AI has made the move into video and it's worryingly plausible

I recently had the opportunity to see a demo of Sora, OpenAI's video generation tool, which was released in the US last Monday, and it was so impressive it made me worried for the future.

- Victoria Turk

The new technology works like an AI text or image generator: write a prompt, and it produces a short video clip. In the pre-launch demo I was shown, an OpenAI representative asked the tool to create footage of a tree frog in the Amazon, in the style of a nature documentary. The result was uncannily realistic, with aerial camera shots swooping down on to the rainforest, before settling on a closeup of the frog. The animal looked vivid and real.

Yet despite the technological feat, as I watched the frog I felt less amazed than sad. It certainly looked the part, but we all knew what we were seeing wasn't real. The tree frog, the branch it clung to, the rainforest it lived in: none of these things existed, and they never had. The scene, although visually impressive, was hollow.

Video is Al's new frontier, with OpenAI finally rolling out Sora in the US after first teasing it in February, and Meta announcing its own text-to-video tool, Movie Gen, in October. Google made its Veo video generator available to some customers this month. Are we ready for a world in which it is impossible to discern which of the moving images we see are real?