About

Sora is a text-to-video artificial intelligence video generator produced by OpenAI and released to a limited audience in mid-February 2024. The generator allows users to prompt with natural language and produce video content. After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared examples on Twitter / X on February 15th, 2024, the generation tool went viral online, prompting discourse, memes and media coverage.

History

OpenAI released Sora on February 15th, 2024, in a limited trial that was available to certain artists and technologists alongside a "red team" tasked with testing Sora and evaluating how it responds to malicious or abusive uses. The "red team" and the test phase period of Sora, according to the company's statements, appeared to be centered around assessing how to prevent the generator from being abused for making misinformation or other kinds of harmful content.^[1]

The site describing the generator states that its goal is "to understand and simulate the real world," rendering not just moving images but videos in which objects behave according to the laws of physics and causality (although OpenAI conceded that there are still some bugs and flaws as of February 2024).

Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, advertised the release of the model in a February 15th post on X in which he asked his followers to reply with prompts for Sora. Altman then posted the videos produced by Sora. His initial post (seen below) received over 47,000 replies and 6,000 likes in the course of an hour^[3] (examples of videos shared by Altman seen in highlights section).

https://t.co/SOUoXiSMBY pic.twitter.com/JB4zOjmbTp

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2024

Online Reactions to February 2024 Reveal

Following the initial reveal on X in mid-February 2024, posters compared the sophistication and realism of Sora to earlier AI text-to-video generators as it garnered virality. In particular, posters compared Sora's performance to AI Will Smith Eating Spaghetti memes. For example, X user @samsheffer (seen below) posted a side-by-side comparison of the two on February 15th, 2024, earning over 2,200 likes in an hour.^[5]

🚨text to video progress in one year🤯2023: 2024: pic.twitter.com/gK57GmFAHv

— Sam Sheffer (@samsheffer) February 15, 2024

Many commented on the innovativeness of OpenAI's work on Sora, such as X user @var_epsilon on February 15th, who argued that Google had been "mogged again" by OpenAI in a meme (seen below), which received over 2,700 likes in an hour.^[6]

mogged again pic.twitter.com/XHPrM9cKKa

— varepsilon (@var_epsilon) February 15, 2024

Others wondered if Sora, or a prototype of it, may have been the technology that led to the internal chaos observed at OpenAI in November 2023, which saw CEO Sam Altman temporarily removed from power. At the time, tech leaders like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk thought it was because the company's chief scientist, Ilya Sustevker, had "seen" something that scared him.

For example, on February 15th, 2024, X user @AdrianDittmann made a post about this (seen below), earning over 140 likes in less than 24 hours.^[10]

On Reddit, a post on /r/nextfuckinglevel received over 1,400 upvotes and 370 comments in three hours on February 15th, featuring one of the promotional videos put out by OpenAI and generated by Sora.^[11] Sora was also discussed elsewhere on Reddit.

Fake Prompts

In the hours after Sora's release, a wide variety of meme responses emerged. Some of these included imaginary prompts for Sora of things users would like to see generated, or postings of pre-existing videos which posters jokingly claimed were generated by Sora. For example, @seconds_0 posted a joke about asking Sora to generate an image of Sydney Sweeney, earning over 42,000 likes and 5 million views (seen below, top) in 24 hours.^[12] @tunguz performed a Rickroll joking that the music video of Rick Ashley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up" had, in fact, been generated using Sora and receiving over 3,600 likes in four hours on February 16th (seen below bottom).^[13]

Features

OpenAI's site describes Sora's capabilities by saying:

Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.^[1]

Like Stable Diffusion, Sora is a "diffusion" model of AI, meaning it works by narrowing down to its desired output from a video that begins as just "static noise." According to reporting from The New York Times, Sora is trained on videos sourced both from publicly available and copyrighted material.^[9] OpenAI is also making efforts to "watermark" the videos produced by Sora as AI-generated.

Highlights

Among the videos generated by Altman with prompts from his X followers were prompts asking Sora to generate a video of wizard (seen below, top) and "two golden retrievers podcasting on a mountain" (seen below, bottom).^[3][4]

Others with early access to Sora also posted the results of their prompting, including Min Choi (seen below) who rendered a Chinese New Year parade and received over 1,700 likes in an hour.^[7]

One of the team members behind Sora, Bill Peebles, posted a "bling zoo" (seen below) complete with shot changes mimicking the style of a film.^[8]

Search Interest

External References