OpenAI hits pause on video model Sora after artists leak access in protest

[MostlyStable]

This is so weird. They are mad that they didn't get paid for voluntarily participating in a program that never offered any pay? There are legitimate artist complaints around AI (I don't always agree with them, but they are reasonable complaints to have and are part of very important conversations about how society chooses to interact with AI), but this has got to be the silliest one I have heard so far.

[ENGNR]

I’m guessing they gave feedback and felt that it was ignored. So rather than let the trial end and let OpenAI say “we even ran it past a bunch of artists, there’s no problem here” - someone decided to flip the table, since they were unheard anyway and felt there were unresolved issues

[hnlmorg]

I suspect their protests stem from those legitimate artist complaints.

Basically that they aren’t being compensated for testing a tool that is ultimately intended to replace them.

I can definitely forgive their complaints when it’s framed that way. But I do agree that the article doesn’t do a particularly good job representing their view point.

[shkkmo]

> This is so weird. They are mad that they didn't get paid for voluntarily participating in a program that never offered any pay?

Companies have been getting ever bolder about abusing volunteer and crowd sourced labor. When the participants are bound by strict NDAs, I think some skepticism is in order.

All we really can tell is that non-neglibigle percentage of the participants in a limited access program were creeped out enough to be willing to blow up their access to call attention to it.

I don't think this story is really even about AI at all, but about labor practices.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Maybe they realised what they were really doing after the fact and changed their minds. They can’t really do anything about it so they are doing what they can.

It a bit silly to think people won’t learn new information and change their minds.

[thyrox]

I've been eagerly awaiting access to the tool for quite a while.

I would definitely be willing to pay to try it out and provide feedback in addition. I'm genuinely surprised by this news.

[benreesman]

I think that everyone at this point just distrusts the board who isn’t paid to say otherwise.

OpenAI is the new high watermark in moral, ethical, social, and intellectual corruption and anyone who works there who has any moral sense is deeply conflicted.

It’s cancer that has cancer. To defeat it would be like discovering a vaccine.

[lemoncookiechip]

You can read their open letter yourself, whether or not you agree with their logic is up for you to decide.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/PR-Puppets/PR-Puppet-Sora

[ruthmarx]

The less reasonable artist complaints are the ones where they just straight up accuse AI of stealing their work, when that's not how it works at all.

[rightbyte]

I prefer Pepsi to Coca Cola. I sometimes pose as a Coca Cola drinker to suddenly instigate protests among Coca Cola drinkers.

Some people think I am acting strange but I'd argue they don't see my point.

[dyauspitr]

Probably blown away by what was possible so they panicked.

[throwaway290]

Maybe they agreed first and later realized that if they help ClosedAI murder their future careers and careers of other artists they might as well get paid for it.

[aabhay]

“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company”

This is a hilarious basis for protest

[esperent]

A huge company is using unpaid artist's labour to create tools that will reduce the potential for these and all future artists to get any paid work at all in the future.

It seems like signing up as the volunteer with the goal of derailing the company as much as possible is a highly valid form of ptotest.

[Blahah]

Unless they volunteered precisely so that they would have early access and could leak it, which would be sensible.

[yyuugg]

"We are doing labor, and are not being fairly compensated for our labor" is a hilarious basis? How so?

[benreesman]

A lot of people refused to hang out with Diddy even if they could put their finger on exactly why.

I know more than most, but the sexual assault allegations and shady restructuring and abuse of the the political process and the multiple firings for financial fraud and, well a lot of stuff, that’s all public record.

Matt Gaetz got run out of DC for less.

[dyauspitr]

So stupid. I realize artists are panicking but this angle just makes them look like Luddite villains.

[pineaux]

Hilariously correct you mean?

[yread]

Yeah, hilarious. Now lets go back to working on open source so that corporations can use it and openai can train on it

[hulitu]

> > unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company”

> This is a hilarious basis for protest

Of course. Every CEO works for free these days. /s

[it_citizen]

Looking at the examples here: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1861450051085545880

It seems pretty underwhelming compared to what was shown in early 2024 no?

[cloudking]

There's a bunch of commercial options live right now that have comparable results. Not sure what all the hype is about, here are a few:

https://runwayml.com/

https://klingai.com/

https://hailuoai.video/

https://lumalabs.ai/

https://pika.art/

https://viggle.ai/

[resiros]

I don't think it's worse, just that the standards moved up, the expectations are now much higher. Sam forgot YC's advice to launch fast.

[Jordan-117]

Apparently they only had access to the light/turbo model, not the full one.

[nicce]

> It seems pretty underwhelming compared to what was shown in early 2024 no?

People seem to have five fingers so I would say that as a win.

[rafram]

Yeah, for all the talk of Sora building an internal “world model” that could be a building block for AGI… this seems to suffer from all the same glitches as the Will Smith spaghetti video, just with much, much more polish.

I don’t think it’s that much worse than what OpenAI showed off earlier in the year when you consider that those examples were very cherry-picked, though. These new videos don’t make it seem like a bad model, they’re just a bit more realistically mediocre.

[kylehotchkiss]

Yeah, I'm struggling to understand what the use case of this is. These videos aren't tricking anybody who's used a cameraphone. Just shooting video with phone costs nearly nothing. People don't particularly seem to want to generate films of places they aren't.

[irjustin]

Wow yeah. The pixelation makes it hard but chopstick pens, pages moving, cars crossing over eachother.

Demo's gonna demo.

[jdenning]

https://archive.is/8sKXF

[daniel_iversen]

I’d love to see the contract those artists signed! I’m sure they did, or should have, gone in with their eyes wide open, and not sure what they expected from OpenAI (since clearly there wouldn’t have been any mention of payment in the contract), or whether OpenAI started asking them for a lot of work maybe (that’s the only thing I can think of that would give them the right to complain)?

[HPsquared]

They probably signed up for the purpose of doing this. People don't usually change their opinions that easily, especially a total 180 from "volunteering to support OpenAI" to directly the opposite.

[add-sub-mul-div]

I wish the slop era would just get up to speed already so it can be seen for what it is.

[immibis]

It's already here even without pervasive video AI. We had text slop before LLMs too.

[dumpsterdiver]

I’m convinced Sora will finally motivate me to finish my novel, and I’m so excited about that.

[sebastiennight]

I'm curious; how does a video generation model motivate you towards finishing your novel?

[HPsquared]

GenAI has been a huge boon to my creativity as well. It does the donkey work.

[HPsquared]

A bit of buzz, free publicity if anything. It's a competitive space.

[mensetmanusman]

The top Video models will not arise in the west where Hollywood rules.

[orbital-decay]

In other news, Sora still exists. I thought they were never going to release it, there are comparable/better commercial options now.

[9o1d]

Doesn't the law establish a minimum wage? Who violates the rights of the working person?