As part of Shipmas Day 3, OpenAI just launched its AI video generator, Sora, to the public.
Sora can generate up to 20-second videos from written instructions. The tool can also complete a scene and extend existing videos by filling in missing frames.
Rohan Sahai, Sora's product lead, said a team of about five or six engineers built the video generator in months.
"Sora is a tool," Joey Flynn, Sora's product designer, said. "It allows you to be multiple places at once, try multiple ideas at once, try things that are entirely impossible before."
OpenAI showed off the new product and its various features during a livestream Monday with CEO Sam Altman.
Sora includes an "explore" page, a browsable feed of videos shared by the community. OpenAI also showed the various style presets available, such as pastel symmetry, film noir, and balloon world.
To customize videos further, there's also Storyboard, which lets users organize and edit sequences on a timeline. The feature helps pull together text prompts that Sora then builds into scenes.
In February, OpenAI made Sora available to a limited group of creators, including designers and filmmakers, to get feedback on the model.
The company said in a blog post at the time that the product "may struggle to simulate the physics of a complex scene" and may not understand cause and effect. It may also mix up left and right and struggle to depict events that happen over time, it added.
The tool has already made a strong impression on some in Hollywood. Tyler Perry previously put his plans for an $800 million studio expansion on hold after seeing Sora. The billionaire entertainer referred to Sora demonstrations as "shocking" and said AI would likely reduce the need for large sets and traveling to locations for shoots.
However, the tool's product designer said in the demonstration Monday that Sora wasn't going to create feature films at the click of a button. Flynn said the tool was more "an extension of the creator who's behind it."
"If you come into Sora with the expectation that you'll just be able to click a button and generate a feature film, I think you're coming in with the wrong expectation," Flynn added.
The team also briefly touched on safety issues. Sahai said during the presentation that OpenAI had a "big target" on its back and that the team wanted to prevent illegal activity while balancing creative expression with the new product.
"We're starting a little conservative, and so if our moderation doesn't quite get it right, just give us that feedback," Sahai said. "We'll be iterating."
OpenAI said Sora would roll out to the public in the US and many other countries on Monday. But Altman said it would be awhile before the tool became available in the UK and most of Europe.
ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who pay $20 monthly, can get up to 50 generations a month of AI videos that are five seconds long and have a 720p resolution. ChatGPT Pro users, who pay $200 a month, get unlimited generations in the slow-queue mode and 500 faster generations, Altman said in the demo. Pro users can generate up to 20-second-long videos that are 1080p resolution, without watermarks.
While nonpaying users can't create Sora videos, they can browse Sora's explore feed, Altman said.
The prominent YouTuber Marques Brownlee published what he described as the first-ever Sora review on Monday, telling his nearly 20 million subscribers that the results were both "horrifying and inspiring."
After a brief overview of Sora's strengths and weaknesses — the YouTuber said that it could make provocative videos of cosmic events in deep space and other abstractions but that it struggled with realistic depictions of physics in day-to-day life, like a man running with a football — Brownlee was frank about his concerns.
Millions of people can now use Sora for basically whatever they want. And while the program has decent guardrails, one can be circumvented, he said. The little watermark that Sora adds to the bottom-right corner of its videos can be cropped out, Brownlee said.
"And it's still an extremely powerful tool that directly moves us further into the era of not being able to believe anything you see online," he said, adding: "This is a lot for humanity to digest right now."
