A sight for Sora eyes

OpenAl’s latest text-to-video tool takes AI to a new level but raises some troubling questions in the process.

- PETER GRIFFIN

The most charming video that's come across my newsfeed in recent days is of a fluffy cat wearing a pirate hat and riding around someone's lounge on a robotic vacuum cleaner. The video has the familiar, slightly shaky look of a candid clip recorded on someone's smartphone.

Only, the cat and the vacuum cleaner aren't real, and neither is the house. The 12-second clip was created by Sora, the new text-to-video generator driven by artificial intelligence from OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT AI chatbot.

Sora uses a so-called diffusion AI model which works by examining a vast number of videos and learning to identify the objects and actions in them. It can then assemble completely new videos by responding to text prompts. Sora understands what the user has asked for in the prompt, as well as how those things exist in the physical world.

For instance, the prompt for that cat video was: "An adorable kitten pirate riding a robot vacuum around the house." That's exactly what Sora delivered.