At the beginning of the new year of 2024, a new word has become popular all over the film and television circles, technology circles, and capital circles - SORA. On February 16, Beijing time, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company, launched a new model SORA that generates short ** in real time according to text instructions. At this time, it has only been more than a year since the company released its chatbot model, ChatGPT.
In the demo** produced by OpenAI's latest product, Sora, a woman wearing sunglasses and a leather dress and a red dress walks on the streets of Japan, looking back from time to time with a mysterious temperament. The neon street scene in the distance, the reflection of the water on the ground nearby, and the ** state of the heroine in the close-up are all clearly visible.
In the traditional film and television industry, filming and production requires the creation of storyboard scripts, site selection, service, lighting, shooting, live-action interpretation, post-editing, ......But with Sora, all of this can be done with a single text command, which is undoubtedly exciting for people from all walks of life.
Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360, expressed his opinion on social networks, saying, "The birth of SORA means that the realization of AGI (artificial general intelligence) may be shortened from 10 years to one or two years. As a result, some people assert that SORA will change the way we judge and perceive the world, so that "seeing is not necessarily believing" and "the real world will cease to exist"; Shocked filmmakers inevitably fall into "unemployment anxiety" and self-doubt: "Will our jobs eventually be replaced by AI?" "There are also concerns that with the promotion and application of SORA, the threshold for counterfeiting will be greatly reduced, and a series of moral, ethical and legal regulatory issues will ......
How "godly" is Sora? What kind of benefit or impact will it bring to the film and television and entertainment industries? What kind of attitude should we have to welcome the advent of the AI era? Nandu reporters recently visited a number of practitioners to jointly understand the impact of SORA on the film and television entertainment industry.
What is the strength of Sora?
You can create a 60-second "World Simulator".
The name sora is derived from the Japanese word for "sora", meaning sky, to show its unlimited creative potential. "It's a very imaginative thing, and we, as practitioners, have mixed feelings. Wei Qi, co-founder and director of Virtual Pictures, lamented to reporters.
According to the official introduction, SORA can create up to 60 seconds of realism ** according to the user's text prompts, which not only presents a fine and vivid image, but more importantly, it can understand the way objects exist in the physical world, so as to deeply simulate the real physical world and generate complex scenes with multiple characters and specific movements. For this reason, SORA is also known as the "World Simulator".
In fact, before Sora, there were already many products that could generate HD through text or**, and the more well-known products include the already commercialized Runway, free Pika, and Google Lumière, Meta Make-A-Video, etc., which are still in the improvement stage. Compared with these previous products, what are the highlights and strengths of SORA? Why did it explode on social networks as soon as it was born?
The first case of SORA's launch.
Liu Jun, vice president of Unilumin Group, summarized the three characteristics of the SORA model in an interview with a reporter from Nandu. "The first is that it can generate ** for a relatively long time; The second is that it is very simulative, not only can it simulate dynamic visual effects, but it can also capture some of the deep-seated interaction patterns that are consistent with our daily life experience. For example, in the ** of 'woman walking on the street' launched by Sora this time, even the reflection of water on the road after the rain (very accurate), including the contrast between the woman's height and the entire space structure, etc. (very accurate). So it's actually able to simulate this kind of complex physical space. The third is in terms of speech comprehension and ** generation, it has a long text parsing technology, which can be analyzed according to the user's text. It can also accept us to upload some dynamic images, for example, I want to do some extensions on the existing **, and the content it adds will be close to your original **style.。 ”
Of course, according to the official introduction, SORA still has some "hard injuries". For example, because its model does not rely on the built-in physics engine, but relies on large-scale data-driven, there will be places that do not conform to the real physical laws in the ** generated by it, and this problem is still difficult at present.
It may replace traditional tools and "tool people", and practitioners are "surprised and anxious".
SORA has made great breakthroughs in terms of duration, imaging quality, analysis and simulation capabilities. According to the International Data Corporation, it will be the first to be applied in the media fields such as short**, advertising, interactive entertainment, and film and television production. So, can the sora who was born out of nowhere replace ** and film and television workers? Which jobs will be impacted and face an "unemployment crisis"? Industry insiders said in an interview with Nandu reporters that SORA is likely to replace traditional CG tools and related low-tech positions, and greatly improve production efficiency and quality in terms of rehearsal, basic editing, and secondary processing and creation of existing materials.
Liu Jun revealed that Unilumin Technology has been certified by Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and has obtained the official access license of OpenAI, but the company has not yet tested SORA, and can only speculate on the possibility through the official information revealed. He said: "The first feeling is that AI is progressing very fast, and if it is given enough time to improve, it can really replace some of the current creative tools and some basic 'tool people' to do the work." For example, the rehearsal of **, such as in the industrial field, the medical field, etc., we need to use a lot of ** content for teaching, you only need to enter the requirements, and SORA can simulate it. This way it can replace a lot of traditional CG-related jobs, and it will output better things. ”
Liu Jun said frankly, "Once the AI model is exposed to a large amount of data, it can continue to learn and fission itself, and its upper limit is immeasurable." We should be pleasantly surprised by this result, but we will be anxious. The surprise is because the application of AI in some fields will indeed be very labor-saving, fast and efficient. "Not only does SORA greatly improve production efficiency, but it can also lower the production threshold and make ** creation more accessible and convenient. But on the other hand, it does have an impact on traditional tools and low-skilled jobs, leading to job losses for some people.
Regarding this kind of technological anxiety, Wei Qi, co-founder and director of Virtual Pictures, said that practitioners should continue to learn and improve themselves: "Again, we keep our imagination but prepare for everything. We must keep learning, if we just don't innovate the old technology, even if it's not SORA, it's another new technology, (we) will be eliminated sooner or later. Liu Shuangjian, director of virtual films, also showed a positive attitude in an interview with a reporter from Nandu: "Since AI is a tool, it will naturally need people who use it." So what we should think about is how to use it and make it a better creative tool. ”
"AI is just an auxiliary tool, not a substitute for creative talents."
While they were amazed by the power of SORA, it was also clear to practitioners that it had limitations as an auxiliary tool in terms of creation. Especially in the innovative thinking of film and television works and first-class scripts, human beings are still irreplaceable.
AI can only assist everyone in creation, it cannot replace our creative talents. Liu Jun took the production of the movie "Lonely on the Moon" as an example, "You can ask AI to generate material of 'a kangaroo walking in a space capsule', but what exactly does the image of a kangaroo look like? How tall? How strong? Is it cute or robust? It's hard to design a specific image and style. It still requires the creative ideas of directors, artists and other creative staff to outline the outline image of the kangaroo, and then it can be generated with the help of AI tools. ”
Liu Jun said that AI has a large library of materials, and its role is to help creators make secondary edits on the basis of existing materials, but it is difficult to "make something out of nothing". "If the creator wants to find some existing materials to do secondary creation, AI can improve his creative efficiency, and it can do creative execution. However, the generation of ideas and creative ideas are still inseparable from the subjective initiative of our human beings. ”
For short **, compared with the editing technology and visual optimization in the later stage, a novel and interesting script idea and an idea that can hit the emotions of the audience are the "soul" of creation, which is exactly the ability that SORA does not have. In the face of the creation of film and television dramas with longer volume and more complex emotions, literary tools such as SORA are more "weak". In addition to the creativity required to produce the script, the layout of the complete story line, the control of the narrative rhythm, the setting of the atmosphere, the shaping of the characters, and the expression of emotions ......These complex processes are far from being realized by current AI technology. Liu Jun mentioned: "There are so many scenes and story lines in movies and TV series, AI may be able to generate material piece by piece, but it is still difficult to string together the entire film, and the style and tone of the scene are also random, which may not be able to maintain coherence." ”
When the craze for new concepts subsides and returns to calmness and rationality, practitioners have to return to the most essential problem - how to improve their creative ability? How to tell a good story? Neither SORA nor any other kind of high-tech can replace creators with innovative thinking and profound expression skills.
Written by: Nandu reporter Zhu Wenyi and Yu Xiaoyu