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Sora is here

openai.com

1,152 pointstoomuchtodo983 comments

I've found using these and similar tools that the amount of prompts and iteration required to create my vision (image or video in my mind) is very large and often is not able to create what I had originally wanted. A way to test this is to take a piece of footage or an image which is the ground truth, and test how much prompting and editing it takes to get the same or similar ground truth starting from scratch. It is basically not possible with the current tech and finite amounts of time and iterations.

It just plain isn't possible if you mean a prompt the size of what most people have been using lately, in the couple hundred character range. By sheer information theory, the number of possible interpretations of "a zoom in on a happy dog catching a frisbee" means that you can not match a particular clip out of the set with just that much text. You will need vastly more content; information about the breed, information about the frisbee, information about the background, information about timing, information about framing, information about lighting, and so on and so forth. Right now the AIs can't do that, which is to say, even if you sit there and type a prompt containing all that information, it is going to be forced to ignore most of the result. Under the hood, with the way the text is turned into vector embeddings, it's fairly questionable whether you'd agree that it can even represent such a thing.

This isn't a matter of human-level AI or superhuman-level AI; it's just straight up impossible. If you want the information to match, it has to be provided. If it isn't there, an AI can fill in the gaps with "something" that will make the scene work, but expecting it to fill in the gaps the way you "want" even though you gave it no indication of what that is is expecting literal magic.

Long term, you'll never have a coherent movie produced by stringing together a series of textual snippets because, again, that's just impossible. Some sort of long-form "write me a horror movie staring a precocious 22-year old elf in a far-future Ganymede colony with a message about the importance of friendship" AI that generates a coherent movie of many scenes will have to be doing a lot of some sort of internal communication in an internal language to hold the result together between scenes, because what it takes to hold stuff coherent between scenes is an amount of English text not entirely dissimilar in size from the underlying representation itself. You might as well skip the English middleman and go straight to an embedding not constrained by a human language mapping.

The adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" has the nice corollary "A thousand words isn't enough to be precise about an image".

Now expand that to movies and games and you can get why this whole generative-AI bubble is going to pop.

And another thing that irks me: none of these video generators get motion right...

Especially anything involving fluid/smoke dynamics, or fast dynamic momements of humans and animals all suffer from the same weird motion artifacts. I can't describe it other than that the fluidity of the movements are completely off.

And as all genai video tools I've used are suffering from the same problem, I wonder if this is somehow inherent to the approach & somehow unsolvable with the current model architectures.

AI isn't trying to sell to you: a precise artist with real vision in your brain. It is selling to managers who want to shit out something in an evening that approximates anything, that writes ads that no one wants to see anyway, that produces surface level examples of how you can pay employees less because "their job is so easy"

Way back in the days of GPT-2, there was an expectation that you'd need to cherry-pick atleast 10% of your output to get something usable/coherent. GPT-3 and ChatGPT greatly reduced the need to cherry-pick, for better or for worse.

All the generated video startups seem to generate videos with much lower than 10% usable output, without significant human-guided edits. Given the massive amount of compute needed to generate a video relative to hyperoptimized LLMs, the quality issue will handicap gen video for the foreseeable future.

Right, but you're thinking as someone who has a vision for the image/video. Think from someone who is needing an image/video and would normally hire a creative person for it, they might be able to get away with AI instead.

The same "prompt" they'd give the creative person they hired... Say, "I want an ad for my burgers that make it look really good, I'm thinking Christmas vibes, it should emphasize our high quality meat, make it cheerful, and remember to hint at our brand where we always have smiling cows."

Now that creative person would go make you that advert. You might check it, give a little feedback for some minor tweaks, and at some point, take what you got.

You can do the same here. The difference right now is that it'll output a lot of junk that a creative person would have never dared show you, so that initial quality filtering is missing. But on the flip side, it costs you a lot less, can generate like 100 of them quickly, and you just pick one that seems good enough.

Real artists struggle matching vague descriptions of what is in your head too. This is at least quicker?

When I first started learning Photoshop as a teenager I often knew what I wanted my final image to look like, but no matter how hard I tried I could never get the there. It wasn't that it was impossible, it was just that my skills just weren't there yet. I needed a lot more practice before I got good enough to create what I could see in my imagination.

Sora is obviously not Photoshop, but given that you can write basically anything you can think of I reckon it's going to take a long time to get good at expressing your vision in words that a model like Sora will understand.

Free text is just the fundamentally wrong input for precision work like this. Because it is wrong for this doesn’t mean it has NO purpose, it’s still useful and impressive for what it is.

FWIW I too have been quite frustrated iterating with AI to produce a vision that is clear in my head. Past changing the broad strokes, once you start “asking” for specifics, it all goes to shit.

Still, it’s good enough at those broad strokes. If you want your vision to become reality, you either need to learn how to paint (or whatever the medium), or hire a professional, both being tough-but-fair IMO.

If you have a specific vision, you will have to express the detailed information of that vision into the digital realm somehow. You can use (more) direct tools like premiere if you are fluent enough in their "language". Or you can use natural language to express the vision using AI. Either way you have to get the same amount of information into a digital format.

Also, AI sucks at understanding detail expressed in symbolic communication, because it doesn't understand symbols the way linguistic communication expects the receiver to understand them.

My own experience is that all the AI tools are great for shortcutting the first 70-80% or so. But the last 20% goes up an exponential curve of required detail which is easier and easier to express directly using tooling and my human brain.

Consider the analogy to a contract worker building or painting something for you. If all you have is a vague description, they'll make a good guess and you'll just have to live with that. But the more time you spend with them communicating (through description, mood boards rough sketches etc) the more accurate to your detailed version it will get. But you only REALLY get exactly what you want if you do it yourself, or sit beside them as they work and direct almost every step. And that last option is almost impossible if they can't understand symbolic meaning in language.

Agreed. It’s still much better than what I could do myself without it, though.

(Talking about visual generative AI in general)

The thing about Hollywood is that movies aren't made by a producer or director creating a description and an army of actors, tech and etc doing exactly that.

What happens is a description becomes a longer specification or script that's still good and hangs together in itself and then further iterations involving professionals who can't do "exactly what the director wants" but rather do something further that's good and close enough to what the director wants.

I believe it. I was just using AI to help out with some mandatory end of year writing exercises at work.

Eventually, it starts to muck with the earlier work that it did good on, when I'm just asking it to add onto it.

I was still happy with what I got in the end, but it took trial and error and then a lot of piecemeal coaxing with verification that it didn't do more than I asked along the way.

I can imagine the same for video or images. You have to examine each step post prompt to verify it didn't go back and muck with the already good parts.

Iterations are the missing link.

With ChatGPT, you can iteratively improve text (e.g., "make it shorter," "mention xyz"). However, for pictures (and video), this functionality is not yet available. If you could prompt iteratively (e.g., "generate a red car in the sunset," "make it a muscle car," "place it on a hill," "show it from the side so the sun shines through the windshield"), the tools would become exponentially more useful.

If you use it in a utilitarian way it'll give you a run for your money, if you use for expression, such as art, learning to embrace some serendipity, it makes good stuff.

As only a cursory user of said tools (but strong opinions) I felt the immediate desire to get an editable (2D) scene that I could rearrange. For example I often have a specific vantage point or composition in mind, which is fine to start from, but to tweak it and the elements, I'd like to edit it afterwards. To foray into 3D, I'd be wanting to rearrange the characters and direct them, as well as change the vantage point. Can it do that yet?

This is the conundrum of AI generated art. It will lower the barrier to entry for new artists to produce audiovisual content, but it will not lower the amount of effort required to make good art. If anything it will increase the effort, as it has to be excellent in order to get past the slop of base level drudge that is bound to fill up every single distribution channel.

Still three or four order of magnitudes cheaper and easier than to produce said video through traditional methods.

I think inpainting and "draw the label scene" type interfaces are the obvious future. Never thought I'd miss GauGAN [1].

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNv7XBngmLY&t=25

> A way to test this is to take a piece of footage or an image which is the ground truth, and test how much prompting and editing it takes to get the same or similar ground truth starting from scratch.

Sure, if you then do the same in reverse.

Not too far in the future you will be able to drag and drop the position of the characters as well as the position of the camera, among other refiment tools.

For those scenarios would be helpful a draft generation mode: 16 colors, 320x200...

Yeah, it almost feels like gambling - 'you're very close, just spend 20 more credits and you might get it right this time!'

Sounds like another way of saying a picture is worth a thousand words.

For those curious (and still locked out) here’s direct a comparison of Sora vs. the open-source leaders (HunyuanVideo, Mochi and LTX):

https://app.checkbin.dev/snapshots/1f0f3ce3-6a30-4c1a-870e-2...

Pros:

- Some of the Sora results are absolutely stunning. Check out the detail on the lion, for example! - The landscapes and aerial shots are absolutely incredible. - Quality is much better than Mochi & LTX out of the box. Mochi/LTX seem to require specifically optimized workflows (I've seen great img2vid LTX results on Reddit that start with Flux image generations, for example). Hunyuan seems comparable to Sora!

Cons:

- Still nearly impossible to access Sora despite the “launch”. My generations today were in the 2000s, implying that it’s only open to a very small number of people. There’s no api yet, so it’s not an option for developers. - Sora struggles with physical interactions. Watch the dancers moonwalk, or the ball goes through the dog. HunyuanVideo seems to be a bit better in this regard. - Can't run it locally mode (obviously) - I haven't tested this, but I think it's safe to assume Sora will be censored extensively. HunyuanVideo is surprisingly open (I've seen NSFW generations!) - I’m getting weird camera angles from Sora, but that could likely be solved with better prompting.

Overall, I’d say it’s the best model I've played with, though I haven’t spent much time on other non-open-source ones. Hunyuan gives it a run for its money, though!

I can't speak to any of those videos in a technical sense but personally, I don't feel like any of them are good?

The vibe they give me is similar to the iPhone photography commercials where yes, in theory, a picnic in the park could look exactly like this except for all the parts that seem movie perfect.

I guess it's really more of a colour grading question where most of the Sora colour grading triggers that part of my brain that says "I'm watching a movie and this isn't real" without quite realising why.

A few of the Hunyuan videos in contrast seem a bit more believable even though they have some obvious glitches at times.

The other thing I think Sora has is that thing in commercials where no one else except the protagonist exists and nothing is ever inconvenient. The video of the teacher in a classroom with no students reminds me of that as well as the picnic in the park where there's wide open space with no one around.

I suppose it depends if the goal is to generate believable video and how you define believable.

Hunyuan was more realistic but lower quality than Sora, shorter videos with lower resolution or bitrate. The downside to Sora's sharpness is that it makes mistakes more apparent. Also funny that Sora didn't understand the rolling dunes metaphor.

Based on this it really seems like Hunyuan is a significantly better model. In nearly every example I preferred its output.

Every day that passes I grow fonder of Google's decision to delay or otherwise keep a lot of this under the wraps.

The other day I was scrolling down on YouTube shorts and a couple videos invoked an uncanny valley response from me (I think it was a clip of an unrealistically large snake covering some hut) which was somehow fascinating and strange and captivating, and then scrolling down a few more, again I saw something kind of "unbelievable"... I saw a comment or two saying it's fake, and upon closer inspection: yeah, there were enough AI'esque artifacts that one could confidently conclude it's fake.

We'd known about AI slop permeating Facebook -- usually a Jesus figure made out of unlikely set of things (like shrimp!) and we'd known that it grips eyeballs. And I don't even know in which box to categorize this, in my mind it conjures the image of those people on slot machines, mechanically and soullessly pulling levers because they are addicted. It's just so strange.

I can imagine now some of the conversations that might have happened at Google when they choose to keep a lot of innovations related to genAI under the wraps (I'm being charitable here of their motives), and I can't help but agree.

And I can't help but be saddened about OpenAI's decisions to unload a lot of this before recognizing the results of unleashing this to humanity, because I'm almost certain it'll be used more for bad things than good things, I'm certain its application on bad things will secure more eyeballs than on good things.

I saw my first AI video that completely fooled commenters: https://imgur.com/a/cbjVKMU

This was not marked as AI-generated and commenters were in awe at this fuzzy train, missing the "AIGC" signs.

I'm quite nervous for the future.

On the other hand, because these tools like this are being made available before output is perfected, you and many others are being trained in AI discernment; being able to detect fake things will be a helpful skill to have for some time: another form of critical thinking.

It would be FAR worse if a privately held advanced AI's outputs were unleashed without the population being at least somewhat cautious of everything. The real danger imho comes from private silos of advanced general intelligence that aren't shared and used to gain power, control, and money.

It saddens me. Innovations in AI 'art' generation (music, audio, photo) have been a net negative to society and are already actively harming the Internet and our media sphere.

Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art? It's good enough to fool people and break the fragile trust relationship we had with online content, but is also extremely shit and carries no meaning or depth whatsoever.

They should have kept this amazing tech under the wraps because you have a bad feeling about it? Hate to break it to you, but there have been fake videos on the internet ever since it has existed. There are more ways to fake videos than GenAI. If you haven't been consuming everything on the internet with a high alert bs sensor, then that's an issue of its own. You shouldn't trust things on the internet anyway unless there is overwhelming evidence.

Too charitable indeed. Google was simply unprepared and has inferior alternatives.

My prediction is that next year they will catch up a bit and will not be shy about releasing new technology. They will remain behind in LLMs but at least will more deeply envelope their own existing products, thus creating a narrative of improved innovation and profit potential. They will publicly acknowledge perceived risks and say they have teams ensuring it will be okay.

I wish Google would allow me to remove the AI stuff from search results.

99% of the times it's either useless or wrong.

This is all inevitable. At worst it's pulling the issues forward by a few months or years, and I don't think anyone will meaningfully address the problem until it's staring us in the face.

I believe the internet needs a distributed trust and reputation layer. I haven't fully thought through all the details, but:

- Some way to subscribe to fact checking providers of your choice.

- Some way to tie individuals' reputation to the things they post.

- Overlay those trust and reputation layers.

I want to see a score for every webpage, and be able to drill into what factored into that score, and any additional context people have provided (e.x. Community Notes).

There's a huge bootstrapping and incentive problem though. I think all the big players would need to work together to build this. Social media, legacy media companies, browsers, etc.

This also presupposes people actually care about the truth, which unfortunately doesn't always seem like the case.

I don't think Google delayed or kept this under wraps for any noble reasons. I think they were just disorganized as evidenced by their recent scrambling to compete in this space.

I don't even know if this will be possible, or how it would work, but it seems like the next iteration of social media will be based on some verification that the user is not using AI or is a bot. Currently they are all incentivized to not stop bot activity because it increases user counts, ad revenue, etc.

Maybe the model is you have to pay per account to use it, or maybe the model will be something else.

I doubt this will make everyone just go back to primarily communicating in person/via voice servers but that is a possibility.

exactly one lab has passed the test of morals vs profit at this point, and thats deepmind, and they were thoroughly punished for it.

Every value oAI has claimed to have hasn't lasted a milisecond longer than there was profit motive to break it, and even anthropic is doing military tech now.

> the image of those people on slot machines, mechanically and soullessly pulling levers because they are addicted. It's just so strange.

Worse, the audience is our parents and grandparents. They have little context to be able to sort out reality from this stuff

Shorts are designed to trade your valuable attention for trite, low-effort content. Most decent shorts are just clips of longer-form content.

Do yourself a favor and avoid that kind of content, opting instead for long-form consumption. The discovery patterns are different, but you're less inclined to encounter fake content if you develop a trust network of good channels.

The way AI goes, it will actually raise the cost of valid services: cost of bullshit and spam is going down, which will raise the cost of valid, non-ai powered services to raise above the noise or be able to filter it out. There is only negative value to what "open"-ai is adding to the world right now. By playing the long-term AI safety card, of the hypothetical scenario some AI supposedly getting conscious in the future, they try to pass themselves clean and innocent in all the damage they cause to society.

I just hope the online, social media space gets enshitified to an such a degree that it stops playing a major role in society, though sadly that is not how things usually seem to work.

On the other hand by making public what technologies capabilities are - doesn't it stop the problem of people having this tech in secret and using it before anybody is aware it's even possible?

ie a company developing this tech, keeping under wraps and say only using for special government programmes....

Pandora’s box is open, not releasing models and tools is just going to result in someone else doing it.

They didn’t keep it under wraps, it’s just the team considered the paper shipping not the product. They still shipped the papers that decentralized the knowledge.

Could even argue shipping the product and not the paper would have done more for AI safety, least it would be controlled.

The best part is that eventually, over time, the AI slop will feed into training data more and more. I suspect it will be like the Kessler Syndrome of AI models.

The ability to make strange videos as a consumer... it's not inherently good or bad, it'll just be... weird

It doesn't take AI to fool people. They have been propagandised and lied to on a major scale since mass media.

They also lie themselves: they cannot detect overt bias or reflect on themselves and be aware of their hidden motives, resentments and wishful thinking. Including me and you.

Most people hold important beliefs about the world that are comically inaccurate.

AI changes absolutely nothing how many true or false beliefs the average Joe holds.

> And I can't help but be saddened about OpenAI's decisions to unload a lot of this before recognizing the results of unleashing this to humanity

Yeah, and it's especially hypocrite coming from them who said they'd refuse to disclose anything about GPT-3 because they said it was dangerous. And then a few years latter: “Hey remember about this thing we told you it was too dangerous before? Now we have a monetization strategy so we're giving access to everyone, today.”

> there were enough AI'esque artifacts that one could confidently conclude it's fake.

And yet, you would not have known how to recognize those artifacts without "OpenAI's decisions to unload a lot of this before recognizing the results of unleashing this to humanity".

You could have said the same thing about photo shop... Some people will learn to spot BS and think critically even if they can't quite put their finger on it and the video is very good (What, Trump fought a T-Rex, AND WON?), some people could be fooled by anything, and there is a lot in between.

Considering google image search is polluted by AI-generated images at this moment, perhaps google is afraid of making the search even worse?

What I desperately need is a model that generates perfectly made PowerPoint slides. I have to create many presentations for management, and it’s a very time consuming task. It’s easy to outline my train of thoughts and let an LLM write the full text, but then to create a convincing presentation slide by slide takes days.

I know there is Beautiful.ai or Copilot for PowerPoint, but none of the existing tools really work for me because the results and the user flow aren’t convincing.

Have you checked out Marp? https://marp.app/

Basically it generates slides from markdown, which is great even without LLMs. But you can get LLMs to output in markdown/Marp format and then use Marp to generate the slides.

I haven't looked into complicated slides, but works well for text-based ones.

I want something that can take my ugly line drawing and make it a cool looking line drawing without distorting the main idea

I don't really understand how this would work. Writing long paragraphs to prompt the AI is much more tedious than writing a few bullet points for the slides.

If you need the AI to help you brainstorm a good narrative, that is a different story

Never used it but seen it mentioned in that space: https://gamma.app/

there is a YC company that does that I think: https://www.rollstack.com/ i've never used them but I think they have many satisfied customers, maybe worth a shot!

Wow this is bad. And by bad i mean worse than leading open source and existing alternatives.

Is it me or does it seem like OpenAI revolutionized with both chatGPT and Sora, but they've completely hit the ceiling?

Honestly a bit surprised it happened so fast!

I think we're in the snapdragon age of AI for the next little bit, if you were around for early smartphones.

Each company would either rush to get a phone out with the new snapdragon chip, or take their time to polish a release and have a better phone late cycle. But the real improvements we're just the chip.

Nvidia chips/larger data centers are the chips. the models are the plethora of android phones each generation.

That kept going until progress stabilized. Then the best user experience & vertical integration won over chasing chip performance (apple).

Same goes with DALLE. It was cool to try it the first week or so but now the output is so much worse than Midjourney and stable diffusion. For me it can’t even generate straight lines and everything looks comic-ish.

If you're going to say something like this, you need to back it up with specific alternatives that provide a better result.

Besides just citing your sources, I'm genuinely curious what the best ones are for this so I can see the competition :)

What are the leading alternatives? (Open source or otherwise)

Sora was not really that big of a revolution, it was just catching up with competitors. I would even say in gen video they are behind right now.

Bad also in the sense once you get over the "boy, it's amazing they can do that", you immediately think "boy, they really shouldn't do that".

My working theory is that OpenAI is the 'moonshot' kind of company full of super smart researchers who like tackling hard problems, but have no time and effort for things like 'how do we create an UX people actually want to use', which actually requires a ton of painful back-and-forth and thoughtful design work.

This is not a problem as long as they do the ChatGPT thing, and sell an API and let others figure out how to build an UX around it, but here they seem to be gunning for creating a boxed product.

No doubt. I was waiting so long for Sora but Runway already burned me out on AI video.

It was fun for a few days but far more limited than I would have ever expected.

Maybe Sora 5.0 will be something special. Right now though all these video models are basically shit.

What are some of the open source video models?

Could it be that text sources are plenty, and more dense than training for videos, and images?

Their example videos: https://openai.com/sora/, of the doors opening, are hilarious.

1. The first set of doors doesn't have any doorknobs or handles. https://ibb.co/PwqfzBq

2. The second set of doors has handles, and some very large/random hinges on the left door. https://ibb.co/JkDtc6r

3. The third set doesn't have any handles, but I can forgive that, because we're in a spaceship now. The problem is that the inside of the doors seem to have windows, but the outside of the doors, doesn't have any windows. https://ibb.co/nwpXmtq & https://ibb.co/wr6v2g1

4. The best/most hilarious part for me. The doors have handles, but they are on the hinge side of the door. No idea how this would work. https://ibb.co/gWXDcfr

There are more examples of its limitations.

The video with dogs shows three taxis transforming into one, the number of people under the tree changing https://player.vimeo.com/video/1037090356?h=07432076b5&loop=...

An example from the HunyuanVideo is terrible as well. Look at that awful tongue: https://hunyuanvideoai.com/part-1-3.mp4

And what we see in that marketing is probably the best they could generate. And I suppose it took a lot of prompt tweaking and regenerations.

The internet is already full of junk shorts and useless videos and soon there will be even more junk content everywhere. :(

I think they trained on one too many closet bifold doors [1].

If you look at the edge of the doors as they swing open, it seems their movement resembles bifold door movement (there's a wiggle to it common to bifold doors that normal doors never have). Plus they seem to magically reveal an inner fold that wasn't there before.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=interior+bifold+closet+doors&...

I feel like there is a sweet spot for AI generation of images and videos that I would describe as "charmingly bad", like the stuff we got from the old CLIP+VQGAN models. I feel like Sora has jumped past that into the valley of "unappealingly bad".

I think that's why humor and memes are such good targets for this type of stuff. If you look up videos like "luma memes compilation," it takes well-known memes and distorts them in uncanny, freaky, and bizarre ways. Yet the fact the original subject is a meme somehow bypasses the uncanny valley repulsion. We seem to accept that much more readily, for whatever reason.

Technically it's amazing that this is possible at all. Yet I don't see how the world is better off for it on net. Aside from eliminating jobs in FX/filming/acting/set design/etc, what do we really gain? Amateur filmmakers can be more powerful? How about we put the same money into a fund for filmmakers to access. The negatives are plentiful, from the mundane reduction of our media to monolithic simulacra to putting the nail in the coffin for truth to exist unchallenged, let alone the 'fine tunes' that will continue to come for deepfakes that are literal (sexual) harassment.

Humans are not built for this power to be in the hands of everyone with low friction.

> Amateur filmmakers can be more powerful?

YouTube turned everyone into broadcasters. Sora could help bring countless untold stories to life, straight from the imagination.

> Humans are not built for this power to be in the hands of everyone with low friction.

Why is having power concentrated in few hands better?

I've taken to calling the digital artists I work with "the old masters" in light of the flood of inexpert, low effort AGI content. And they do use generative AI, pretty liberally for concept work and reference, but they know what they're doing and can turn it into great things.

I thought we lost a lot in the transition from analog to digital media, but that doesn't mean there's not a peak to any modern craft, just that there hasn't been a unified or named movement highlighting the best and worst, outside of social media algorithms.

Humans are not built for this power to be in the hands of everyone with low friction

Now we have this with social media, everyone is their own little FSB propaganda machine…yay

Not available in France yet, I'd we interested to know if it's a matter of progressive rollout, or some form of legislation (EU or otherwise ?) that's making OpenAI cautious ? Something like the EU AI Act [1] ?

In a sane world, any video produced by Sora would be required to have a form of watermarking that's on par with what intellectual property owners require.

We've put people in jail for sharing copyrighted movies, and don't see why we would refrain from mandating that AI generated videos have some caption that says, I don't know, "This video was generated with AI" ?

People would not respect the mandate, and we would consider that illegal, and use the monopoly on force to take money out of their bank account.

I know, it sounds mad and soooo 20th century - maybe that's why OpenAI overlords are not deeming peasants in France worthy of "a cat in a suit drinking coffee in an office" and "you'll never believe what the other candidate is doing to your kids".

[1] https://www.imatag.com/blog/ai-act-legal-requirement-to-labe...

EDIT: apparently some form of watermarking is built in (but it's not obvious in the examples, for some reason.)

> While imperfect, we’ve added safeguards like visible watermarks by default, and built an internal search tool that uses technical attributes of generations to help verify if content came from Sora.

[2] https://openai.com/index/sora-is-here/

>any video produced by Sora would be required to have a form of watermarking that's on par with what intellectual property owners require

It's a completely different thing. IP owners want watermarks on their IP so they can prosecute people who use their IP without giving credit, nobody's forcing them to watermark it.

> People would not respect the mandate, and we would consider that illegal, and use the monopoly on force to take money out of their bank account.

Imagine a culture that would harness their frustration at being left out in the direction of innovating on their own.

Defining the status quo on things like watermarks by leading the field and then demonstrating how to act from the front.

Seems like they'd be more effective than one that settles for derision and calling for taxes and rules from the back of the pack, so they can presumably profit off the terrible evil things being built.

Not gonna happen in EU too soon, imo. It still works with a VPN so the fence is not so protected.

Each of Google's AI things were delayed by months, I assumed due to GDPR, but I haven't seen such delays from OpenAI yet.

MKBHD's review of the new Sora release:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY2x0TyKzIQ

Love the callout of them definitely training on his own videos

Interesting to see how bad the physics/object permanence is. I wonder if combining this with a Genie 2 type model (Google's new "world model") would be the next step in refining it's capabilities.

I quit watching this guy after he filmed himself speeding a 100 mph through residential. Just another privileged YouTuber.

Link should be annoucement post: https://openai.com/index/sora-is-here/

Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://sora.com/ above.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368981

> We’re introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it’s used responsibly as the field advances.

That's an interesting way of saying "we're probably gonna miss some stuff in our safety tools, so hopefully society picks up the slack for us". :)

Flashbacks to when they were cagey about releasing the GPT models because they could so easily be used for spam, and then just pretended not to see all the spam their model was making when they did release it.

If you happen to notice a Twitter spam bot claiming to be "an AI language model created by OpenAI", know that we have conducted an investigation and concluded that no you didn't. Mission accomplished!

Users, not tools, should be judged.

It is unlikely anyone is going to perform act of terrorism with this, or any kind of deep fakes that buy Easter European elections. The worst outcome is likely teens having a laugh.

The problem isn't whether we should regulate AI. It's whether it's even possible to regulate them without causing significant turmoil and damage to the society.

It's not hyperbole. Hunyuan was released before Sora. So regulating Sora does absolutely nothing unless you can regulate Hunyuan, which is 1) open source and 2) made by a China company.

How do we expect the US govt to regulate that? Threatening sanction China unless they stop doing AI research???

"to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards"

Or, "this safety stuff is harder than we thought, we're just going to call 'tag you're it' on society"

Or,

-Oppenheimer : speaking "man, this nuclear safety stuff is hard, I'm just going to put it all out there and let society explore developing norms and safeguards".

-Society : Bombs Japan

-Oppenheimer : "No, not like that, oops".

"Climate Change is likely to mean more fires in the future, so we've lit a small fire at everyone's house to give society time to co-develop norms and safeguards."

Specially since they were originally supposed to be a non-profit focused on AI safety and Sam Altman single-handedly pivoting to a for-profit after taking all the donations and partnering with probably the single most evil corporation that has ever existed, Microsoft.

"We're releasing this like rats on a remote island, in hopes of seeing how the ecosystem is going to respond".

The onus will be on the rest of society to defend itself from all the grift that will result from this.

text, image, video, and audio editing tools have no 'safety' and 'alignment' whatsoever, and skilled humans are far more capable of creating 'unsafe' and 'unethical' media than generative AI will ever be.

somehow, the society had survived just fine.

the notion that generative AI tools should be 'safe' and 'aligned' is as absurd as the notion that tools like Notepad, Photoshop, Premiere and Audacity should exist only in the cloud, monitored by kommissars to ensure that proles aren't doing something 'unsafe' with them.

The irony is that users want more freedom and fewer safeguards.

But these companies are rightfully worried about regulators and legislatures, often led by a pearl-clutching journalists, so we can't have nice things.

Do we not want new stuff? If the answer is "Sure, but only if whoever invents the stuff does all the work and finds all rough edges" then the answer is actually just "No, thanks".

'when civilization collapses because all photo, audio and video evidence is 100% suspect, i mean, how could you blame us'

A bit off-topic, but how much does a 4-letter (or less) .com go for these days? I wonder if they bought this via an intermediary so that the seller wouldnt see "OpenAI" and tack on a few zeros.

edit: previously, this thread pointed to sora.com

Pretty off-topic, but yes, domains and land are often bought via shell companies for this reason. They probably didn't settle upon the name Sora until they already secured the .com . That's a famous YC piece of advice. If you can't get the .com then rename. But for domains that everyone wants, like chat.com, OpenAI paid 8 figures for that one.

His review video is so much better than the announcement video at explaining what has been released.

For the $20/month subscription: you get 50 generations a month. So it is included in your subscription already! Nice.

For the Pro $200/month subscription: you get unlimited generations a month (on a slower que).

I wonder what I will be doing with 20 garbage videos. And this probably includes revisions too. It takes 10 attempts to get something remotely useful as an image (and that's just for a blog post).

Who is the audience for this product? A lot of people like video because it's a way of experience something they currently cannot for one reason or another. People don't want to see arbitrary fake worlds or places on earth that aren't real. Unless it's video game or something. But I see this product being used primarily to trick Facebook users

I guess the CGI industry implications are interesting, but look at the waves behind the AI generated man. They don't break so much as dissolving into each other. There's always a tell. These aren't GPU generated versions of reality with thought behind the effects.

> People don't want to see arbitrary fake worlds or places on earth that aren't real.

Isn't there a multi-billion dollar industry in California somewhere that caters exactly to that demand?

> Who is the audience for this product?

Infants, people just coming out of anesthesia, the concussed, the hypoxic, the mortally febrile and so on

To me this is what all AI feels like. People want "hard to make things" because they feel special and unordinary. If anybody with a prompt can do it, it ain't gonna sell

"People don't want to see arbitrary fake worlds or places on earth that aren't real."

What? This is 90% of the Instagram/TikTok experience, and has been for years. No one cares if something is real. They care how it makes them feel.

The audience for this is every "creator" or "influecner". No one cares if the content is fake. They'll sell you a vacation package to a destination that doesn't exist and people will still rate it 3/5 stars for a $15 Starbucks gift card.

I know a bunch of marketing people that have fully incorporated these tools into their workflow. So that's one group.

Also seen GenAI replace more and more stock media in many facets of business/professional services.

> primarily to trick Facebook users

You say it like that's not the majority of the web.

Anyone who wants to waste your time/attention/money(!!) for cheap. Think all the bullshit useless jobs aka marketers, scammers, identity thieves.

Other than that, it's also so people can spam every single website with millions of hours of AI generated spam and earn 7 cents off of the 5000 people the algorithm randomly decides to show it to.

Legitimate uses outside of that kinda shit? I fail to see one.

Raises billion dollar, claims of agi by 2025, cannot handle new user sign up traffic.

I don't even get why I have to "sign up." I'm already a paying customer with an existing account.

Billion is table stakes , OpenAI has raised over 6 billion dollars this year alone

This is by design, they want the news articles saying "this is so popular it crashed their website!"

That’s because in this case scaling to big traffic needs more hardware which is very expensive and even if you have money the manufacturers may not have the capacity you need.

“Sora is here”

No it’s not. I’ve been trying to access all day: “Sora account creation is temporarily unavailable We're currently experiencing heavy traffic and have temporarily disabled Sora account creation. If you've never logged into Sora before, please check back again soon.”

I finally got access. Generated roughly 15 videos. Quality ranged from okay to very very bad.

I wouldn't get your hopes up - it's not at all as good as they've hyped it.

A little worried how young children watching these videos may develop inaccurate impressions of physics in nature.

For instance, that ladybug looks pretty natural, but there's a little glitch in there that an unwitting observer, who's never seen a ladybug move before, may mistake as being normal. And maybe it is! And maybe it isn't?

The sailing ship - are those water movements correct?

The sinking of the elephant into snow - how deep is too deep? Should there be snow on the elephant or would it have melted from body heat? Should some of the snow fall off during movement or is it maybe packed down too tightly already?

There's no way to know because they aren't actual recordings, and if you don't know that, and this tech improves leaps and bounds (as we know it will), it will eventually become published and will be taken at face value by many.

Hopefully I'm just overthinking it.

> For instance, that ladybug looks pretty natural, but there's a little glitch in there that an unwitting observer, who's never seen a ladybug move before, may mistake as being normal. And maybe it is! And maybe it isn't?

Well, none of the existing animation movies follow exact laws of physics.

I grew up watching Looney Tunes interpretation of physics and turned out just fine.

Between omnipresent cgi in movies and tv, animation, and video game physics (all of which are human-coded approximations of real physics, often intentionally distorted for various reasons), that ship has long since sailed.

> The sinking of the elephant into snow - how deep is too deep? Should there be snow on the elephant or would it have melted from body heat? Should some of the snow fall off during movement or is it maybe packed down too tightly already?

Should there be an elephant in the snow? The layers of possible confusion, and subtle incorrect understandings go much deeper.

> inaccurate impressions of physics

Or just inaccurate impressions of the physical world.

My young kids and I happened to see a video of some very cute baby seals jumping onto a boat. It was not immediately clear it was AI-generated, but after a few runs I noticed it was a bit too good to be true. The kids would never have known otherwise.

YouTube Shorts are full of AI animal videos with distorted proportions, living in the wrong habitat, and so on. They popped up on my son’s account and I hate them for the reasons you outline. They aren’t cartoonish enough explain away, nor realistic enough to be educational.

I’d be more worried about the inevitable “we’re under nuclear attack, head for shelter” CNN deepfakes.

I dont think you are overthinking it.

Facebook seems full of older people interacting with AI generated visual content who don't seem to understand that it is fake.

Our society already had a problem with people (not) participating in consensus reality. This is going to pour gasoline on the fire.

> A little worried how young children watching these videos may develop inaccurate impressions of physics in nature.

I'm less concerned with physics for children--assuming they get enough time outdoors--and more about adulthood biases and media-literacy.

In particular, a turbocharged version of a problem we already have: People grow up watching movies and become subconsciously taught that flaws of the creation pipeline (e.g. lens flare, depth of field) are signs of "realism" in a general sense.

That manifests in things such as video-games where your human character somehow sees the world with crappy video-cameras for eyes. (Excepting a cyberpunk context, where that would actually make sense.)

Fair! I watched a lot of Superman as a kid and I killed myself jumping off a building

Yes, entertainment spreads lots of myths. But bad physics from AI movies is only a tiny part of the problem. This is similar to worries about the misconceptions people might get from playing too many video games, reading too many novels, watching too much TV, or participating too much in social media.

It helps somewhat that people are fairly aware that entertainment is fake and usually don’t take it too seriously.

> A little worried how young children watching these videos may develop inaccurate impressions of physics in nature.

And why don't we worry this about CGI?

CGI is not always made with a full physical simulation, and is not always intended to accurately represent real-world physics.

Me too. While I'm generally optimistic about generative art, at this point the models still have this dreamlike quality; things look OK at first glance, but you often get the feeling something is off. Because it is. Texture, geometry, lights, shadows, effects of gravity, etc. are more or less inconsistent.

I do worry that, as we get exposed more and more to such art, we'll become less sensitive to this feeling, which effectively means we'll become less calibrated to actual reality. I worry this will screw with people's "system 1" intuitions long-term (but then I can't say exactly how; I guess we'll find out soon enough).

Here's the obligatory AI enthusiast answer:

What is physics besides next token/frame prediction? I'm not sure these videos deserve the label "inaccurate" as who's to judge what way of generating next tokens/frames is better? Even if you you judge the "physical" world to be "better", I think it's much more harmful to teach young children to be skeptical of AI as their futures will depend on integrating them in their lives. Also, with enough data, such models will not only match, but probably exceed "real-physics" models in quality, fidelity, and speed.

i wouldnt expect young children to learn how to walk by watching people walk on a screen, regardless of if its a real person walking, or an ai animation.

the real world gives way more stimulus

watching the animations might help them play video games, but i again imagine that the feedback is what will do the real job.

even for the real ladybug video, who says the behaviour on screen is similar to what a typical ladybug does? if its on video, the ladybug was probably doing something weird amd unexpected

Sure this is problematic for society although I'm not concerned about what you are mentioning. I remember as a kid noticing how in looney tunes wile e coyote could run off the cliff a few steps and thinking maybe there's a way to do that. Or kids arguing about whether it was possible to perform a sonic boom like in street fighter. Or jumping off the playground with an umbrella etc

Don't be, physics laws miss interpretation are very quick to correct with a reality check. I'm more worried for kids that have to learn how the world works trough a screen. Just let them play outside and interact with other kids and nature. Let them fall and cry, and scratch and itch, it will make them stronger and healthier adults.

> Hopefully I'm just overthinking it.

I think it's unnecessary to worry about obviously bad stuff in nascent and rapidly developing technology. The people who spent most time with it (the developers) are aware of the obviously bad stuff and will work to improve it.

A little worried how young children watching these videos may develop inaccurate impressions of physics in nature.

Pretty sure cartoons and actions movies do that already, until youtube videos of attempted stunts show what reality looks like.

Young generation that will grow up with this tools will have completely different approach to anything virtual. Remember how prople though that camera stole part of their soul when they see themselves copied on picture?

Video games and movies have existed for a long time. I think children today will end up being more discerning than us because they will grow up sifting through AI generated content.

That could be nice. If you think that rabbits crawl like on the sora.com homepage, but then you see one hopping in real life, you might have more of a sense of wonder about the world.

AI physics isn't worth worrying about compared to other inaccurate things kids see in movies. It doesn't seem to hurt them.

If you really want something to worry about, consider that movies regularly show pint-sized women successfully drop kicking men significantly bigger than themselves in ways that look highly plausible but aren't. It's not AI but it violates basic laws of biology and physics anyway. Teaching girls they can physically fight off several men at once when they aren't strong enough to do that seems like it could have pretty dangerous consequences, but in practice it doesn't seem to cause problems. People realize pretty quick that movie physics isn't real.

You are not overthinking it, moreover, text LLM have the same problem in that they are almost good. Almost. Which is what gives me the creeps.

I share your concern as well and at times worry about what I'm seeing too.

I suppose the reminder here is that seeing does not warrant believing.

I am not sure if you have kids or not but you are in for a big surprise if you don’t have kids. Watching videos =\= real life.

I know this sounds judgmental, but this reminds me of the idiom “touch grass”. Children should be outdoors observing real life and not be consuming AI slop. You are not overthinking this, this will most likely be bad for children and everyone in the long run.

Also, I guess its just normal for a car lane to just merge seamlessly into a pedestrian zone

Yes Bugs bunny and willie the coyote harmed ours physics.

Don’t worry, you are.

Kids are fine with fiction.

Many people say:

> these things will get bigger and better much faster than we can learn to discern

I would like to ask “Why?”

Clearly, these models are just one case of “NN can learn to map anything from one domain to another” and with enough training/overfitting they can approximate reality to a high degree.

But, why would it get better to any significant extent?

Because we can collect an infinite amount of video? Because we can train models to the point where they become generative video compression algorithms that have seen it all?

> But, why would it get better to any significant extent?

Two years ago, the very best closed-source image model was unable to represent anything remotely realistic. Today, there's hundreds of open source models that can generate images that are literally indistinguishable from reality (like Flux). Not only that, there's an entire collection of tools and techniques around style transfer, facial reconstruction, pose control, etc. It's mindblowing, and every week there's a new paper making it even better. Some of that could have been more training data. Most of it wasn't.

I guess it's fair to extrapolate that same trend to video, since it's the arc text, audio and images have taken? No reason it would be different.

As there was no mention of an API for either Sora or o1 Pro, I think this launch further marks OpenAI’s transition from an infrastructure company to a product company.

It seems like there going that direction - especially the way they setup the Sora interface, It feels its nearing a video editing product.

“Right before the TikTok ban goes into effect” is incredible market timing for the release of a tool that is useless for anything other than terrible TikTok spam videos

Hey now, no need to downplay the product here, it's also useful for spamming other video sharing platforms! Think Facebook timelines, which are already full of AI image barf, Twitter feeds, which mostly consist of AI text barf, and Youtube Shorts, which is full of existing AI animation barf!

Soon, lots of people can pay a modest sum to make the internet just a worse for everyone in exchange for a chance to make their money back!

Not available in

> the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Economic Area. We are working to expand access further in the coming months

Excellent to announce this lack of access after the launch of pro. At least I have no business reason for sora so it's not a loss there so much but annoying nonetheless.

Who legitimately asked for, or wants this? It's cool on it's face, sure.

What legitimate problem does it solve? Isn't AI supposed to make our lives easier, or is that just "not what it's supposed to be bro", or whatever. I've lost track at this point with all the hallucinations and poor/bad/really fucking bad responses. It's not 100% of the time, but that's the point of companies like OpenAI releasing stuff like this to the public... to be helpful and believable.

Deep fakes were bad enough. Shit like this is not helpful when given to the largely ignorant public. It's not going to be used for anything helpful, conducive, or otherwise beneficial.

It's impressive. Sure. I just fail to see what it's the solution to.

It's not a solution to anything, it's simply just money. If they don't release a for-profit video generator, someone else will

Sorat? https://anthroposophy.eu/Sorat

Here's something I find interesting: We have multiple paid accounts with OpenAI. In other words, we are paying customers. I have yet to see a single announcement or new development that we learn about through email. In most cases we learn these things when they get covered by some online outfit, posted on HN, etc.

OpenAI isn't the only company that seems to act in this manner. I find this to be interesting. Your paying customers actively want to know about what you are doing and, more than likely, would love to get a heads-up before the word goes out to the world. Hearing about things from third parties can make you feel like a company takes your business for grant it or does not deem it important enough to feed you news when it happens.

Another example of this is Kickstarter, although, their problem is different. I have only ever backed technology projects on KS. That's all I am interested in. And yet, every single email they send is full of projects that don't even begin to approach my profile (built over dozens of backed projects). As a result of this, KS emails have become spam to be deleted without even reading them. This also means I have not backed projects I would have seriously considered and I don't frequent the site as much as I used to.

Getting back on topic: It will be interesting to see how Sora usage evolves.

I'd be interested to know how many people around here pay for ChatGPT. Is it common? I would have thought technical people would be choosing AI tools other than chatGPT. So you use it mainly for coding? Or are you chatting with it and doing all those "fun" things?

Yes, they do seem to take your business for granted. In my case, I will keep paying for it. I need OpenAI's tools more than OpenAI needs my business, and probably yours too.

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

It will not be available in the EU for now. I always feel disadvantaged when I read that sentence

I'm not in the EU, but when I see something that is US only, I tend to assume its doing something with privacy/user data/otherwise that is restricted in the EU.

Which means I generally avoid things that are not EU available even if they are available to me. Its not 100% but its a fairly decent measure of how much companies care about users to ensure they meet EU privacy laws from the start, vs if they provide some limited version or delayed version to the EU.

And in the UK and Switzerland unfortunately

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10250692-sora-supported-...

Are you saying you're not glad that the EU has chosen for you?

I would ask an AI to generate a riff on a "I am the very model of a modern major general" but for some EU bureaucrat but I'll spare you the spam.

From "12 Days of OpenAI: Day 3"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jKVx2vyZOY (live as of this comment)

Over now, and pretty short/light on info AFAICT. That said, knowing what we know now about Altman made me physically unable to watch while he engages in sustained eye contact with the camera, so maybe missed something while skimming! On the upside, I'm so glad we have three billionaires cultivating three different cinema-supervillain vibes (Musk, Altman, & Zuckerberg). Much more fresh than the usual "oil baron" aesthetic that we know from the gilded age

In a not so distant future we might need to have some sort of regulation that forces uploaders (or content creators) to declare if videos have been generated with ai tech or not and depending on the content such declaration might carry legal consequences. On the other side hosting platforms should display clearly if such content was declared ai generated or not as well. Right now I can't see a simple and good enough solution as this that could mitigate the spread of malicious content.

This is actually a different version from what they had before. What they released today is Sora Turbo.

Account creation currently unavailable

There’s an ongoing related livestream[0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/2jKVx2vyZOY

If we take HunyuanVideo, which is similar to Sora, as an example, they state that generating a 5-second video requires 5 minutes on 8xH100 GPUs. Therefore, if 10,000 users simultaneously want to generate a 5-second video within the same 5-minute window, you would need 80,000 H100 GPUs, which would cost around 2 billion USD in GPUs alone.

Curious, what kinds of things are you all gonna make with Sora?

Personally, I think I'll just be making weird memes to send to my friends!

Can't even log in. I get "Unexpected token '<', "<!DOCTYPE "... is not valid JSON"

God, I hate this crap. Every damn thing on the internet now is some variety of AI slop. Every image is some generative garbage, half the text is the kind of stilted half-accurate wordy gpt garbage, and now I get to dodge a gazillion generated videos of things that would be interesting if they were real and followed the laws of physics and continuity, and I get to do all that while living in a post-truth society, because there’s just too much bullshit out there for the average person to bother to sort through. You’d think after 20 years of this crap nerds would have some notion that technology has consequences, but nope, there’s a shiny thing we could build, so we’ve gotta build it.

Not to be picky, but Sora is here: https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Sora,_Laz...

Welp I can't even login with my existing ChatGPT account because their servers are overloaded

Wish they’d followed their previous MO of releasing stuff with no warning or buildup.

Results won’t match the hype.

If you're looking for video for casual personal projects or fill-ins for vlog posts, or something to make your PowerPoint look neat, this seems like a rad tool. It has a looong way to go before it's taking anyone's movie VFX job.

The mammoths are walking over some pre-existing footprints, but they don't leave any prints of their own. I guess I'm getting hung up on little things. For a prompt of a few words, it looks pretty nice!

Genuinely curious who is doing this for adult content?

Complaints about Sora's quality and prompt complexity likely not as important to auteur's in that category, especially with ability to load a custom character etc

Account creation not available. Login to see more videos.

Classic OpenAI. I don't care, there are so many better alternatives to everything they do. Funny how quickly they have become irrelevant and lost their moat.

This seems pretty broken at the moment, I haven't actually managed to create a video, every prompt results in "There was an unexpected error running this prompt".

Not downplaying the amazing progress, but even the video showcases have some weird uncanny valley effects. The winged horse one in particular - the wings and legs morph, the wing on the left disappears and reappears through the tail.

This stuff is a little ways off, but still some amazing effects here. I think it will be a little bit before it is sufficient for production use in any real commercial situation. There's something unsettling about all of the videos generated here.

I wonder what it is about EU and UK law, in particular, that restricts its availability there. Their FAQs don't mention this.

If it's about training models on potentially personal information, the GDPR (EU and UK variants) kicks in, but then that hasn't restricted OpenAI's ability to deploy (Chat)GPT there. The same applies to broader copyright regulations around platforms needing to proactively prevent copyright violation, something GPT could also theoretically accomplish. Any (planned) EU-specific regulations don't apply to the UK, so I doubt it's those either.

The only thing that leaves, perhaps, is laws around the generation of deepfakes which both the UK and EU have laws about? But then why didn't that affect DALL-E? Anyone with a more detailed understanding of this space have any ideas?

Forget video. Imagine what this going to do for video-gaming

“The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations. Although Sora Turbo is much faster than the February preview, we’re still working to make the technology affordable for everyone.”

So they demo the full model and release the quantised and censored model.

Does anyone else find this kind of bait & switch distasteful?

How long until they fix the sign up issue? What an embarrassment. Why release something if you know it can't work properly? And why do we need to sign up when we already have an account with ChatGPT?

It was cool when they announced it but the novelty of generating a piece of AI video clipart is quickly fading, especially when it takes months or years to just get a demo in users' hands.

"Sora is not available in The United Kingdom yet". Available elsewhere, from Albania to Zimbabwe. Any particular reason why?

I'm surprised they put in 2 legged poodles

So when's the lawsuit from Google coming?

That's now how the world is supposed to work, I wonder if there is going to be long-term psychological effects if being exposed to videos like these regularly. If our neurons are unable to receive a stable stream of reality like we have for millions of years will our brains become dysfunctional over time?

Something about that image of the spinning coffee cup with sailing ships is giving me severe trypophobia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia

It’s a like a spider’s eyes… and also not what I would expect a latte to look like.

I was searching recently for a photograph of Arthur Rimbaud in his later years, and noticed that already Google Images was flooded with AI-generated stuff from websites that do not require marking it as such. Authentic material will soon be much harder to find for people who don't know the sources.

I have been subscribing to ChatGPT Plus for a long time. I just cancelled my subscription today because every time I try to login to sora.com, I get the too busy message. I have never been able to try it. Pissed me off.

Tencent has a comparable open weight model dropped in the last week that looks at least as good.

Is it better or just more distracting away from it's flaws and using flaws to advantage? I only see repulsive mouth movements to induce fear, face coverings to hide the uncanniness, dreamy physics sim to distract. Not so out of place in present day hollywood but never any coherence of feeling.

So in the end, was it all classic hype pumping and heavily edited marketing material? Can't create account but from what I see on the front-page, every video looks kinda strange, almost in everyone of them something is instantly off to my eye. Anyone got decent results yet?

Why keep building AI to do the things that people find fun to do rather than the mundane bullshit? All we’ll be left with is cleaning, folding laundry, and doing the dishes while AI does all the interesting things.

Is there information when it will be available in other countries, like Germany for example?

Meh. It's a cool POC and immediately useful for abstract imagery, but not for anything realistic.

Looking forward to the onslaught of AI-generated slop filling every video feed on the Internet. Maybe it's finally what's going to kill things like TikTok, YT Shorts, Reels, etc. One can hope...anyway.

I may be the only one but this kinda breaks my brain in that I notice weird physics anomalies in these but then I start to look for those in non-AI produced video and start to question everything. Hopefully this a short term situation.

No integration with ChatGPT is a lost opportunity and illustrates no joined up thinking in all senses of that phrase. Demonstrations, helping people with learning difficulties visualise things, education purposes, story telling...

Serious question: is this better than current text-to-video models like Hailuo?

In July I made this 3 minute little content marketing video for Canada Day. Took me about 40 minutes using a combo of midjourney + pika, suno for the music. Honestly I had a lot of fun making it, I can see these tools with be fun for creative teams to hammer out little things for social media and stuff: https://x.com/ascent_hi/status/1807871799302279372

I don't see sora being THAT much better than pika now that I'm trying both, except that it's included in my openai subscription, but I do think people who do discreet parts of the "modal stack" are going to be able to compete on their merits (be it pika for vid or suno for music etc)

A minimum setting video took an hour 480p 5s 1:1. Servers getting cooked

"Here" depends on where you live. Not available in the UK.

Anyone else feeling their servers melt a bit on sora.com?

A friendly reminder: if you have tech-illiterate people in your life (parents, grandparents, friends, etc), please reach out to them and inform them about advances in AI text, image, audio, and (as of very recently) video generation. Many folks are not aware of what modern algorithms are capable of, and this puts them at risk. GenAI makes it easier and cheaper than ever for bad actors to create targeted, believable scams. Let your loved ones know that it is possible to create believable images, audio, and videos which may depict anything from “Politician Says OUTRAGEOUS Thing!” to “a member of your own family is begging you for money.” The best defense you can give them is to make them aware of what they’re up against. These tools are currently the worst they will ever be, and their capabilities will only grow in the coming months and years. They are already widely used by scammers.

What’s next, Tiagra?

Is there no way to try it even without subscribing? After you log in, it goes straight to a screen asking for subscription to create videos.

Great. In a world awash with disinformation, we're making it easier to create even more of it.

I don't see any good coming from tools like these.

I wonder when in the future ai images and videos will be remotely useful and easy to create. These are still weird and garbage quality.

The competition in text-to-video tools is heating up, but a key challenge remains: achieving desired results without exhausting resources. Runway, for instance, often consumes all your credits before producing something usable, even if you stick to their guidelines. Hailuo AI shows better consistency, while Sora Turbo sounds promising with potentially more mature generations. Progress is clear, but there’s still a way to go in perfecting these tools.

sorry for the tangent: can't remember a launch they've had where you could just use it. it's always "rollout", "later this quarter", "select users", what's the deal here?

it's given openai this tinge to me that i probably won't ever manage to forget.

Sora makes movies less interesting, regardless of how they're created.

The part made by Sora? About as interesting as the latest chess programs doing well at chess. woohoo/nice job.

The overall effect? Now we spend mental energy trying to figure out which parts are machine generated, and hence not worth anything. That mental energy is gone, sucked out of the cultural economy, and fed to the machinery of mediocrity.

Account creation currently unavailable

Was this the one trained on YouTube?

regarding all the comments about physics, I wonder if a hybrid approach would work better, with an llm generating 3d objects that interact in a physics simulation with guiding forces from the LLM and then another model generating photo realistic rendering.

What is a "System Card"?

The most impressive part is the temporal consistency in the demo videos.

He flower one is the best looking.

sharing a paper of Sora: https://www.openread.academy/en/paper/reading?corpusId=50343...

It's worth remembering, in the end, humans still created it. Just remarkable.

I am not impressed by it at all ... Is it actually better than the competitors?

Sort of messed up that I’m paying for ChatGPT pro and still can’t access it.

So they released it in Afghanistan but not in Sweden? Is this an EU ban?

"...I felt a great disturbance in the algorithm... as if millions of influencers, OnlyFans stars, and video creators suddenly cried out in terror..."

At least we don't have to worry about AI taking over any time soon

I wish that after Sora and Sora Turbo they would release Sora Lella

So we are now a few years into the AI video thing.

I'm curious to know - is it actually useful for real world tasks that people/companies need videos for?

anyone done a comparison with the open-source hunyuanvideoai.com?

I think this would be fitting use case for niche stock video.

I like that the contributors are presented as movie credits

God. These AI tools are really showing just how f’d up people are. AI is a scapegoat for the absurdity of society. We are a a scourge! Well, aren’t we? Look at what we’re doing and the way we use this to instinctively conduct psychological warfare on each other! People are facetious. People will kill each other, and people want to lie, steal, and cheat. God almighty. How depressing…

This is a problem that highlights the apparent either lack of effect, or lack of care for, consequences, period. The current consequences in place to deter this abysmal and abhorrent behavior simply aren’t enough. I look around and the world is going nuts, and failing, it seems, to attribute the cause with the effect. Shitty people doing shitty things. We don’t need new laws or regulations, when people aren’t willing or able to abide by the ones currently in place! What good will that do?

what in particular is better as about this than

https://civitai.com/videos

"Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue"

mmmmh...

ok, so gpt pro with some extra power and sora. This means that gtp5 and generally speaking AGI can wait

even in this mammoths demo, the dust clouds keep popping behind them even after they have moved forward

No API/per video generation? Huh.

forced to finally release after that new open source model came out that was equal or better?

Great. More tools to continue the enshitification of everything on the web.

Sora? More like r/ShittyHDR

People really worry about fake video and images and whatever but I have to say, the correct heuristics both already exist and have existed for a long time:

1. Anything on the internet can be fake

2. Trust is interpersonal, and trusting content should be predicated first and foremost on trusting its source to not deceive you

This is imperfect but also the best people ever really do in the general case, and just orders of magnitude better than most people are currently doing

The issue isn't models like this, it's that people are eating a ton of information but have been strongly encouraged to be credulous, and a lion's share of that training is directly coming from the tech grift industrial complex

I wouldn't even say this is the most compelling kind of tool for plausible-looking disinformation out there by a long shot for the record, but without actually examining why people are gullible there is no technology that's going to make people accepting fiction as fact substantially worse, or better, really. Scams target people on the order of their life savings every day and there are robust technologies and protocols for vetting communications, but people have to know to use them, care to use them, and be able to use them, for that to matter at all

co-develop := we are in f** around and f** out mode, please bear with us.

Ah, yes. We definitely needed another bad dreams generator.

Seems as shitty as others.

Is it just me or do all the clips on the official page feel just creepily wrong? Everything seems so wrong, movements, proportions, light, color... everything's almost correct, but barely and noticeable not so. To me it looks like some horror from beyond, something inter-dimensional beings would dream up to simulate the idea of the something that's similar to reality. And it creeps me the fuck out.

Win me an Academy Award

OpenAI is a masterclass in pissing off paying customers.

I'm just about ready to cancel my ChatGPT subscription and move fully over to Claude because OpenAI has spit in my face one too many times.

I'm tired of announcements of things being available only to find out "No, they aren't" or "It's rolling out slowly" where "slowly" can mean days, weeks, or month (no exaggeration).

I'm tired of shit like this:

    Sign ups are temporarily unavailable
    We’re currently experiencing heavy traffic and have temporarily disabled sign ups. We’re working to 
    get them back up shortly so check back soon.

> We’re releasing it today as a standalone product at Sora.com to ChatGPT Plus and Pro users.

No you aren't, you might be rolling it out (see above for what that means) but it's not released, I'm a ChatGPT Plus user and I can't use it.

"a tool never made an artist"

so incredible ugly.

Yawn, there are literally 10 different apps and wannabe startups that do video generation and AI videos have already flooded social media. This doesn't look any better than what is and has been already available to the masses. OpenAI announced this ages ago and never did give people access, now competitors have already captured the AI generated video for social media slop market.

We have yet to see any kind of AI created movie, like Toy Story was for computer 3D animation.

OpenAI isn't a player in the video AI game, but certainly has bagged most of the money for it already (somehow).

Gentle reminder that it's important to boycott this kind of thing.

"We are currently experiencing heavy loads..."

no API = not good enough

no pay per use = overpriced

I got lucky and got in moments after it launched, managed to get a video of "A pelican riding a bicycle along a coastal path overlooking a harbor" and then the queue times jumped up (my second video has been in the queue for 20+ minutes already) and the https://sora.com site now says "account creation currently unavailable"

Here's my pelican video: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/sora/

One of the problems with a 10-month preannouncement is that the competition is ready to trash the actual announcement. Half an hour in, I already see half a dozen barely-concealed posts ranging from downplays to over-demands to non-user criticism.

Unless they drop something mega in the next few months can't help but think that openai's moat is basically gone for now at least.

Not available in the EU: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10250692-sora-supported-...

Though I like the novelty of AI generated content, it kind of sucks dead internet theory is becoming more and more prevalent. YouTube (and all of the web) is already being spammed with AI generated slop and "better" video/text/audio models only make this worse. At some point we will cross the threshold of "real" and "generated" content being posted on the web and there's no stopping that.

Pricing:

Plus Tier (20$/month)

- Up to 50 priority videos (1,000 credits)

- Up to 720p resolution and 5s duration

Pro Tier (200$/month)

- Up to 500 priority videos (10,000 credits)

- Unlimited relaxed videos

- Up to 1080p resolution, 20s duration and 5 concurrent generations

- Download without watermark

more info: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10245774-sora-billing-cr...

Not impressive compare to the opensource video models out there, I anticipated some physics/VR capabilities, but it's basically just a marketing promotion to "stay in the game"...

Anyone else find this stuff extremely distasteful? "Disrupting" creativity and art feels like it goes against our humanity.

I am so intrigued with the new sora release. I hope it turns out well.

I can't wait for the safety features because I know there are those in society that would do bad things. But not me, though. I'd like the unlocked version.

That’s around more than 20+ VC-backed AI video generation startups destroyed in a microsecond and scrambling to compete against Sora in the race to zero.

Many of them will die, but may the AI slop continue anyway.

Hollywood's days are numbered.

If you are a creative in this industry, start preparing to transition to another industry or adapt.

Your boss is highly likely to be toying around with this.

The first entirely AI generated film (with Sora or other AI video tools) to win an Oscar will be less than 5 years away.

I hope somebody pays 100.000 pro subscriptions and uses AI to request Sora to generate videos 24/7. Maybe Elon?

Even if they use queues, I'm sure they are running at a loss and the GPU time is going to cost 100x more than what they charge.

Creating false demand for AI can easily bankrupt their business, as they will believe people actually want to use that crap for that purpose.

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