A Sora tale

On Tuesday, a group of artists who were participating in the closed beta of Sora, the video generation algorithm created by OpenAI, published a project for some time on Hugging Face, the largest repository of artificial intelligence tools in open source.

Accompanying the software was a letter that started like this:

Dear Corporate AI Overlords,

We received access to Sora with the promise to be early testers, red teamers and creative partners. However, we believe instead we are being lured into “art washing” to tell the world that Sora is a useful tool for artists.

Clearly the three hundred beta testers feel they are being used as the R+D department of a company that has not respected them, part of the creative process so that the tool ends up being something that has a positive and not negative impact on their work.

In response, OpenAI has blocked access to its video generator and will probably find another way to trial it with another group of artists or under other conditions. The problem, of course, is that in many ways, the damage has been done: we are talking about three hundred artists who represent a sufficient critical mass to generate a very bad image in the community, and who, surely, if their access to the tool is canceled, will not say too many nice things about it and the company.