OpenAI is meeting with Hollywood this week to pitch its new, and as yet unreleased, AI video generator Sora.
OpenAI’s preview of Sora has created a massive buzz and raised questions about the future of video and the future of entertainment.
And now Bloomberg reports that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is making overtures toward Hollywood studios, media executives, and talent agencies in a bid to integrate Sora with the industry.
However, this is far from Altman’s first attempt to woo Hollywood after it emerged that OpenAI has already had “introductory conversations” with Hollywood led by its Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. Altman also attended Oscar parties in Los Angeles earlier this month.
“OpenAI has a deliberate strategy of working in collaboration with industry through a process of iterative deployment – rolling out AI advances in phases – in order to ensure safe implementation and to give people an idea of what’s on the horizon,” a spokesperson for OpenAI tells Bloomberg. “We look forward to an ongoing dialogue with artists and creatives.”
Artificial intelligence is a highly-charged topic that was partly behind the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strike that took place last year. The leader of the actors’ union Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said that Hollywood studios want to create scans of background actors so they can use AI-generated replicas of them in perpetuity.
Back then, the existence of Sora was not known but since its announcement and publication of a series of wild videos that were AI-generated, creatives are coming to terms with a new reality.
Sora is not the first AI video generator; Runway AI and Pika Labs are both market leaders in the AI video space with huge funding behind them.
However, OpenAI is the biggest name and startup in the generative AI space, having already found huge success with its large language model ChatGPT and its text-to-image model DALL-E.
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI’s Chief Technical Officer Mira Murati said that Sora will be released “definitely this year, but could be a few months.” She also added the training data used to instruct Sora’s capabilities was “publicly available.”
