The maker of ChatGPT on Thursday unveiled its next leap into generative artificial intelligence with a tool that instantly makes short videos in response to written commands.
San Francisco-based OpenAI's new text-to-video generator, called Sora, isn't the first of its kind. Google, Meta and the startup Runway ML are among the other companies to have demonstrated similar technology.
But the high quality of videos displayed by OpenAI — some after CEO Sam Altman asked social media users to send in ideas for written prompts — astounded observers while also raising fears about the ethical and societal implications.
"A instructional cooking session for homemade gnocchi hosted by a grandmother social media influencer set in a rustic Tuscan country kitchen with cinematic lighting," was a prompt suggested on X by a freelance photographer from New Hampshire. Altman responded a short time later with a realistic video that depicted what the prompt described.
The tool isn't yet publicly available and OpenAI has revealed limited information about how it was built. The company, which has been sued by some authors and The New York Times over its use of copyrighted works of writing to train ChatGPT, also hasn't disclosed what imagery and video sources were used to train Sora. (OpenAI pays an undisclosed fee to The Associated Press to license its text news archive).
OpenAI said in a blog post that it's engaging with artists, policymakers and others before releasing the new tool to the public.
"We are working with red teamers — domain experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content, and bias — who will be adversarially testing the model," the company said. "We're also building tools to help detect misleading content such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was generated by Sora."
In NBC’s “Brilliant Minds,” Zachary Quinto Plays Doctor–In A Role Inspired By Physician/Author Oliver Sacks
There's a great moment in the first episode of the new NBC medical drama "Brilliant Minds" when it becomes very clear that we're not dealing with a typical TV doctor.
Zachary Quinto is behind the wheel of a car barreling down a New York City parkway, packed with hospital interns, abruptly weaving in and out of lanes, when one of them asks, "Does anyone want to share a Klonopin?" — a drug sometimes used to treat panic disorders.
"Oh, glory to God, yes, please," says Quinto, reaching an arm into the back seat. The intern then breaks the pill in half and gives a sliver to the driver, who swallows it, as the other interns share stunned looks.
Quinto, playing the character Dr. Oliver Wolf, is clearly not portraying any dour, by-the-rules doctor here — he's playing a character inspired by Dr. Oliver Sacks, the path-breaking researcher and author who rose to fame in the 1970s and was once called the "poet laureate of medicine."
"He was someone who was tirelessly committed to the dignity of the human experience. And so I feel really grateful to be able to tell his story and to continue his legacy in a way that I hope our show is able to do," says Quinto.
He's a fern-loving doctor
"Brilliant Minds" takes Sack's personality — a motorcycle-riding, fern-loving advocate for mental health who died in 2015 at 82 — and puts him in the present day, where the creators theorize he would have no idea who Taylor Swift is or own a cell phone. The series debuts Monday on NBC, right after "The Voice."
"It's almost as if we're imagining what it would have been like if Oliver Sacks had been born at a different time," says Quinto. "We use the real life person as our North Star through everything we're doing and all the... Read More