OpenAI launches text-to-video generator Sora

US – OpenAI, the company behind generative AI chatbot ChatGPT and still image-generator DALL-E, has launched an AI text-to-video generator.

Named Sora, after the Japanese word for sky, the technology can generate videos from text prompts – such as historical footage of California during the gold rush – in a matter of minutes. The resulting videos are cinematic and high-resolution, although sometimes include strange and illogical images.

The company is not yet releasing Sora to the public, however, opting to share the technology with a small group of academics and other researchers for the time being. This group is working to identify the potential dangers of the technology and ways it might be misused. One fear is that the technology might assist in the spread of misinformation ahead of a particularly jam-packed year of elections.

Sora marks the next era of the Generative AI Creativity Market, as consumer-facing generative AI platforms begin to redefine the boundaries and nature of creative work, and OpenAI’s work to safeguard the technology is a promising development in regulation surrounding generative AI.