The three big unanswered questions about Sora

OpenAI is making moves toward monetizing things (you can now buy products directly through ChatGPT, for example). On October 3, its CEO, Sam Altman, wrote in a blog post that “we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation,” but he didn’t get into specifics. One can imagine personalized ads and more in-app purchases. 

Still, it’s concerning to imagine the mountain of emissions might result if Sora becomes popular. Altman has accurately described the emissions burden of one query to ChatGPT as impossibly small. What he has not quantified is what that figure is for a 10-second video generated by Sora. It’s only a matter of time until AI and climate researchers start demanding it. 

How many lawsuits are coming? 

Sora is awash in copyrighted and trademarked characters. It allows you to easily deepfake deceased celebrities. Its videos use copyrighted music. 

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI has sent letters to copyright holders notifying them that they’ll have to opt out of the Sora platform if they don’t want their material included, which is not how these things usually work. The law on how AI companies should handle copyrighted material is far from settled, and it’d be reasonable to expect lawsuits challenging this. 

In last week’s blog post, Altman wrote that OpenAI is “hearing from a lot of rightsholders” who want more control over how their characters are used in Sora. He says that the company plans to give those parties more “granular control” over their characters. Still, “there may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t,” he wrote.

But another issue is the ease with which you can use the cameos of real people. People can restrict who can use their cameo, but what limits will there be for what these cameos can be made to do in Sora videos? 

This is apparently already an issue OpenAI is being forced to respond to. The head of Sora, Bill Peebles, posted on October 5 that users can now restrict how their cameo can be used—preventing it from appearing in political videos or saying certain words, for example. How well will this work? Is it only a matter of time until someone’s cameo is used for something nefarious, explicit, illegal, or at least creepy, sparking a lawsuit alleging that OpenAI is responsible? 

Overall, we haven’t seen what full-scale Sora looks like yet (OpenAI is still doling out access to the app via invite codes). When we do, I think it will serve as a grim test: Can AI create videos so fine-tuned for endless engagement that they’ll outcompete “real” videos for our attention? In the end, Sora isn’t just testing OpenAI’s technology—it’s testing us, and how much of our reality we’re willing to trade for an infinite scroll of simulation.