Sora, OpenAI's video generation tool, unexpectedly shut down. How did Sora go from uprooting the entirety of Hollywood only to end up as an unprofitable beacon for AI slop, wonders Derek McArthur.

OpenAI, Sam Altman’s AI behemoth that gave birth to the widely popular ChatGPT, has abruptly shut down its video creation tool Sora.

For a minute there, Sora was a very real existential threat to the entire structure of the film and television industries. A Hollywood set would have become a weird quirk of the past. Sora could generate settings, actors, dialogue, and every single aspect of production, pretty much, and to an almost carbon copy degree. It was never perfect - look closely at any of its glossy promotional videos for long enough and that becomes obvious - but it was near enough to the finish line to raise major concerns across the industry.

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Even the gigantic Disney corporation backed the tool, with the company under former CEO Bob Iger investing $1 billion (£750 million) into OpenAI and allowing Sora to use characters from Marvel, Pixar, and other Disney-owned studios in its video generation. It exacerbated the persistent fears of creative works being used to train AI without the creator or owner’s permission, with the biggest player in the industry willingly handing over its biggest properties and paying a billion for the pleasure.

Unfortunately for OpenAI, a tool like this was bound to be used in the real world much differently than envisioned by its ambitious and out-of-touch higher-ups.

Sora was presented to us as an industry-standard tool that could wipe out all difficulties of production, where you didn’t even need to interact with another person to generate Hollywood-standard video. Its existence was a great shock to an industry that was still reeling from gruelling pandemic shutdowns and the implicit knowledge that studio bosses would initiate drastic cost-cutting measures over doing the right thing.

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Instead, what happened was Sora becoming one of the main sources of AI slop videos currently infecting the internet. This Hollywood-ending tool was more likely to be used for engagement farming Facebook posts where grandma earnestly sends over an AI video of a gorilla performing unseen feats, believing that it’s real. Hollywood production is now old hat to most, and its sway and cultural cache have been in decline for many years. The engagement realm was really the natural and only destination for Sora to soar.

More frighteningly, Sora was a huge source of heavily political AI-generated videos, entirely designed to stir strong emotions and create engagement. It doesn’t matter if what the video was portraying was accurate, as it often wasn’t; these videos easily circulated regardless, placing everyone into their own sect of political reality. These videos would often appear out of countries of a completely different origin, the pittance paid out for the engagement turning to a hustle in countries with much weaker currency.

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So why did OpenAI, a truly well-funded operation with an $852b (£644b) evaluation, shut down Sora, one of the pillars they planned to march into the future with? It just wasn’t profitable. Generating full-scale video worlds for engagement slop seems not to be the most lucrative use of the company’s time.

An inside look behind the scenes from the Wall Street Journal sets out the company’s dilemma:

“OpenAI was weeks away from finishing work on a new AI model, code-named Spud, and needed to free up more computing resources to power the coding and enterprise products that would run on it. AI chips are the most precious commodity at any leading research lab, and at OpenAI, Sora was eating up far too many of them.”

A curse of its own making, perhaps. The huge uptick in AI use over the past few years has created a shortage of computer chips, which manufacturers say could last through next year as they struggle to keep up with demand. It caused Nvidia, which manufactures computer chips, to become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Even for OpenAI, chips have become a finite resource that must be rationed responsibly, and Sora was not worth its margins.

Increases in AI use has resulted in a fight for resources (Image: Unsplash)

If you are a private consumer looking for computer chips, whether that’s for personal computers, cars, or the myriad other things reliant on computer processing, then good luck. Expect to be put on an endless backlog and pay far over the odds. You can thank the bizarre fake videos of Martin Luther King Jr supporting Donald Trump, and other prompted fantasies, for the precarious predicament.

But OpenAI will make it out fine. The company is completely untouchable as it stands, as it has just finished off a successful funding round to the tune of $122b (£90b). The technology has yet to be proven as profitable in the marketplace, but the valuations are through the roof and only increasing, and that’s the only thing anyone is paying any mind.

Derek McArthur is an arts writer specialising in cinema and culture. He writes a weekly arts column for The Herald.

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