OpenAI's Sora makes fake videos very easy, and very realistic

In its first three days, users of a new app from OpenAI deployed artificial intelligence to create strikingly realistic videos of ballot fraud, immigration arrests, protests, crimes and attacks on city streets - none of which took place.

- TIFFANY HSU STUART A. THOMPSON STEVEN LEE MYERS

The app, called Sora, requires just a text prompt to create almost any footage a user can dream up. Users can also upload images of themselves, allowing their likeness and voice to become incorporated into imaginary scenes. The app can integrate certain fictional characters, company logos and even deceased celebrities.

Sora — as well as Google’s Veo 3 and other tools like it — could become increasingly fertile breeding grounds for disinformation and abuse, experts said. While worries about Al's ability to enable misleading content and outright fabrications have risen steadily in recent years, Sora's advances underscore just how much easier such content is to produce, and how much more convincing it is.

Increasingly realistic videos are more likely to lead to consequences in the real world by exacerbating conflicts, defrauding consumers, swinging elections or framing people for crimes they did not commit, experts said.

“It’s worrisome for consumers who every day are being exposed to God knows how many of these pieces of content,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-founder of GetReal Security. “I worry about it for our democracy. I worry for our economy. I worry about it for our institutions.”

OpenAI has said it released the app after extensive safety testing, and experts noted that the company had made an effort to include guardrails.

“Our usage policies prohibit misleading others through impersonation, scams or fraud, and we take action when we detect misuse,” the company said in a statement in response to questions about the concerns.

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