A screenshot of a video allegedly made by Sora. © @slow_developer sur X/OpenAI
Last February, OpenAI unveiled Sora, an artificial intelligence model capable of creating videos based on text prompts. So far only a limited group of users have access to receive feedback, with a global launch planned for later in the year, according to the latest news. But the latest developments surrounding this amazing tool may well change the situation. It appears that a hack, or more precisely a hijacking, has occurred.
Like the wind of AI rebellion
While awaiting official communication from OpenAI, artists, members of the limited group of users just mentioned, seem to have decided to rebel. Under the banner of the collective PR-Puppet-Sora, they performed two acts.
The first is to publish a tool on the community site HuggingFace that allows videos to be created by AI with the Sora API. Just three hours after putting it online, it was disabled by OpenAI, whose servers were exploited to exploit a tool not normally available to the general public. Videos, apparently made with Sora, still had time to flourish on the Internet.
“Corporate artwashing detected“
PR-Puppet-Sora’s second action was to claim and explain the action through an open letter. The collective says it got access to Sora with the promise of being creative partners, listeners and preview testers. Instead, they feel they have been manipulated and are just part of a campaign.Art washIn other words, that OpenAI is just trying to do artistic whitewashing through its recruitment to reassure the public and artists around its tool.
Letter from PR-Puppet-Sora. © Screenshot by Les Numériques
The letter also emphasizes that artists are not free R&D, bug testers, data sources, communication puppets or validation objects. The people behind the leak also state: “We’re not against using AI as an artistic tool (if we were, we probably wouldn’t be invited to this event). What we don’t agree with is how this artist program was launched and how the tool is being developed before a possible public release.“
To conclude, the collective invites artists to use open source tools instead, such as CogVideoX, Mochi 1, LTX Video and Pyramid Flow.
