Sora: Creating video from text

Best way to deal with the sense of doom imo is to actually use it. You'll find how dumb it really is by itself, and how much of your own judgment/help/editing is still necessary to get anything usable. It might look like magic from these manicured press releases, but once you get your hands on it, it quickly becomes just another tool in your toolbox that, at best, helps you do the work you were doing anyway, more quickly.

Obviously concern yourself with your job and what you need to do to ensure you can obtain buying power going forward, but most problems and concerns about things like these go away if you just turn off your tech, or really be intentional about your usage.

Extremely hard to do, it is, but you’ll become quasi-Amish and realize how little is actually actionable and in our control.

You’ll also feel quite isolated, but peaceful. There’s always tradeoffs. You can’t have something without giving up not-something, if that makes sense.

Edit: So, essentially, ignorance is bliss, but try to look past the pejorative nature of that phrase and take it for what it is without status implications.

Another step in the trend of everything becoming digital (in film and otherwise). It used to be that everything was done in camera. Then we got green screens, then advanced compositing, then CGI, then full realistic CGI movies modeled after real things and mocap suits. Now we're at the end game, where there will be no cameras used in the production of a movie, just studios of people sitting at their computers. Because more and more, humans are more efficient at just about anything when aided by a computer.

Honest question: of what possible use could Sora be for Hollywood?

The results are amazing, but if the current crop of text-to-image tools is any guide, it will be easy to create things that look cool but essentially impossible to create something that meets detailed specific criteria. If you want your actor to look and behave consistently across multiple episodes of a series, if you want it to precisely follow a detailed script, if you want continuity, if you want characters and objects to exhibit consistent behavior over the long term – I don't see how Sora can do anything for you, and I wouldn't expect that to change for at least a few years.

(I am entirely open to the idea that other generative AI tools could have an impact on Hollywood. The linked Hollywood Reporter article states that "Visual effects and other postproduction work stands particularly vulnerable". I don't know much about that, I can easily believe it would be true, but I don't think they're talking about text-to-video tools like Sora.)

It doesn't understand physics.

It just computes next frame based on current one and what it learned before, it's a plausible continuation.

In the same way, ChatGPT struggles with math without code interpreter, Sora won't have accurate physics without a physics engine and rendering 3d objects.

Now it's just a "what is the next frame of this 2D image" model plus some textual context.