File – The OpenAI logo appears on your phone, and the image generated by ChatGPT’s Dall-E text-to-image conversion model appears on your computer monitor. Boston, December 8, 2023.
Michael Dwyer/Associated Press
hide caption
toggle caption
Michael Dwyer/Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI plans to shut down Sora, the social media app that gained attention last fall as a place to share short videos generated by artificial intelligence, but also set off alarm bells in Hollywood and elsewhere.
In a short message on social media on Tuesday, OpenAI said it was “saying goodbye to the Sora app” and would soon share information on how users can save what they’ve already created on the app.
“What you created with Sora was important. We understand that this news is disappointing.”
The company behind ChatGPT released Sora in September in an attempt to garner attention and potentially advertising dollars following short-form videos on TikTok, YouTube, or Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook.
But a growing number of advocacy groups, academics and experts have raised concerns about the risk of having people create AI videos about almost anything they can type into a prompt, leading to a proliferation of non-consensual images and realistic deepfakes amid a sea of benign “AI slop.”
OpenAI was forced to crack down on AI productions featuring celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mister Rogers doing outlandish things after protests from families and actors’ unions.
Disney, which signed a deal with OpenAI last year to provide its characters to Sora, said in a statement Tuesday that it respects “OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and shift its priorities elsewhere.”
“We’re grateful for the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we’ve learned, and we will continue to engage with our AI platform to find new ways to meet fans where they are, while responsibly embracing new technology that respects the rights of IP and creators,” Disney said in a statement.
