Creative professionals bullish on OpenAI Sora amid IP woes
Investors, gaming firms and filmmakers remain largely bullish on the prospect of OpenAI’s Sora, a text-to-video generative artificial intelligence model and tool. However, a week into its introduction, legal experts believe commercial firms will remain wary of using AI video generator tools in official marketing campaigns for fear of infringing copyrights and intellectual property protection.
On 15 February, OpenAI introduced Sora as an AI model that can “understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.”
Videos showcased looked akin to professional video productions—a creative field that employed over 2 million people and generated over $1.3 billion in ticketing revenue in India last year.
“Content creators without a unique style will see immense competition, and those with an inimitable style will see more viewers flock to them,” said Siddarth Pai, co-founder at venture capital firm 3one4 Capital. “Short-form content creation costs will crash, and social video apps will see a deluge of generative AI videos soon.”
Harsha Kumar, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, agreed, saying tools such as Sora “can potentially bring down the cost of creating short clips in the near term.”
In gaming, Sora can open up the market to more creators. Salone Sehgal, founding gen
In gaming, the likes of Sora can potentially open up the market to more creators, say people from the sector.
eral partner at venture capital firm Lumikai Fund, said that AI tools like Sora are creating a new economy—“one that is transforming from video on demand, to content on command.”
“Large game designing firms that have technical depth and legacy workflows will struggle to meaningfully integrate AI into existing titles and franchises. However, the advent of AI can lead to the creation of smaller, independent AI-first gaming studios, where AI can help in certain vital areas of development such as screenwriting, concept art and asset creation,” Sehgal said.
To be sure, Sora is not the first of its kind, and faces competition from Runway, Synthesia, and DeepBrain. However, the Microsoft-backed OpenAI can open the tech up to wider enterprise adoption—as was seen with its democratization of generative AI with ChatGPT.
Sudhir Kamath, chief operating officer at game distribution, events and publication firm Nazara Technologies, said the benefits would go
beyond cost. “AI tools such as Sora can help our designers create visuals much faster than before. For studios, the cost of game development is directly linked to manpower, which is a fixed cost since you would still need a skilled workforce to make use of such tools…But what will improve is the ability to experiment quickly, which will improve productivity and creativity,” Kamath said.
Nazara, Kamath affirmed, already allows its designers and developers to use AI tools such as Google’s image-generating Imagen for creative templates to build artwork upon.
Deepika Ramani, partner– consumer, internet, media and entertainment at talent advisory ABC Consultants, said gaming will see a bigger impact from AI tools than film production, “since gaming has always been an animation and visual effects-heavy sector.”
In films, industry experts believe Sora could function as a co-pilot for screenwriters, video editors and cinematographers. Chaitanya Chinchlikar, vice-president and CTO at Mumbai-based Whistling Woods International film school, said AI will not threaten the employability of creative professionals.
Sora is not the absolute first of its kind, and faces competition from the likes of Runway, and Synthesia