Derek McArthur: OpenAI’s Sora could kill commercial film – good riddance?

Will AI be the nail in the coffin for the filmmaker? Is the creative just some abstract concept we’ve stubbornly held onto through the ages, ready to be erased in the grand sweep of new generative technologies?

Not quite, I’m happy to report that filmmakers and creatives will survive the haunting spectre of AI. The commercial industry that surrounds the filmmaker? A much different story.

OpenAI’s Sora tool is a step above what we’ve seen so far in generative AI. ChatGPT is not far in concept to the ELIZA chatbot (developed back in the 1960s) and image generator DALL-E essentially just re-interprets existing flat images to create a new, sometimes bewildering, whole.

But Sora is full-motion video that simulates the fluid world that we live in, produced by typing in a few prompted sentences.

It’s not perfect but it’s close, very close. A promotional video shows a woman walking through the neon lights centre of Tokyo, “directed” in a way that suggests Sora understands basic cinematic language. The illusion is slightly off, however. Limbs get cross-wired, objects lack consistency and begin to morph, and so on. It doesn’t quite mirror reality as it does a strange dream state where the details aren’t exact.

Derek McArthur: The Zone of Interest and the powerful impact of cinematic space

But Sora showed up sooner than expected, and the creases will be ironed out in no amount of........

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