OpenAI releases video generator Sora

San Francisco. The world's leading AI start-up OpenAI has launched its highly anticipated software Sora, which can be used to create artificial intelligence videos from text templates. The makers of the AI ​​chatbot ChatGPT point out at the market launch that the new tool still has “many limitations” that can influence the videos created by users.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Sora is available to “American users and most countries internationally.” However, users from Germany have so far only received the message that Sora is not available in their country. And users in the US who tried to log into the service only received the error message that Sora is temporarily unavailable due to the rush.

Sora isn't free

OpenAI also announced Sora's business model at launch: ChatGPT Plus subscribers who pay $20 per month can now create up to 50 videos per month with a comparatively low resolution of 480p and a duration of up to 5 seconds. Users of the new ChatGPT Pro subscription, which costs $200 per month, have unlimited generation options and can create 20-second videos in 1080p (Full HD) resolution. However, really high resolutions such as 4k or 8k are not offered.

In addition to text prompts, Sora can also create videos based on images and video input. For now, however, only some users will be able to create videos based on images and videos of real people. This is necessary due to the “potential for abuse”. Videos of children cannot be generated during this test phase for security reasons.

Fear of abuse

AI technology that creates moving images from text templates could transform video production over time. At the same time, there are great concerns that fake videos could be created on a large scale and could hardly be distinguished from real recordings. The developers of the technology are therefore working on incorporating unique identifying features such as watermarks into the videos. Sora videos should also show that they were created by AI.

ChatGPT triggered the hype about artificial intelligence in November 2022. Just like such AI chatbots, the software for generating photos and videos is also trained with huge amounts of information. OpenAI is now in fierce competition, especially with Google, Amazon, Meta, Elon Musk's xAI, Anthropic and Baidu AI from China.

RND/dpa