I Asked OpenAI Sora for a Female 'Taxi Driver'. This is What Happened
My test drive of the AI video generator everyone's dreading answers: Will it kill Hollywood?
Erik Barmack writes every other Tue. for paid subscribers. He recently interviewed Imagine's Justin Wilkes and Sara Bernstein about using AI to make Netflix’s Churchill docuseries, and assessed how AI storyboarding tools will transform pitch meetings.
Last February, this bird in the video below terrified Hollywood. Not because of the haunting red eye that stares deep into your soul — though that certainly didn’t help — but because it portended a future where Hollywood was no longer necessary.
You see, this bird doesn’t actually exist. Nor does the camera that captured it. This was part of one of the AI-generated videos OpenAI released 10 months ago when it teased Sora, its multi-modal AI video generator, meaning users could input images, videos, or text and AI creates a new video based on the input.
Shortly after those first videos were released, Tyler Perry pulled out of his planned $800M studio expansion, citing Sora and expressing concern that the entertainment industry wouldn’t survive once AI becomes widespread. After actor-slash-venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher played with Sora, he predicted that personalized movies are coming soon.
For the last 10 months, the wider public has only gotten glimpses of Sora — in occasional YouTube videos, at film festivals, in Toys“R”Us and Coca-Cola commercials that no one much liked.
Until now.
After months of speculation, OpenAI released Sora on Dec. 9, and now we’re all Tippi Hedren, praying that we’ll be able to save ourselves from the throngs of AI bird videos that have been presaged as the end of our industry, hiding in a phone booth of Luddite delusion.
One of the core principles of this column is that wherever possible, being able to play with these new tools and see what they can and cannot do is far better than being trapped in the echo chamber with both hypesters and doomers. So I plunked down $200 for a month of the “Pro” version to figure out how long I’d have a job in Hollywood and disposable income, the professional equivalent of paying to be told your death date. (The standard $20 a month ChatGPT subscription gives users more limited access to Sora.)
In this hands-on deep dive from my perspective as a producer, you’ll learn:
What happened when I prompted Sora to make an array of cinematic videos — which you’ll see — including one inspired by Spielberg
Where Sora’s output could be integrated into productions today
The one popular genre that will be most impacted by AI video
How an average producer can get the most value out of Sora
Why such crafts as set designers and cinematographers have little to worry about
Why editors and VFX artists may ultimately come to love these tools
How Sora compares with other generative AI video models
Whether Sora lives up to the hype — and how big of a threat it is to Hollywood
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Erik Barmack is a working producer and the founder of Wild Sheep Content. He also runs a news site dedicated to AI in the entertainment industry called AI in Hollywood. Jocelyn Wexler contributed additional research to this piece.