IBL News | New York
OpenAI avoided allowing its video model Sora—released on Monday and available to ChatGPT Pro and Plus paid users—to upload photos or footage of real people, as many users expected. The company said it would roll out that feature when it is safe.
Generative video is a powerful and controversial tool due to the growing number of fraud cases related to deepfakes worldwide.
“Early feedback from artists indicate that this is a powerful creative tool they value, but given the potential for abuse, we are not initially making it available to all users,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post.
“We know that this will be an ongoing challenge; we’re starting a little conservative,” pointed out Will Peebles, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff and a research lead on Sora, during a livestream presentation on Monday.
Among other measures from OpenAI to prevent misuse, Sora-generated videos contain metadata to show their provenance that abides by the C2PA technical standard.
Also, to fend off copyright complaints, OpenAI uses “prompt re-writing,” designed to trigger when a user attempts to generate a video in the style of a living artist.
Many artists have AI companies, including OpenAI, allegedly training on their works without permission.
OpenAI said Sora was trained using publicly available datasets, proprietary data accessed through its vendor partnerships, and custom sets developed in-house.
Early this year, ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati didn’t deny that Sora was trained on YouTube clips, violating the Google-owned streaming platform’s usage policy.
Sora can create multiple variations of video clips from a text prompt or image and edit existing videos via a Re-mix tool. A Storyboard interface lets users create video sequences; a Blend tool takes two videos and creates a new one that preserves elements of both; and Loop and Re-cut options allow creators to tweak further and edit their videos and scenes.
Sora is not included with ChatGPT Team, Enterprise, or Edu plans and is unavailable in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland.
Other tech companies working on AI, such as Meta and Microsoft, have also been forced to postpone product releases in the EU due to the continent’s complex data privacy regulations.
It is also not currently available to people under the age of 18.
Credits are required to generate videos with Sora. ChatGPT Plus and Pro plans provide 1,000 and 10,000 credits, respectively, which reset monthly.
480p videos generated with Sora cost 20 to 150 credits, 720p videos cost 30 to 540 credits, and 1080p videos cost 100 to 2,000 credits.
Credits reset monthly at midnight, don’t roll over, and expire at the end of each billing cycle.
By default, Sora videos are watermarked with a visual indicator in the lower-right-hand corner.
