OpenAI's newly launched Wensheng ** model SORA is the "top stream" on social networking recently.
SORA's backbone research members, Bill Peebles and Tim Brooks, are constantly updating SORA's new work on X. According to Brooks' news on February 18, Sora already has the ability to generate multiple ** at the same time.
SORA airborne, causing the industry in the field of artificial intelligence, the aftermath spread directly to the film and television industry. A straightforward example is that after the release of SORA, American director Taylor Perry directly called off the $800 million Atlanta studio expansion plan. He believes that artificial intelligence will lead to the loss of a large number of jobs in the film industry. Quite a few have also pointed out that SORA could transform a range of creative industries, including filmmaking, advertising, graphic design and game development.
For film and television creation, artificial intelligence has become a non-negligible existence - SORA has become the focus of discussion at the Berlin International Film Festival as soon as it came out. A few days after the announcement of SORA, the Berlinale organized a forum on artificial intelligence and film and television world building, and the prospects and dangers of SORA dominated everyone's focus.
The scene of the Berlin Film Festival Forum.
Studio owners are excited and fascinated by the idea that AI will bring a new chapter in Hollywood storytelling.
Fear comes from those "workers" who have no right to speak. In the past year, the protracted strike wave of Hollywood screenwriters and actors has pushed the industry's existential anxiety to the table: artificial intelligence writing scripts and artificial intelligence synthesizing actors is no longer uncommon in Hollywood, and screenwriters and actors see their fate of being banned at any time.
The advent of SORA has once again made people in these industries feel the crisis and provoked a wider range of unease. The Hollywood Reporter says AI is an "existential threat" for VFX and other post-production crews.
SORA press conference.
While tech giants are excited about the milestone progress of AI, people in the film and television industry are half expecting and half vigilant. How far will the industry be changed when AI matures enough to replace faces, backgrounds, group performances, and even generate directly from text**?
Further, to what extent does this change our perception of video art?
Sora airborne
Judging from Tim Brooks' recent release of SORA generation**, both the background and the people in the picture are very close to the effect of camera shooting - even the close-up of the snow twisted repeatedly on the fingertips does not show any obvious flaws.
In the field of AI generation**, OpenAI is not the first company to put it into action. Prior to this, Google, Meta, and Runway had all developed similar Wensheng technology. But whether it is for the general audience or film and television content producers, what really has an impact is the recent SORA.
What shocked people was not only the "maturity" of SORA, but also the rapid development of artificial intelligence. From text to images to **, artificial intelligence is approaching humans faster, faster than people expected.
At this time, it has only been more than a year since the last time ChatGPT caused an uproar in the real world. Before SORA came out, SORA's two main "competitors", Pika and Runway, could only generate ** for a maximum of four seconds. Compared to Runway and Pika, Sora has a number of advantages - * longer time, more realistic body movements of characters, and support for more complex motion scenes.
Comparison of pika and runway generation results.
However, Sora is still a bit "clumsy" in some details - for example, there is some disagreement in the recognition of space, and there is a barrier to understanding cause and effect (the person in ** takes a bite of the cookie, but the cookie does not show a bite mark). There are also many detail errors in the women walking through the streets of Tokyo**, most of the Japanese text on street signs is inaccurate, and there are unconventional obstacles in the street scenes.
Even so, SORA represents a new milestone in AI generation. This emerging outlet has made the tech giants fight for their heads. Google's Lumière, Meta's EMU and ByteDance's MagicVideo-V2, as well as startups such as Runway, Pika Labs, Genmo and StabilityAI, are all pulling up the ante on the Wensheng model, and Midjourney is poised to venture into the generative space later this year.
The future of artificial intelligence is in the spotlight. According to Statista, the market size for generative AI is expected to reach 666 by 2024$200 million. According to Bloomberg, the market size will expand to 1$3 trillion. Zhou Hongyi, chairman of domestic 360, judged: "SORA means that the realization of AGI (general artificial intelligence) will be shortened from ten years to one year. ”
Zhou Hongyi Source: Phoenix Technology.
The impact of SORA cannot be limited to SORA itself. Reece Hayden, a senior analyst at market research firm ABI Research, said this type of AI model could have a huge impact on the digital entertainment market, as new personalized content will circulate across channels.
This means that the production method of the film and television industry, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, will usher in a huge change. And the film and television practitioners who rely on this to survive have to come up with favorable conditions than AI.
It is necessary to work with AI
The extent to which audiences will perceive the difference between humans and AI will not be known until SORA is officially available for use.
A year ago, the AI-generated Will Smith Noodles** went viral. At that time, there were obvious bugs in the expressions and movements of the characters, as well as the shape changes before and after the noodle entrance. After Sora recently set off a heated discussion, Will Smith personally recorded a noodle eating **, but before it was explained, many people thought it was Sora's "masterpiece".
Will Smith's "Confusion with Truth" illustrates that in terms of authenticity, people are largely convinced that artificial intelligence is about to have the persuasive power of human works.
Will Smith's "Confusing Falsehood with Truth"**
On this basis, from the "AI face swap", to the "transformation" and background replacement functions of Runway and Elevenlabs, to the direct text output of SORA**, the impact of artificial intelligence on the film and television industry cannot be ignored.
The New Yorker published an article on February 16 that SORA's impact on the ** field can be compared to the impact of ChatGPT on writing.
One of the most significant advantages of AI is its efficiency. Researchers in Science recruited 453 marketers, data analysts, and college-educated professionals, and writers who chose to use ChatGPT took 40 percent less time to complete tasks and produced work that was 18 percent higher than those who didn't.
Another advantage may be the low cost. According to Fast Company, one of the most influential business magazines in the United States, SORA will change the way people create content – in the future, generative AI will be hundreds of times cheaper than using 3D modeling, traditional visual effects and CGI, and it may even be cheaper than setting up a camera.
Taking the well-known sci-fi movie "The Wandering Earth" as an example, the production team drew a total of 5,310 conceptual designs, 9,989 storyboard sketches, and built 102 sci-fi main scenes, which consumed huge manpower and material resources. Director Guo Fan once said in an interview that Midjourney has an advantage when it comes to designing concept art for science fiction movies - because a designer with decades of experience can take a week to complete, while Midjourney can produce a large number of images overnight.
The Wandering Earth 2" crew had 1,189 permanent staff members and more than 22,000 extras during the filming. Guo Fan feels that with artificial intelligence tools, the number of crew members of "The Wandering Earth 3" may be reduced by at least half.
The Wandering Earth 2" stills.
Simon Weiss, a props maker who created miniatures of the Grand Budapest Hotel for director Wes Anderson, said he was "worried that he would lose his job." But now, he's also starting to use new AI technology to aid traditional prop making, "and we have to work with it."
He said: "Artificial intelligence can find ** faster, provide inspiration for building miniature scenes, and use ChatGPT to find what you need** without having to search Google for days." ”
The crisis brought about by the SORA
The future of artificial intelligence involvement in text, images, and even movies is predictable, and it may be able to produce impressive results. Just last year, a "Land of Memories" written by humans and AI also won the second prize of the 5th Jiangsu Youth Science Fiction Competition.
Los Angeles-based director Dave Clarke believes: "Creators need to embrace AI technology to get content that has never been imagined or realized. ”
However, how will new technologies impact the established norms of social life? Humanity doesn't seem to have figured it out yet. Not long ago, artificial intelligence was just caught up in a storm: on January 25, an X user shared an explicit photo of Taylor Swift, which was viewed 47 million times. Despite the efforts of the X platform to remove it, the content went viral like crazy.
This is not an isolated case. In November last year, the ** of more than 30 female high school students in New Jersey was also tampered with by AI as pornographic ** and posted on the Internet. Previously, deep fake** has been rampant on platforms, but with the advent of new technologies, no one can say how the situation will deteriorate.
AI victims, 14-year-old Francesca Mani, and her mother, Dorota Mani, were interviewed.
Andrew Newell, chief scientist at identity verification firm iProov, said: "SORA will make it easier for those with malicious intent to generate high-quality deepfakes, making it easier for them to create ones for attack purposes."
Artificial intelligence generation** is gradually penetrating into the work and life of human beings. It is conceivable that in the near future, the entire Internet will be flooded with AI counterfeiting**. Eventually, cinema, the last bastion of video art, which humanity is proud of, may also be subverted.
However, at that point, we need to redefine what is "forgery" and what is creation.
How the tools represented by SORA will affect the future film and television industry is not entirely subject to the opinions of industry personnel - no matter how good the AI work is, it only makes sense for the audience to pay for it.
Judging from the current data, the audience's attitude towards works with deep participation in artificial intelligence is not optimistic. A survey by Yahoo Entertainment and YouGov shows that most Americans don't want to watch AI-generated movies with deepfake actors. The poll found that 61% of the 1,665 U.S. adults surveyed thought "it's a 'bad idea' to include AI-generated digital replicas of actors in movies and TV shows"; Another 63% believe that Hollywood should not allow AI to generate movies and TV scripts instead of human screenwriters.
Screenshot of ** made by Sora.
How far artificial intelligence will go, human beings are still uncertain.
But what is certain is that creation is ultimately human art. As Christina Caspers-Rommell, general manager of German VFX studio Trixter, explains, film and television productions will continue to rely on human creators, even if AI tools like SORA are more efficient in terms of workflows.