Less than three months after the announcement of Sora The first music video entirely created using the brand new artificial intelligence system has been published by OpenAI text-to-video. The approximately 4 minute film it's about the song The Hardest Part by the indie artist Washed Out (pseudonym of Ernest Greene) and was generated by the director Paul Trillo, one of the few “privileged” people to have previewed the tool. We remember, in fact, that at least for the moment OpenAI has preferred not to release Sora to everyone due to the potential improper uses of the service. To date, the work in question constitutes the longest video generated with an AI system.
The music video was made with Sora for a very simple reason: reduce production costs which would inevitably have been higher if Trillo had called on “flesh and blood” actors to shoot the various scenes.
Driven by some practical and financial difficulties encountered during the making of the project, the director in fact suggested to Greene to experiment with Sora. Initially Greene was hesitant, but his desire to experiment convinced him to try and that's how he gave the green light to Trillo to create the video using OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence.
In carrying out the project, however, not everything went smoothly, confirming the fact that similar tools, although working excellently, are still relatively far from perfectly understanding the prompt (i.e. the commands) that are fed to it by users. Trillo admitted, in fact, that Sora sometimes generated chaotic and, in fact, unusable content (for the record, of the over 700 clips generated with Sora, only 55 were used for the project). Even in the final version of the film, which you can appreciate below, there are some inconsistencies, such as the appearance of the characters which is not always homogeneous.
In any case, the artist who commissioned the work is evidently satisfied with the final result and this can be understood not only from the publication of the video itself, but also from the following statement:
I was definitely surprised by how much he (Sora, Ed.) managed to put together a story.
How AI Sora could change the video production industry
It is clear that the rise of advanced tools like Sora are destined to changing the video production industry. On the one hand, this arouses concern in those who carry out a professional activity that can easily be replaced by AI-based tools (primarily actors and extras) and on the other enthusiasm in those who could exploit these tools to their advantage.
Regarding these purely ethical aspects, Trillo reported the importance of considering artificial intelligence not as the new main method for creating content, but rather as a integrative tool to include in your “toolbox”. The director in fact reported:
Many music videos don't have the budget to dream big. I think artificial intelligence can help the music industry create things that even Ernest (the artist who commissioned him to produce the music video, ed.) could dream of and that perhaps he would never have dared to dream of before.
