Lights, Camera, Concerns: How SORA Will Impact Hollywood?

What if Hollywood becomes SORAWOOD? After OpenAI had made plans to collaborate with Hollywood studios, many experts raised concerns regarding the potential implications it could have on the entertainment industry. Let’s take a look at the potential challenges faced by Hollywood if they collaborate with SORA in any way!

Major Concerns Regarding SORA & Hollywood Partnership

Bloomberg first reported that OpenAI wants to meet with Hollywood studios and filmmakers to try and test its latest text-to-video generator known as SORA. As we know, SORA can generate hyperrealistic videos and well-constructed scenes in minutes.

Although this state-of-the-art AI tool hasn’t been released publicly, the company has stated that they had given access to some visual artists, designers and directors to get back some feedback. Here is an example of what they have created:

Although this partnership could have a transformative impact, the film industry will face many challenges if it happens.

1) Controversy Regarding Training Data

As with ChatGPT or any other generative AI technology, the training data is always the first major controversy to pop up. OpenAI has been receiving a lot of backlash on social media platforms for not being transparent about the training data since SORA was first announced.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), OpenAI CTO Mira Murati offered vague responses when asked about the source of the videos it was trained on. This further increased curiosity regarding what kind of data has been used to train Sora. Murati said that they only used publicly available and licensed data. 

But when asked for clarification on whether Sora had been trained with data from platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook, Murati had this to say:

“I’m actually not sure about that.” before adding, “You know, if they were publicly available — publicly available to use. But I’m not sure. I’m not confident about it.”

It was later confirmed that Shutterstock was one of the sources from where videos are being used. Still, many creators already suspect SORA was trained by scraping art and videos without the knowledge or consent of their creators.

It is also speculated that to create a model this advanced, it needs lots of video data, so it can be assumed it was trained on video data scraped from all corners of the internet.

While there are arguments to be made that each big tech firm like Google or Meta has been collecting data and training their systems without the consent of the creators or its users, it doesn’t give a free pass to other companies to do the same thing.

2) Copyright Issues

When Midjourney and other image generator tools were first unveiled, many well-known artists alleged that the image generated was a copyright violation of their artwork. This combined with the vagueness of training data will be a potential legal nightmare.

If SORA ever partners up with Hollywood studios, there might be a substantial rise in copyright claims made on the footage generated using the tool. Artists and Designers will start suing them for stealing their craft. It will be Studios then, who will be liable to prove that the final film is their sole creation, otherwise, they might not retain the rights to those projects.

But to counter that, they might delegate these tasks to smaller studios and lesser-known artists to defend themselves.

3) More Unemployment for Actors, Writers, Technicians

SORA might hurt the work of writers, actors, technicians, and VFX artists as its use threatens to overhaul the film industry by replacing or reducing jobs. A 2024 report predicts that more than 200,000 jobs in the entertainment sector will be disrupted, either reduced or completely eliminated.

The 2023 strikes by Actors and Writers have already put the industry one year behind schedule. The positive thing from those strikes is that the screenwriters secured significant guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence and SAG-AFTRA won promises of compensation and credit for AI likenesses but it couldn’t succeed in banning such practices altogether.

However, a potential deal between OpenAI and film studios could seriously undermine the efforts and compromises achieved by the strikes. 

First, for VFX artists, there will be a scenario where only a smaller team will be able to create the same amount of output. This will lead to significant unemployment in that space, just like how in the coding world, we will soon need fewer people to do the same task. This is great for productivity but not good for livelihoods.

Here is an AI video that is made by just using text prompts, which would have otherwise required hours of shooting and editing the visual effects in the post:

The jobs at most risk are 3D modellers, graphic designers, animators, sound designers, compositors, and storyboard artists. This is what the interim executive director of the International Animated Film Association’s Hollywood branch, Aubry Mintz said about SORA:

“If Sora makes roles in reference animation, concept art and storyboarding redundant, these industry professionals may find themselves out of a job.”

Aubry Mintz

Second, the production will require less number of ‘extras’ (the actors who appear in the background with no lines), as such type of footage can be generated using AI. While OpenAI stated that they will reject prompts for celebrity likeness, that cannot be said about the background talent.

Third, as more scenes can be created on a computer, there will be less physical shooting needed and there will be fewer technicians required to build the sets or set up the lights. Everything can be done in the editing room.

Studio owner Tyler Perry has put his $800 million expansion plans on hold to increase the soundstages after SORA came to the limelight. He said that he has seen what it can do and how it will affect the world of films. Here is what he said after watching the capabilities of tech and its impact:

“It makes me worry so much about all of the people in the business. Because as I was looking at it, I immediately started thinking of everyone in the industry who would be affected by this, including actors and grip and electric and transportation and sound and editors, and looking at this, I’m thinking this will touch every corner of our industry.”

Tyler Perry

While AI is not still that great at writing stories, don’t forget that it can add a lot of improvement to the scripts and studios will hire less number of people for the writing staff.

And don’t forget that it can make doing motion capture easier, so actors don’t have to sit for hours and do prosthetics and makeup. We know that SORA has the ability of video-to-video editing where the user can upload their videos and add customizations using prompts.

4) High Costs & Unaffordability

While SORA will be made publicly available at a very decent price, like ChatGPT, it can still be unaffordable for independent filmmakers and small-scale studios. This is because of the substantial computational power necessary for producing significant portions of full-feature films. 

SORA can generate a maximum of about 5 minutes of video per hour per Nvidia H100 GPU. The GPU costs alone may also skyrocket with widespread use. So, it might become costly for an average content creator and AI will be more viable for films with massive budgets. 

There are many more concerns associated with SORA in general, so, it will be interesting to see what happens next and if the regulations might come soon with it to counter this impact.

Conclusion

SORA in Hollywood will change the industry forever. While it presents transformative possibilities for filmmaking, questions regarding data transparency and its impact on job displacement remain unresolved. As we move towards AI-driven content creation, careful consideration of ethical and legal implications is important to ensure a sustainable future!