advancing. “The wheel, the lightbulb, the combustion engine, the airplane, the computer, the internet .... None of them ever accelerated or proliferated like this.” If you look closely, you can tell that these very short videos aren’t real. But it’s impossible to say whether this technology is nearly as good as it’s going to get, “or if we’re just at the start of the AI acceleration curve.” Videos made a year ago, using the rival AI tool Midjourney, couldn’t even muster the correct number of fingers on a hand, said Kylie Robison in Fortune. Sora makes “that problem seem as antiquated as a modem’s dial tone.” Get ready for “the next wave of AI disruption” as Sora roils the entertainment industry.
Yet costs are accelerating, too, said Madhumita Murgia and George Hammond in the Financial Times. “Estimates of the cost of building out AI infrastructure” have varied “from hundreds of billions of dollars to as high as $7 trillion over coming years.” Where’s the money going to come from? With OpenAI’s current valuation approaching $100 billion, “traditional venture investors are largely priced out.” Sovereign wealth funds and nation-state-backed investors are “one possible avenue for fresh capital,” but many governments are likely to have national security concerns about backing this technology.
Such concerns are well founded, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. It’s simply “impossible to know how these systems will be misused, and used for propaganda, until they’re out in the wild.” While OpenAI has guardrails to prevent violent or sexualized imagery, disinformation is much harder to police. Faked videos could “sow confusion and chaos” ahead of the presidential election, or even on Election Day itself. At the very least, OpenAI should wait until after November to bring Sora to the public.