What Sora means for creativity

When OpenAI introduced Sora last month, the ability to generate short full-motion videos in near-instantaneous fashion, simply by typing in a prompt like “Animated scene features a close-up of a short fluffy monster kneeling beside a melting red candle,” became a reality. Naturally, people responded with both wild enthusiasm and white-knuckle techno-panic. And sometimes a little bit of both.

This is how it usually goes when the future suddenly flashes before your eyes, one wooly mammoth trekking through the snow at a time.

So will Sora wipe out Hollywood and make everything from video cameras to YouTube creators as unnecessary as a stunt double in a Pixar movie? Not any more than talkies or Godzilla did. 

Over the course of the movie industry's 130-plus year history, humans have always used some form of high-tech tools to create visual magic. Same with the TV industry. Now, talented creatives have one more powerful tool to help them amplify their creativity and tell stories through images. Just like ChatGPT, Pi, Midjourney, DALL-E, and other AI tools are doing across the board, multimedia generators like Sora will start transforming the entertainment industry and the lives of those who work in it, now and in the future. And that has the potential to be an amazing thing.

At the same time, I get how a new set of transformative tools can be disorienting, even if mastering the use of other sophisticated, high-tech tools isn’t new to you and your career. In fact, if you have spent a long time mastering certain technological tools essential to your work, it may be even more intimidating to think about the impact of a tool like Sora. Many of today's leading creatives have invested their 10,000+ hours into a particular set of tools, and now there will be new tools and new work patterns to learn and adapt to.

It's also true that the new capabilities Sora enables will have different impacts on different industry roles. If you're a VFX artist, you've maybe already applied to OpenAI for early access to the model. If you're a makeup artist, probably not. As Hollywood classics like Singin' In the Rain and The Artist so vividly depict in their chronicling of the shift from silent movies to a new age of sound, change is inherent in a tech-driven business. Ultimately, the ability to learn and productively adapt to new technologies as they emerge is what has kept the entertainment industry so dynamic and at the forefront of global culture for more than a century. That same adaptability helps creatives continuously improve the quality and scale of their work, which benefits viewers, too. 

So once again, it's time for the industry to ask: How can we learn and adjust? What are the interesting applications, the potential challenges, and the ways in which human creativity might be amplified beyond our current tool set? What, in short, is our next act?

I, for one, am very much looking forward to seeing how people in one of the most creative industries on Earth make use of the remarkable new tools that will soon be available to all.