OpenAI hits pause on video model Sora after artists leak access in protest
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Basically that they aren’t being compensated for testing a tool that is ultimately intended to replace them.
I can definitely forgive their complaints when it’s framed that way. But I do agree that the article doesn’t do a particularly good job representing their view point.
If I were to give them the benefit of doubt, I’d guess they joined because they initially saw this more like the AI vs chess type contribution where their contributions would be publicly demonstrated and praised rather than just used to beta test.
They might not have been aware of how many other people were asked.
They probably also underestimated the tool’s capabilities and then got worried for their careers after using it.
It’s pretty common for people’s perception of an opportunity to change after agreeing to it. I’d bet you’ve taken on paid jobs that were less exciting than advertised. Or gone to a party that was completely mis-sold by your friends.
I don’t think we’ll ever truly know the motives that lead up to this leak.
Companies have been getting ever bolder about abusing volunteer and crowd sourced labor. When the participants are bound by strict NDAs, I think some skepticism is in order.
All we really can tell is that non-neglibigle percentage of the participants in a limited access program were creeped out enough to be willing to blow up their access to call attention to it.
I don't think this story is really even about AI at all, but about labor practices.
But there's no such thing with volunteering to try a new service. That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?
To that, I will add that there is a large market for content outside mainstream media[^1]. I'm sure there are creative folk out there which are not visual artists as their main thing[^2], but can use cheap visual art coming from AI to generate some sort of income...
[^1]: See, for example, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/data-an...
It's an emerging technology and platform. There are economic advantages to having early access to learn what it can do.
Furthermore, this specific colunteer program appears to have an associated contest that pays creators who win. Thus you have a lot of volunteers, limited under NDA, being pushed to compete for vert limited renumeration for their efforts. I doubt most of the volunteers are bored people doing it as a hobby.
What do they lose when they weren't being paid in the first place?
Because we have laws to protect workers. You can't just not pay an employee and call them a volunteer as a for profit company.
There a legal limitations on what a for profit company can do with volunteer labor but companies have been increasingly bold about pushing those limits.
Often times it is hard to tell if a program violates those limits since particpants are put under strict NDAs.
I general don't agree with NDAs though, so on that front we definitely agree there's an issue there. Especially for a volunteer, I would never sign an NDA when I'm volunteering my time and effort.
It a bit silly to think people won’t learn new information and change their minds.
I would definitely be willing to pay to try it out and provide feedback in addition. I'm genuinely surprised by this news.
OpenAI is the new high watermark in moral, ethical, social, and intellectual corruption and anyone who works there who has any moral sense is deeply conflicted.
It’s cancer that has cancer. To defeat it would be like discovering a vaccine.
The typical person is the result of a ruthless Darwinian selection process that has left the typical person savvy, agile, aware, alert, and capable.
The typical person might be coded inarticulate because the education available to the typical person stresses different vocabulary than people not subject to ruthless selection pressure recently.
I’m home schooled to put it mildly, more accurate is that I was presented books and an admiration for acumen, and I deliberately delineate by degree the dramatic dismissal of people on HN who condescend to typical people.
The typical person on HN would survive about three minutes in a legitimately menacing environment.
Summers was on Jon Stewart recently. People know who he is. They might not know his long-time advocacy for maximum toxic waste disposal in Africa, but in fairness Rubin helped quiet that down. They might have forgotten that he personally knew-capped Brooksley Born at the exact perfect time to demonstrate that LTCM was the prototype for ever godawful prop deak today.
I’ll refrain from commenting on Fidji Simo out of personal experience because it would be unfair given that I’ve known her for 12 years and merely remark that the public record is a litany of OSHA violations handled more clumsily than the already low bar Amazon set.
The typical person is a lot savvier than the typical HN hot take smartass who is dramatically out of their depth.
It's the same if I mentioned some random people from my interest circles that you definitely won't know, but I can guarantee at least millions of people who share the same interests know about those names.
Obviously I can be wrong, but my simple sniff test is asking a couple of friend groups and bar chats with regulars, who are not in tech. Some people don't even know about OpenAI despite using ChatGPT (basically a household name now)! I'm also clueless when my friends in finance/law throw in some names and companies that I have no connection to and knowledge of.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive, probably shouldn't write comments during work hours.
It’s me that owes you an apology if I caused collateral damage to your stress quotient: I was taking a swing at OpenAI’s board because they’re well on their way to war criminals. Unlike them, I care when an innocent is in the blast radius and I’m very sorry that you were.
Some people think I am acting strange but I'd argue they don't see my point.
Every single video is riddled by visual artifacts just like the still images.
I saw a shaking rubiks cube, a shrinking cola bottle, and two dogs jumping into eachother and swapping places in a ridiculous way.
No artist should be threatened by this nonsense. Can't wait for the hype to die.
This is a hilarious basis for protest
It seems like signing up as the volunteer with the goal of derailing the company as much as possible is a highly valid form of ptotest.
"Will" is a strong claim. If the Jevons Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) applies in this case - and it may well do so - the new technology will lower costs, and the increased productivity will increase demand. If so, it will require artists to work in a different way but they'll earn more.
The Baumol Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect) may also lead to increased wages.
The idea that this will raise wages is hilarious. I don’t see how that would be possible.
It would be nice to see that system rearranged. Even if there’s more art, money could instead fund artistic ventures people actually want rather than keeping powerful entities afloat/entrenched.
Maybe the number of major corporations decreases (towards a permanent handful) as the number of paid artists increases (towards basically everyone who could desire payment for art that’s actually in demand).
However, if recent history is a guide, we won't see an increase in the number of paid artists, I'd say looking at the music industry, what we saw was the increase in the number of artists in general, but success seems to me as fickle as ever. Now, apparently, thanks to Ticketmaster monopoly, even live tours barely make any money and musicians are turning to Onlyfans (not porn, just direct support) to make money.
So here's the state of the music industry (partially due to unchallenged monopolies):
You, for the most part, don't make money making music and distributing it online
You don't make money from a live tour either.
Amazing outcome for an industry where the cost of production and distribution has collapsed. No one makes money except for the monopolies in streaming (Spotify) and ticketing (Ticketmaster).
Without monopoly protections, that's what you get. Thankfully, there's a bit more competition in the audiovisual realm with Youtube and multiple streamers. Still, I don't know what to think about what might happen.
Most artists / people in audiovisual production will likely make less money. Some will likely make a lot of money. My (kind of unfounded atm) assumption is that AI will just increase the differences in Paretto distribution of income, making the top 20% very rich and the bottom 80% very poor. Before genAI, you had a very large and vibrant VFX industry, with relatively well paid workers, which is likely to be cut down by huge numbers (it's already been cut by around 50%).
No we don't. I rarely find anything that I like in Netflix, Amazon Prime or HBO. Those services are stuffed with brain bleach that I don't even find entertaining. There are "gold nuggets"[^1] I have enjoyed in those sites, but it's like one or two per year. The rest of my watching time goes to videos of people camping in the wilderness, for lack of a better thing.
[^1]: As in, they are entertaining. Rarely, they are imaginative. Even more seldom, they are educational or contribute to my personal growth.
You don’t get it. Those programs are made because they make money. Netflix is profitable because it makes shows that X number of people want to see.
The number of people like yourself who are underserved by stuff to watch is too low to be profitable - or they don’t know how to make a show that would appeal to this group yet.
The dark truth about TV is that it’s what people want to watch. There is no conspiracy. Here is a good Steve Jobs quote on the subject:
“ When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
Anyway assuming that an industry screwed up because you personally don’t like their product is pretty incredible. No they didnt screw up. They’re just serving people who aren’t quite like yourself.
* Slow, thoughtful, hard sci-fi that's well-written and well acted, with immersive (not campy) sets and effects. Enough of that to fill an evening a week.
* A spiritual successor to Firefly with the same production requirements and release schedule described above.
Even YouTube is bound by the same limitations as the AAA streaming platforms are—you can't sink money into something that's too niche, and right now doing things well costs buckets of money. So I'm sure there are a few fan films on YouTube adjacent to my interests, but their production value is going to be far below what it could be if things were made cheaper.
If you're looking for hard sci fi I really recommend Andor.
They make the most profitable content they can think of.
Breaking contracts seems tame by comparison.
Why not organize a worldwide protest where every participant produces and shares Art denouncing generative AI? "AI might produce single pieces but this collective work, this is what AI can't do" and so on.
What they're doing is so weird and ineffective in contrast, it baffles me.
In their statement, they make it clear that they're not opposed to the use of AI in art: they're opposed to the abuse of artists to pretend that OpenAI is doing this for their sake. This serves their perspective better than any juvenile anti-AI quilt could have.
Ah yes, a feel good protest that can be completely ignored by everyone, especially OpenAI. Even better, maybe OpenAI could fund it? That way they get to claim they hear the protests but they don't have to actually change anything.
It's the most immature and pseudointellectual form of protest I can think of. "Oh I am scared of the technology that's coming regardless, let me try and screw everybody else over as well!"
The most effective movements are usually a combination of protest and civil disobedience. Considering livelihoods are under threat I wouldn’t condone nor blame anyone for even going one step further.
If you read it they state quite clearly that they feel like their participation was different than they expected it to be and that's why they are upset.
I know more than most, but the sexual assault allegations and shady restructuring and abuse of the the political process and the multiple firings for financial fraud and, well a lot of stuff, that’s all public record.
Matt Gaetz got run out of DC for less.
Basically luddites were never the bad ones, they were protestors against abusive working conditions. They did sabotage the owners of the mills that paid them so poorly, sometimes by destroying machinery, but it was really an underground labor movement that’s super cool to learn about.
If businesses decide to replace workers with AI, then it's also their collective responsibility to pay for their retraining, or if that isn't possible their social security.
It's telling that the AI sycophants side with the group that was actually murdering people, however.
Gee. Being "replaced" in a job like that sounds like a good career move to me.
The system that prevailed up to that point didn't give them many options, of course... but neither would their response to it. Sabotage doesn't bring progress, no matter who told you that it did, or how much you want to believe it.
Not only were they essentially one of the first organized labor protestors, they also protested against the poor quality of the products made by the machines. This is why they were extremely popular among most people who lived during this time, and would be sheltered by people unrelated to the workers of the mills.
Someone who made quality garments for their town was put out of business by a mill mass-producing terrible quality products. It’s almost the first echoes of what we see coming over from Amazon/Temu now.
There's absolutely no parallels here, to AI. A machine that is taking work from highly skilled labor ohhhh wait
We're primates that make and use tools. AI is a tool, so we'll make it and use it. What we won't do is compete with it. We have better things to do.
Please read the article I linked, it explains how the luddites’ motives are completely misunderstood by most people. This misunderstanding is furthered by people using the term Luddite as a pejorative. But this is somewhat like using the term “Black Panther” as a pejorative.
You assume they changed their mind, there is no data point for that as of now.
> This is a hilarious basis for protest
Of course. Every CEO works for free these days. /s
It seems pretty underwhelming compared to what was shown in early 2024 no?
People seem to have five fingers so I would say that as a win.
I don’t think it’s that much worse than what OpenAI showed off earlier in the year when you consider that those examples were very cherry-picked, though. These new videos don’t make it seem like a bad model, they’re just a bit more realistically mediocre.
Demo's gonna demo.