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Artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI recently showed off its text-to-video generative AI model called Sora. It can generate highly realistic 60-second videos based on simple text prompts, which is a jump forward in quality for AI videos.
“Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” the ChatGPT maker said in a blog post.
Sora will first be available to a small group of artists and filmmakers as well as researchers who will try to find ways it can be misused.
The new tool isn’t the first of its kind. Other companies, including Google, Meta and AI start-up Runway, have built their own text-to-video AI models. But AI analysts said the length and quality of the Sora videos went beyond what has been seen up to now.
Many AI experts and analysts believed that Sora might impact a wide variety of industries from filmmaking to the news business. AI video generators have already caused a stir in Hollywood. Making films is expensive and time-consuming, and requires dozens or hundreds of people. Some experts have theorized that AI tools could allow a single person to make a film with the same visual complexity as a Marvel blockbuster.
Michael Gracey, a film director, predicts that soon AI tools like Sora will allow filmmakers to carefully control their output, creating all sorts of videos from scratch.
“They won’t need a team of 100 or 200 artists over a three-year period to make their animated feature any longer,” he said.
Meanwhile, Gracey said, the fact that AI tools are trained on the work of real-life artists without compensating them is a big problem. OpenAI has not yet revealed how much footage was used to train Sora or where the training videos may originate.
Mutale Nkonde, a policy analyst, acknowledges that the idea that anyone can readily turn text into video is exciting. But she worries about how these tools might embed hateful content and societal biases, their impact on the livelihoods of people in various industries.
Recent strikes by writers and actors guilds, Nkonde said, began to address questions about the use of AI language tools in screenwriting and the use of actors’ likenesses in AI-generated scenes. But she said tools like Sora raise new questions, such as whether human extras will even be needed and how to protect humans in this industry.
Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science, said Sora is likely to become a quick and inexpensive way of creating online misinformation. The high-quality videos it produces would make it even harder for people to recognize as AI generated.
“Sooner or later, we need to adapt to the fact that realism is no longer a maker of authenticity” he added.
(From The Washington Post 2024/02/16)
Expression
show off 展示
a jump forward in 在……的进步
go beyond 超过
up to now 至今
a wide variety of industries 各行各业
cause a stir 引起轰动
from scratch 从零开始
animated feature 动画长片
actors’ likenesses 演员的肖像
raise new questions 引发新问题
sooner or later 迟早
adapt to the fact that 适应……这一现实
Translation
OpenAI发布文本转视频工具 Sora
人工智能公司OpenAI最近推出了文本转视频人工智能模型Sora。它可以根据简单的文本提示生成高度逼真的60秒视频，这是人工智能视频质的飞跃。
作为ChatGPT的制造商，该公司在一篇博客文章中表示：“Sora 能够生成具有多个角色、特定类型运动以及精确主题和背景细节的复杂场景。”
Sora 将首先提供给一小部分专业人士、电影制作人以及试图检测其是否被恶意利用的研究人员。
这种新工具并不是文本转视频工具的首例。其他公司，包括谷歌、Meta和人工智能初创公司Runway，都创建了自己的文本转视频人工智能模型。但人工智能分析师表示，Sora生成的视频，无论是长度还是质量都超越了迄今为止所看到的其他人工智能视频。
许多人工智能专家和分析人士认为，Sora可能会极大范围地影响各行各业——从电影到新闻。人工智能视频生成器已经在好莱坞引起了轰动。拍摄电影既昂贵又费时，需要几十人甚至上百人。一些专家推测，通过使用人工智能工具，一个人就可以制作一部视觉复杂程度媲美漫威大片的电影。
电影导演迈克尔·格雷西预测，很快，像Sora 这样的人工智能工具将允许电影制作人仔细控制他们的输出，从零开始制作各种各样的视频。
他表示：“他们再也不需要靠一个一两百名专业人士组成的团队，花上三年时间去拍他们的电影。”
与此同时，格雷西表示，人工智能工具是在免费的情况下使用现实中专业人士的作品进行训练的，这一事实是一个大问题。OpenAI还没有透露用于训练Sora的视频片段有多少，也没有透露训练视频可能来自哪里。
政策分析师穆塔莱·恩孔德承认，任何人都可以轻易地把文字变成视频的想法令人兴奋。然而，她担心有人可能会利用这些工具嵌入仇恨内容和社会偏见，以及它们对各行各业人们生计的影响。
恩孔德提到，近期作家和演员协会的罢工行动，开始触及AI语言工具在剧本创作中的应用以及演员肖像在AI生成场景中的使用问题。但她指出，像Sora这样的工具又引发了一些新的问题，比如是否还需要人类群众演员，以及如何在这个行业中保护人类。
计算机科学教授阿文德·纳拉亚南表示，Sora很可能因其快速又廉价产出视频的能力而沦为网络造谣的工具。它制作的高质量视频将使人们更难辨认出是人工智能生成的。
他补充道：“现实主义不再是代表真实的标志，我们迟早需要适应这一事实。”
