[HN Gopher] Sora Update #1
___________________________________________________________________
Sora Update #1
Author : davidbarker
Score : 122 points
Date : 2025-10-04 00:39 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.samaltman.com)
| minimaxir wrote:
| Yeah, Nintendo called, and faster than expected.
|
| > People are generating much more than we expected per user, and
| a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
|
| What did OpenAI expect, really? They imposed no meaningful
| generation limits and and "very small audiences" is literally the
| point of an invite-only program.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| Current limit seems to be 100 per rolling 24 hour period, so
| not unlimited but definitely huge given the compute costs.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Setting the limit that high for a soft launch is bizarre. I
| got access to Sora and got the gist of it with like 10
| generations.
| techblueberry wrote:
| I don't understand, what do they mean very small audiences, am
| I not supposed to make video for myself?
| minimaxir wrote:
| OpenAI likely intended users to post every video they make to
| the public feed instead of just using the app as a free video
| generator. (i.e. Midjourney)
|
| Of course, another reason that people don't publish their
| generated videos is because they are bad. I may or may not be
| speaking from experience.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| Can confirm.. I got access to the app yesterday and I have
| used it exclusively for making drafts and sending them to
| my friends without posting.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| 100%. I'm not comfortable sharing likeness of myself
| publicly. I send goofy stuff to friends. That was day 1,
| at least.
|
| Day 2+ I haven't used the app again.
| notatoad wrote:
| my read: they made the app look like tiktok, and were
| expecting people to make tiktok style viral videos. instead,
| what people are making is cameo-style personalized messages
| for their friends, starring mario.
| CPLX wrote:
| Indeed. If you read between the lines that's clearly it.
|
| And on that note can I add how much I truly despise sentences
| like this:
|
| > We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very
| excited for this new kind of "interactive fan fiction" and
| think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to
| them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can
| be used (including not at all).
|
| To me this sentence sums up a certain kind of passive
| aggressive California, Silicon Valley, sociopathic way of
| communicating with people that just makes my skin crawl. It's
| sort of a conceptual cousin to concepts like banning someone
| from a service without even telling them or using words like
| "sunset" instead of "cancel" and so on.
|
| What that sentence actually fucking means is that a lot of
| powerful people with valuable creative works contacted them
| with lawyers telling them to knock this the fuck off. Which
| they thought was appropriate to put in parentheses at the end
| as if it wasn't the main point.
| adriand wrote:
| > To me this sentence sums up a certain kind of passive
| aggressive California, Silicon Valley, sociopathic way of
| communicating with people that just makes my skin crawl.
|
| To me that's Sam Altman in a nutshell. I remember listening
| to an extended interview with him and I felt creeped out by
| the end of it. The film Mountainhead does a great job
| capturing this.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Wow, I am sure excited for your new kind of interactive fan
| fiction of my properties. It will accrue us a lot of value!
| Anyway, please do not use our properties.
| vntok wrote:
| Nice but there's no need for the "please": it's not a
| request, it's a demand from an official lawyer-penned,
| strongly-worded, lawsuit actionable letter.
| martin-t wrote:
| It feels like big exploitative multimedia companies are the
| main force fighting big exploitative ML companies over
| copyright of art.
|
| I wish big exploitative tech companies would fight them over
| copyright of code but almost all big exploitative tech
| companies are also big exploitative ML companies.
|
| Oracle to the rescue? What a sick, sad world.
| saxonww wrote:
| I'm not really disagreeing with you, but I think it's more
| about salesmanship than anything else. "We released v1 and
| copyright holders immediately threatened to sue us, lol"
| sounds like you didn't think ahead, and also paints copyright
| holders in a negative light; copyright holders who you need
| to not be enemies but who, if you're not making it up, are
| already unhappy enough to want to sue you.
|
| Sam's sentence tries to paint what happened in a positive
| light, and imagines positive progress as both sides work
| towards 'yes'.
|
| So I agree that it would be nice if he were more direct, but
| if he's even capable of that it would be 30 years from now
| when someone's asking him to reminisce, not mid-hustle. And
| I'd add that I think this is true of all business executives,
| it's not necessarily a Silicon Valley thing. They seem to
| frequently be mealy-mouthed. I think it goes with the
| position.
| signatoremo wrote:
| You may not like their message, but the style can be found in
| practically any public communication from any corporation.
| Read a layoff announcement from Novo Nordisk as an example
| [1]. No difference.
|
| This is what I don't like about HN, manufactured outrage when
| one dislikes the messenger. No substance whatsoever.
|
| When users are given such a powerful tool like Sora, there
| will naturally be conflicts. If one makes a video putting a
| naked girl in a sacred Buddhist temple in Bangkok, how do you
| think Thai people will react?
|
| This is OpenAI attempting balancing acts between conflicting
| interests, while trying to make money.
|
| [1]-https://www.novonordisk.com/content/nncorp/global/en/news
| -an...
| id00 wrote:
| I actually really like that comment. It's an example of
| classic doublespeak and it's a shame that "Open"AI uses it
| and we as society tolerate that (as well as other companies
| of course)
| redserk wrote:
| If we're going on HN rants, this bizarre tendency of
| reframing the blatantly obvious into something it isn't
| doesn't help any argument.
|
| The messenger isn't some random, disconnected third party
| here.
| toshinoriyagi wrote:
| Yes, but one of the conflicting interests is illegal. We
| all know these companies pirate a huge amount of
| copyrighted data to train their LLMs and VLMs. Clear
| copyright infringement, Anthropic just lost a few billion
| dollars for this.
|
| In addition, the training process attempts to reproduce the
| copyrighted training data as perfectly as possible, with
| the intent to rent the resulting model out for commercial
| gain afterwards. Many argue that this is not fair use, but
| another instance of copyright infringement.
|
| And if the previous infractions weren't enough, OpenAI's
| customers are now generating mass videos of copyrighted
| characters.
|
| So, while it may be common corporate speak, it is still
| snake-tongued weasel-blather that downplays the illegality
| of their actions.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Exactly. I really hope Altman gets whats coming for him.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Update after more testing: looks like every popular video game
| prompt (even those not owned by Nintendo) triggers a Content
| Warning, and prompting "Italian video game plumber" didn't work
| either. Even indie games like Slay the Spire and Undertale got
| rejected. The only one that didn't trigger a "similarity to
| third party content" Content Violation was Cyberpunk 2077.
|
| Even content like Spongebob and Rick and Morty is now being
| rejected after having flooded the feeds.
| mallowdram wrote:
| I see a movie: The MoTrix, copyright blasting Soraddicts
| invent a new prompting language (or discover the one Altman
| seeded) as a way of evading Agents of the Entity, a (c)
| deity/program. Once unleashed, the world descends into
| HeroClix and ReadyPlayerOne slop simulation where original
| becomes indistinguishable from stolen.
| ojosilva wrote:
| And I don't think you can revenue share these generations with
| rights owners just like that. What rights owner will let their
| "product" be depicted in any imaginable situation by any prompt
| by anyone in the planet? Words are powerful and images a 1000
| words worth, videos are a millionth fold... I've seen a quick
| Sora video from OpenAI themselves I believe of the real life
| Mario Bros Princess, a rather voluptuous one, playing herself
| on a console and the image stuck. And it's not just misuse,
| distortion or appropriation but also association: imagine a
| series of very viral videos of Pikachu drinking Coke or a fan
| series of Goku with friends at KFC... it could condition, or
| steal, future marketing deals for the rights holders.
|
| This is a non-starter, unless you own a "license to AI" from
| the rights owner directly, such as an ad agency that uses Sora
| to generate an ad it was hired to do.
| geraldalewis wrote:
| > rightsholders
| roxolotl wrote:
| It's telling to how society values copyright of different media
| that 4 years into people yelling about these being copyright
| violation machines the first time there's been an emergency
| copyright update has been with video.
| musicale wrote:
| "Hi, as the company that bragged about how we had ripped off
| Studio Ghibli, and encouraged you to make as many still
| frames as possible, we would now like to say that you are
| making too many fake Disney films and we want you to stop."
| timschmidt wrote:
| Cue an open weights model from Qwen or DeepSeek with none
| of these limitations.
| ineedasername wrote:
| These attempted limitations tend to be very brittle when
| the material isn't excised from the training data, even
| more so when it's visual rather than just text. It
| becomes very much like that board game Taboo where the
| goal is to get people to guess a word without saying a
| few other highly related words or synonyms.
|
| For example, I had no problem getting the desired results
| when I promoted Sora for "A street level view of that
| magical castle in a Florida amusement area, crowds of
| people walking and a monorail going by on tracks
| overhead."
|
| Hint: it wasn't Universal Studios, and unless you know
| the place by blind sight you'd think it had been the
| mouse's own place.
|
| On pure image generation, I forget which model, one
| derived from stable diffusion though, there was clearly a
| trained unweighting of Mickey Mouse such that you
| couldn't get him to appear by name, but go at it a little
| sideways? Even just "Minnie Mouse and her partner"? Poof-
| guardrails down. If you have a solid intuition of the
| term "dog whistling" and how it's done, it all becomes
| trivial.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Absolutely. Though the smarter these things get, and the
| more layers of additional LLMs on top playing copyright
| police that there are, I do expect it to get more
| challenging.
|
| My comment was intended more to point out that copyright
| cartels are a competitive liability for AI corps based in
| "the west". Groups who can train models on all available
| culture without limitation will produce more capable
| models with less friction for generating content that
| people want.
|
| People have strong opinions about whether or not this is
| morally defensible. I'm not commenting on that either
| way. Just pointing out the reality of it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's a matter of time. I imagine they'll get more effect
| suppressing activations of specific concepts within the
| LLM, possibly in real time. I.e. instead of filtering
| prompt for "Mickie Mouse" analogies, or unlearning the
| concept, or even checking the output before passing it to
| user, they could monitor the network for specific
| activation patterns and clamp them during inference.
| ronsor wrote:
| The only thing we need is an emergency copyright deprecation.
| martin-t wrote:
| So people who spend time working on code or art should have
| exactly zero protection against somebody else just taking
| their work and using it to make money?
| 1gn15 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| (The "takers" also do not have copyright protection.)
| noduerme wrote:
| Great, you've just removed any incentive for people to
| make anything.
| ares623 wrote:
| It's ok I don't have any talent so that won't affect me
| JimDabell wrote:
| The vast amounts of permissively licensed works directly
| contradicts you.
|
| Even if you take away copyright, there are plenty of
| incentives to create. Copyright is not the sole reason
| people create.
| noduerme wrote:
| Vague. Are you talking about reasons to create like the
| joy of creating? Your bio describes you as a 'tech
| entrepreneur', not 'DIY tinkerer'. So I'll assume that
| when you spend a great deal of time entrepreneuring
| something, you do so with the hope of remuneration. Maybe
| not by licensing the copyright, but in some form.
|
| Permissive licenses are great in software, where SAAS is
| an alternative route to getting paid. How does that work
| if you're a musician, artist, writer, or filmmaker who
| makes a living selling the rights to your creative
| output? It doesn't.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Vague. Are you talking about reasons to create like the
| joy of creating?
|
| That's one of them, but I really don't have to be
| specific about the reasons. I just have to point out the
| existence of permissively licensed works. You said:
|
| > Great, you've just removed any incentive for people to
| make anything.
|
| This is very obviously untrue. Perhaps you meant to say
| "...you've just removed _some_ incentives for people to
| make _some_ things"?
| martin-t wrote:
| So basically the only winners should be:
|
| - owners of large platforms who don't care what
| "content"[0] is successful or if creators get rewarded,
| as long as there is content to show between ads
|
| - large corporations who can afford to protect their
| content with DRM
|
| Is that correct?
|
| Do you expect it to play out differently? Game it out in
| your head.
|
| [0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-
| whatever/#:~:text...
| reorder9695 wrote:
| No, but the current system is totally idiotic. Why not
| have a fixed timeframe i.e. 30-50 years to make money?
| Life of the author + x years is stupid not only because
| it's way too long, it keeps going until way after the
| creator is no longer benefitting, and it can cause issues
| with works where you don't know who the author is so you
| can't cleanly say it's old enough not to have copyright.
|
| I'm not sure for most (specifically smaller, who need the
| most protection) creators this would actually change very
| much. Media typically makes money in it's first few years
| of life, not 70 years on.
| mallowdram wrote:
| The shareholder class would demand rapid fire
| exploitation of (c) the moment it expired and the
| resulting media would be a soup of mediocrity. The idea
| is to recognize the highly creative have unique
| imaginations that invent paradigms that propel culture.
| Excluding that for 70+ years generates that. Had Lucas
| gained the rights to Flash Gordon (DeLaurentiis beat him
| to it) he'd never been forced to create the SW universe.
| Think about constraints as the path to progress.
| iterance wrote:
| This does not demonstrate a sound understanding of how
| the public domain works, why copyright lengths have been
| extended so ferociously over the last century (it's
| shareholders who want this), nor the impact it has both
| on creative process and public conversation.
|
| This is a highly complex question about how legal
| systems, companies, and individual creatives come in
| conflict, and cannot be summarized as a positive creative
| constraint / means to celebrate their works.
| mallowdram wrote:
| I develop copyright material from the letter and the
| images that I've both sold to studios and own myself.
| Copyright lengths are there to prevent the shareholder
| class from rapid exploitation. Once copyright declines to
| years not decades, shareholders will demand that be
| exploited rather than new ideas. The public conversation
| is rather irrelevant as the layperson doesn't have a
| window into the massive risk, long-term development
| required to invent new things, that's how copyright is
| not a referendum, it's a specialized discourse. Yes the
| idea of long-term copyright developed under work-for-hire
| or individual ownership can be easily summarized.
| License, sample, or steal. Those are the windows.
| martin-t wrote:
| Then the solution is fixing the problem, not removing any
| protections at all.
|
| In fact, copyright should belong to the people who
| actually create stuff, not those who pay them.
| kg wrote:
| The detail that rightsholders seem to be demanding a revenue
| share is interesting. That sounds administratively and
| technologically very complex to implement and probably also just
| plain expensive to implement.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Sam says Sora 2 has to make money but there is no revenue model
| that can feasibly offset a $4-5 compute cost per video.
| nojs wrote:
| Where did you get that figure from?
| minimaxir wrote:
| It's more a ballpark since exact numbers vary and OpenAI
| could be employing shenanigans to cut costs, but in
| comparison, Veo 3 which has similar quality 720p video
| costs $0.40/second for the user, and Sora's videos are 10
| seconds each. Although Veo 3 could cost more or less to
| Google than what is charged to the user.
|
| I suspect OpenAI's costs to be higher if anything since
| Google's infra is more cost-efficient.
| nvr219 wrote:
| It was revealed to them in a dream.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| With some back of the napkin math, I am pretty sure you're
| off by at least two orders of magnitude, conceivably 4. I
| think 2 cents per video is an upper limit.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434298
|
| Generally speaking, API costs that the consumer sees are
| _way_ higher than compute costs that the provider pays.
|
| EDIT: Upper limit on pure on-going compute cost. If you
| factor in chip capital costs as another commentator on the
| other thread pointed out, you might add another order of
| magnitude.
| rafram wrote:
| You also aren't including amortized training costs, which
| are immense (and likely ongoing as they continue to tweak
| the model).
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| I suspect amortized training costs are only a relatively
| small fraction of the amortized hardware costs (i.e.
| counting amortized hardware costs already accounts for
| the large fraction of the cost of training and pulling
| out training as a completely separate category double
| counts a lot of the cost).
| martin-t wrote:
| This is how all work should be rewarded.
|
| Workers getting paid a flat rate while owners are raking in the
| entire income generated by the work is how the rich get richer
| faster than any working person can.
| pxoe wrote:
| This "but it's too hard to implement" excuse never made sense
| to me. So it's doable to make a system like this, to have smart
| people working on it, hire and poach other smart people, to
| have payments systems, tracking systems, personal data
| collection, request filtering and content awareness, all that
| jazz, but somehow all of that grinds to a halt the moment a
| question like this arises? and it's been a problem for years,
| yet some of the smartest people are just unable to approach it,
| let alone solve it? Does it not seem idiotic to see them serve
| 'most advanced' products over and over, and then pretend like
| this question is "too complex" for them to solve? Shouldn't
| they be smart enough to rise up to that level of "complexity"
| anyway?
|
| Seems more like selective, intentional ignoring of the problem
| to me. It's just because if they start to pay up, everyone will
| want to get paid, and paying other people is something that
| companies like this systematically try to avoid as much as
| possible.
| rr808 wrote:
| That is my reminder to generate more AI slop to burn through all
| that VC cash.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Someone I know uses chatgpt a lot. Not because they find it
| incredibly valuable. But because they want to stick it to the
| VC's funding OAI and increase their costs with no revenue.
|
| So this is why you have to be careful about usage numbers. The
| only true meaningful number is about those who are contributing
| towards revenue. Without that OAI is just a giant money sink.
| MountDoom wrote:
| I suspect this has the opposite effect. More daily users ==
| higher valuation, so more profit if the VCs decide to sell.
| There's no pressure on OpenAI to become profitable yet.
| jameslk wrote:
| Viacom-suing-YouTube-after-it-used-all-its-IP-as-a-growth-hack
| vibes
| nextworddev wrote:
| Lol blast from the past. Real Gs remember this.
| piskov wrote:
| Broke: cure cancer, new physics, agi, take your jobs, what have
| you. Please give us a trillion.
|
| Woke: AI slop tictoc to waste millions of human-hours.
| eclipticplane wrote:
| > AI slop tictoc to waste millions of human-hours.
|
| Don't forget the power it consumes from an already overloaded
| grid [while actively turning off new renewable power sources],
| the fresh water data centers consume for cooling, and the noise
| pollution forced on low-income residents.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| As a european, i don't know if it's more funny or sad that
| american citizens close tho data centers are effectively
| subsidizing ai for the rest of the world by paying more for
| their electricity since the datacenters are mostly there
| noduerme wrote:
| You make a good point. They may well as admit at this point
| that curing cancer, new physics, and AGI aren't going to happen
| very soon.
|
| What surprises me a bit is that they'd take this TikTok route,
| rather than selling Sora as a very expensive storyboarding tool
| to film/tv studios, producers, etc. Why package it as an app
| for your neice to make viral videos that's bound to lose money
| with every click? Just sell it for $50k/hr of video to someone
| with deep pockets. Is it just a publicity stunt?
| measurablefunc wrote:
| The query data they are collecting can be used for ad
| targeting. Remember, if you're not paying for it (and in many
| cases even when you are paying for it) then the data
| collected from your use of the application is going to be
| used by someone to make money one way or another. Google made
| billions from search queries & OpenAI has an even better
| query/profiling perspective on its users b/c they are
| providing all sorts of different modalities for interaction,
| that data is extremely valuable, analogous to how Google
| search queries (along w/ data from their other products) are
| extremely valuable to corporate marketing departments that
| are willing to pay a premium for access to Google's targeting
| algorithms.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > What surprises me a bit is that they'd take this TikTok
| route, rather than selling Sora as a very expensive
| storyboarding tool to film/tv studios, producers, etc.
|
| Because it's not good enough, I would assume. Hard to see it
| actually being useful in this role.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Well, yeah, but that stuff was all bullshit, whereas the fake
| tiktok kind of exists and might keep the all-important money
| taps on for another six months or so.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Almost as if the AGI talks were what a ceo would do to pump the
| hype of its company as much as possible
| tkamado wrote:
| The OpenAI dream: replace your job with AI, replace your free
| time with AI slop?
| stogot wrote:
| And replace rightsholders with "maybe we will try to revenue
| share... maybe"
| pants2 wrote:
| They also said at one point they'll share their profits with
| the world as UBI
| CompoundEyes wrote:
| I don't have access but it seems you can impose a friend into a
| video? Are we not rightsholders to our own likeness? It seems
| like a person should be able to block a video someone shares
| without their consent or earn revenue then if their likeness is
| used.
| minimaxir wrote:
| You have to explicitly opt into sharing your likeness with
| permission controls.
|
| > person should be able to block a video someone shares without
| their consent
|
| That is already implemented.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| > You have to explicitly opt into sharing your likeness with
| permission controls.
|
| Ok... how is that supposed to work? I don't have an OpenAI
| account, there are no permission controls for me. Someone
| else could easily upload a picture of me, no?
| pants2 wrote:
| No, you have to register yourself with a video where you're
| required to say a unique code.
|
| So unless you've posted a video of yourself online saying
| every number from 1 to 99 they won't be able to copy your
| likeness
| noduerme wrote:
| So only the heads of companies who lead shareholder
| meetings are vulnerable to this exploit? Cool.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| That's more than I expected from them, genuinely. But it
| still doesn't seem like a very solid solution. I wonder
| how much variation in look and voice it accepts?
|
| My partner likes to cosplay, and some of the costumes are
| quite extensive. If they want to generate a video in a
| specific outfit will they need to record a new source
| video? The problem exists in the other direction, too. If
| someone looks a lot like Harrison Ford, will they be able
| to create videos with their own likeness?
|
| I wonder how this extends to videos with multiple people,
| as well. E.g. if both my friend and I want to be in a
| video together.
| WmWsjA6B29B4nfk wrote:
| It's not like making a video of someone saying a number,
| given a single photo and any voice sample is a very
| difficult problem today. We can just fast-forward a few
| weeks into a world where this ,,registration" is already
| broken.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| This seems... pretty easy to get around? There are
| already open weight models which can take any photo and
| audio and make a video out of it with the character
| speaking/singing/whatever, and it runs on normal consumer
| hardware.
| pants2 wrote:
| So you wouldn't know what the three numbers are ahead of
| time, you'd have to be using a real time face replacement
| model (or I guess live-switching between pre-rendered
| clips) and somehow convince the app that you're the
| iPhone selfie cam.
|
| But at that point you might as well just use WAN 2.2
| Animate and forget about Sora.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| So that sounds like they "released" this fully aware it would
| generate loads of hype, but never ever be legally feasible to
| release at scale, so we can expect some heavily cut down version
| to eventually become publicly released?
| nmfisher wrote:
| Feels very much like a knee-jerk response to Facebook releasing
| their "Vibes" app the week before. It's basically the same
| thing, OpenAI are probably willing to light a pile of money on
| fire to take the wind out of their sails.
|
| I also don't think the "Sam Altman" videos were
| authentic/organic at all, smells much more like a coordinated
| astroturfing campaign.
| ares623 wrote:
| Or to distract from the new routing and intent/context
| detection thing they have going on.
| g42gregory wrote:
| It is already illegal to use images in somebody's likeness for
| commercial purposes or purposes that harm their reputation, could
| be confusing, etc... Basically the only times you could use these
| images are for some parodies, for public figures, and fair use.
|
| Now, the OpenAI will be lecturing their own users, while
| expecting them to make them rich. I suspect, the users will find
| it insulting.
|
| Generation for personal use is not illegal, as far as I know.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Wait, are you telling me Sam Altman has no regard for the law
| and thinks his own messianic endeavors are more important than
| that? Shocker!
| nickthegreek wrote:
| you can use the images to harm someone's reputation legally as
| long as you don't represent them as real.
| _fs wrote:
| is it still invite only? I tried downloading the app to give it a
| whirl, but apparently you need a code to even open the app
| mallowdram wrote:
| It began as floor wax now it's a dessert topping.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| I don't understand some parts of this, the writing doesn't seem
| to flow logically from one thought to another.
| > Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video
| generation. People are generating much more than we expected per
| user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small
| audiences. > We are going to try sharing some of this
| revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by
| users. > The exact model will take some trial and error
| to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that
| the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue
| share, but of course we we want both to be valuable.
|
| The first part of this paragraph implies that the video
| generation service is more expensive than they expected, because
| users are generating more videos than they expected and sharing
| them less. The next sentence then references sharing revenue with
| "rightsholders"? What revenue? The first part makes it sound like
| there's very little left over after paying for inference.
|
| Secondly, to make a prediction about the future business model -
| it sounds like large companies (disney, nintendo, etc) will be
| able to enter revenue sharing agreements with OpenAI where users
| pay extra to use specific brand characters in their generated
| videos, and some of that licensing cost will be returned to the
| "rightsholders". But I bet everyone else - you, me, small youtube
| celebrities - will be left out in the cold with no controls over
| their likeness. After all, it's not like they could possibly
| identify every single living person and tie them to their
| likeness.
| cg505 wrote:
| 1. They need to charge users for generation.
|
| 2. They might get into trouble charging users to generate some
| other entity's IP, so they may revenue-share with the IP owner.
|
| They're probably still losing money even if they charge for
| video generation, but recouping some of that cost, even if they
| revshare, is better than nothing.
| earthnail wrote:
| You got the last paragraph wrong. They need to negotiate with
| rights holders on the revenue split. They're hoping that the
| virality aspect will be more important to rights holders than
| money alone, but they will of course also give money to
| rights holders.
|
| Or, in other words: here's Sam Altman saying to Disney "you
| should actually be grateful if people generate tons of videos
| with Disney characters because it puts them front and center
| again.", but then he acknowledges that OpenAI also benefits
| from it and therefore should pay Disney something. But this
| will be his argument when negotiating for a lower revenue
| share, and if his theory holds, then brands that don't enter
| into a revenue share with OpenAI because they don't like the
| deal terms may lose out on even more money and attention that
| they would get via Sora.
| camillomiller wrote:
| "Dear rights holders, we abused your content to train our
| closed model, but rest assured we'll figure out a way to get
| you pennies back if you don't get too mad at us"
| 48terry wrote:
| > the writing doesn't seem to flow logically from one thought
| to another.
|
| Neither has most of the stuff Sam has said since basically the
| moment he started talking.
|
| It is possible, perhaps, that he is actually a very stupid
| person!
| braebo wrote:
| My read says intelligent sociopathic narcissist.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't get the confusion. He's saying that
|
| (i) they will need to start charging money per generation (ii)
| they will share some of this money with rightsholders
| samastur wrote:
| they will TRY to share this money ;)
| cedilla wrote:
| Yes - "with rightsholders who want their characters
| generated by users. "
|
| So it's not about reimbursing "rightsholders" they rip off.
| It's about giving a pittance to those who allow them to
| continue to do so.
|
| Sorry, _trying to_ give a pittance to them.
| basisword wrote:
| They will share the money with the rights holders large
| enough to sue them. Fuck the rest. Just as they've done with
| training material for ChatGPT.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| It's confusing to me because charging money is implied - "we
| are going to have to somehow make money" - but not actually
| stated, and then it jumps past the revenue structure into
| sharing money with "rightsholders".
|
| It has left me wondering if, instead of just charging users,
| they would start charging "rightsholders" for IP protection.
| I could see a system where e.g. Disney pays OpenAI $1 million
| up front to train in recognition of Mickey Mouse, and then
| receives a revenue share back from users who generate videos
| containing Mickey Mouse.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| > After all, it's not like they could possibly identify every
| single living person and tie them to their likeness.
|
| Wasn't he literally scanning eye balls a couple years ago?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| the scanning continues.
| rglover wrote:
| "Just look into the orb, bro."
| raphman wrote:
| "Sora Update #4: Through a partnership with Google, Meta and
| Snap Inc., you will be able to generate tasteful photos of the
| cute girl you saw on the bus. She will receive a compensation
| of $0.007 once she signs our universal content creators'
| agreement."
| brandon272 wrote:
| Obviously, OpenAI could have had copyright restrictions in place
| from the get-go with this, but instead made an intentional
| decision to allow people to generate everything ranging from
| Spongebob videos to Michael Jackson videos to South Park videos.
|
| Today, Sora users on reddit are pretty much beside themselves
| because of newly enabled content restrictions. They are
| (apparently) no longer able to generate these types of videos and
| see no use for the service without that ability!
|
| To me it raises two questions:
|
| 1) Was the initial "free for all" a marketing ploy?
|
| 2) Is it the case that people find these video generators a lot
| less interesting when they have to come up with original ideas
| for the videos and cannot use copyright characters, etc?
| ronsor wrote:
| These video generators are mostly useful for memes at this
| point, and adding copyright shackles make it a lot less useful
| for memeing.
| hamhamed wrote:
| At stay22 we've built a way to monetize travel videos
| automatically with multi-modal LLM, starting with travel and soon
| into retail. It's already live and testing with a few youtubers,
| via rev share. It automatically detects destinations, activities,
| hotels, implicitly throug the visuals or explcitily from the
| vlogger's voice
|
| Few live examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3tObRu8EuM
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v03mG1mMi0
|
| That could be way at least for travel content if you work at
| OpenAI and want to collab
| HypomaniaMan wrote:
| Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be
| measurablefunc wrote:
| The logic is that if they don't do it then Meta or some other
| company will & they have decided it's better that they do it
| b/c they are the better, more righteous, & moral people. But
| the main issue is I don't understand how they went from solving
| general intelligence to becoming an ad sponsored synthetic
| media company without anyone noticing.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Oh we all noticed, but this is a new level of entrepreneurial
| narcissism and corporate gas lighting. Maybe one day Sam
| Altman will generally be perceived as who he actually is
| measurablefunc wrote:
| He is the boy wonder genius who will usher an era of
| infinite abundance but before he does that he has to take a
| detour to generate a lot of synthetic media & siphon a lot
| of user queries at every hour of every day so that
| advertisers can better target consumers w/ their plastic
| gadgets & snake oils. I'm sure they just need a few more
| trillions in data center buildouts & then they can get
| around to building the general purpose intelligence that
| will deliver us to the fully automated luxurious communist
| utopia.
| cess11 wrote:
| Is this a roundabout way to say that they've realised that people
| are using their service to make porn of celebrities and fictional
| characters in the entertainment industry, and aim to figure out a
| way to keep making money from it without involving
| "rightsholders" in scandals?
| simianparrot wrote:
| > In particular, we'd like to acknowledge the remarkable creative
| output of Japan--we are struck by how deep the connection between
| users and Japanese content is!
|
| Translation from snake speech bs: We've been threatened by
| Japanese artists via their lawyers that unless we remove the
| "Ghibli" feature that earned us so much money, and others like
| it, we're going to get absolutely destroyed in court.
| qlm wrote:
| > Japanese "content"
|
| Sickening
| simianparrot wrote:
| No human writes like this. If he actually did it's worrying.
| rossant wrote:
| Would you mind explaining? As a non native English speaker
| I may have missed some nuance.
| danhau wrote:
| The word content. Art would have been the appropriate
| term.
| sph wrote:
| Wait until they coopt the word "art" to include AI-
| generated slop. I dread the future discussion tarpits
| about whether AI creations can be considered art.
| krapp wrote:
| My person in deity that future has been here for a while
| now.
|
| Not only do they consider it art, they call what you and
| I consider art "humanslop" and consider it inferior to
| AI.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| This sounds a lot like boomers complaining about kitty
| litter instead of bathrooms in elementary school
|
| It's easy to get too chronically online and focus on some
| tiny weird thing you saw when in fact it's just a tiny
| weird thing
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| A piece of wood, a rock can be pretty/interesting to look
| at. It is not art. AI slop might be pretty/interesting,
| but it is not art.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Disagree, it is content. The Japanese anime (referenced)
| is specifically made to be marketed and sold.
| qlm wrote:
| The involvement of money does not preclude a work from
| being considered art. Your claim is cynical and
| ahistorical.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| it also doesn't preclude it from being content.
| estearum wrote:
| I don't think any supposes it does. They're arguing that
| the word choice implies something about the speaker's
| value system and the place that art or human culture has
| in it.
| qlm wrote:
| Well, yes, but I didn't really think that needed to be
| said.
| estearum wrote:
| Almost every piece of art you've ever seen (by virtue of
| you seeing it) was made to be marketed and sold.
|
| Art is overwhelmingly not a charity project from artists
| to the commons.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Most independent artists will disagree with this
| statement. They do it for passion, to communicate, to
| tell stories, to fulfill their own urges. Some works
| incidentally hit a sweet spot and become commercial
| successes, but that's not their purpose. On the other
| hand, the 'art' you see being marketed around you is made
| specifically to be marketed and sold, with little
| personal connection to the artist, and often against
| their own preferences. That's "content".
| richardfulop wrote:
| Art is not an objective definition, it is the subjective
| experience of the observer. Content is a format.
| estearum wrote:
| Is that what they tell you when you're standing in the
| gallery with a checkbook? Or in the boardroom with a
| signature?
|
| No, you almost never see art that wasn't meant to be
| sold. Public art pieces are commissioned (sold), art in
| galleries were created by professional artists (even if
| commercially _unsuccessful_ ) 99.99999% of the time.
|
| Surely if this wasn't true, you could point to a few
| specific examples of art -- or even broad categories of
| art -- that weren't made to be sold and that you have
| personally seen?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I think you're just interpreting the meaning of "made to
| be sold" very literally. Of course artists want to make a
| living and have their art be appreciated, so they expect
| pieces to be sold; but that is not the _main motivation_
| behind making the art, where commercial "art" -
| advertising, mainstream cinema, pop music, most art
| galleries, anime, 80% of what you see in arts and crafts
| fairs, pieces in IKEA - is created with profit as the
| main motive.
|
| Going back to the origin of this, stating that Ghibli
| style videos generated with SORA (which the OP initially
| called "content") are equivalent to Studio Ghibli movies
| because they are both "art made to be sold" would be
| wild. A film like Spirited Away took over 1 million hours
| of work, if making money was the main goal it would have
| never happened.
| estearum wrote:
| > Of course artists want to make a living and have their
| art be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold
|
| "they want their to be appreciated, so they expect pieces
| to be sold" is a clever trick but one is not related to
| the other. One could want their art to be appreciated and
| never sell it, but virtually no one would see this art
| for a variety of reasons including the fact that
| marketability increases visibility _and_ that there is
| very, very little amateur art that is worth looking at,
| much less _promoting_ to a larger audience.
|
| It seems you agree that in fact art (that anyone sees) is
| overwhelmingly made to be sold.
|
| I didn't say anything about their "main motivation" and
| neither you nor I (nor even the artist, frankly) could
| say much about what someone's main motivation is.
|
| What we can say is that nearly all of the art anyone sees
| was in fact made to be sold, which is the specific claim
| that I made.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _nearly all of the art anyone sees_
|
| See comment above.
| estearum wrote:
| Yes you're just restating my thesis but with the air of
| disputing it.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| Buddy your thesis is that art does not exist because of
| capitalism. That is a ridiculous 'thesis'.
| estearum wrote:
| ... what? Not sure how you got that, but no, that's not
| what I believe.
|
| Here, I'll restate it:
|
| > Almost every piece of art you've ever seen (by virtue
| of you seeing it) was made to be marketed and sold.
|
| > Art is overwhelmingly not a charity project from
| artists to the commons.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _almost never see art that wasn't meant to be sold_
|
| Because most art isn't in a gallery or store. You quite
| literally aren't seeing it.
| estearum wrote:
| In other words:
|
| > Almost every piece of art you've ever seen (by virtue
| of you seeing it) was made to be marketed and sold.
| Kiro wrote:
| I presume "by virtue of you seeing it" includes other
| conditions or I don't understand how you can claim such a
| thing.
| estearum wrote:
| Where exactly have you seen art that wasn't made to be
| sold? Be specific.
| Kiro wrote:
| Friends, family, coworkers, my own, random posts online,
| everywhere.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| some of it are cultural products too.
| layer8 wrote:
| The word "content" is often perceived as devaluing
| creative work:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/movies/emma-thompson-
| writ...
|
| Paradoxically, it signals indifference or disregard about
| the actual contents of a work.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| None of us should be surprised. This joker has zero respect
| for the artistry of humans.
| andrew_mason1 wrote:
| hey don't forget about nintendo too
| qoez wrote:
| My hunch is that openai used ghibli as the example in their
| earlier dall-e blog posts strategically _because_ anime was
| earlier said by the PM not to be protected by copyright in
| training. OpenAI is always sneakier than most people give them
| credit for.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _OpenAI is always sneakier than most people give them
| credit for._
|
| There's usually more useful information in what Sam Altman
| specifically doesn't say than what he does.
| 47thpresident wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is in response to the flood of Sora anime
| parodies that have flooded TikTok in the past 48 hours. Seems
| like OpenAI is acknowledging some strongly worded letters from
| anime rights holders rather than individual artists, or the
| response wouldn't be this swift.
| surrTurr wrote:
| > launch new sora update
|
| > enable generating ghibli content since users are ADDICTED to
| that style
|
| > willingly ignore the fact that the people who own this content
| don't want this
|
| > wait a few days
|
| > "ooooh we're so sorry for letting these users generate
| copyrighted content"
|
| > disables it via some dumb ahh prompt detection algorithm
|
| > dumb down the model and features even more
|
| > add expensive pricing
|
| > wait a few months
|
| > launch new model without all of these restrictions again so
| that the difference to the new model feels insane
| slacktivism123 wrote:
| >dumb ahh prompt detection algorithm
|
| Don't worry, you can write "dumb ass" here without needing to
| use algospeak. This isn't Instagram or TikTok and you won't be
| unpersoned by a "trust and safety" team for doing so.
|
| P.S. No need for a space after your meme arrows :-)
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| copyright is such a poorly designed tax on our society and
| culture. innovations like Sora should be possible, but faces
| huge headwinds because... Disney wants even more money?
|
| the blind greed of copyright companies disgusts me
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Society has benefited hugely from copyright law. In fact, the
| first copyright laws were created in response to desires to
| have education material/a better educated society.
|
| Saying 'disney/laws bad because I want billionaire
| corporation to have access to something they know they don't
| but built their business model around using anyway.' isn't
| saying anything but 'I want what I want'.
|
| If anything society should take this slow and do it right,
| not throw out hundreds of years of
| thinking/decisions/progress because 'disney' and 'cool new
| tech'.
|
| We should not bend/throw away laws because billion dollar
| industry chose to build a new business model around ignoring
| them. Down that path lies dystopia.
| workfromspace wrote:
| I'm new to Sora. Which step are we in at the moment?
| aubanel wrote:
| > "We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very
| excited for this new kind of "interactive fan fiction" and think
| this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them,
| but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used
| (including not at all)"
|
| Marvelous ability to convolute the simple message "rightholders
| told us to fuck off"
| zarzavat wrote:
| Revenue sharing for AI generated videos of characters sounds
| completely insane.
|
| I can't tell if this is face saving or delusion.
| sumedh wrote:
| It sounds insane to you but sounds completely normal to me.
|
| Why should AI generated videos not have revenue sharing.
|
| In the end what matters is whether people enjoy the video, it
| does not matter if its AI created or human created.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| As someone who is concerned about how artists are supposed to
| earn a living in a ecosystem where anyone can trivially copy
| any style effortlessly, it does sound better than the status
| quo?
|
| The fact that LLMs are trained on humans data yet the same
| humans receive no benefits from it (cannot even use the weights
| for free, even if they unwillingly contributed to it existing),
| kind of sucks.
|
| What alternative is there? Let companies freely slurp up
| people's work and give absolutely nothing back?
| stared wrote:
| It is sad (and predictable, PR- and legal-wise) that there was no
| mention of the Ghibli Studio.
|
| I would be actually moved if there was some genuine in the line
| of "We are sorry - we wanted to make a PR stunt, but we went to
| hard." and offered real $ for that. (Not that I believe it is
| going to happen, as GenAI does not like this kind of precedence.)
| rpgbr wrote:
| >Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video
| generation. People are generating much more than we expected per
| user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small
| audiences.
|
| Once again, Scam Altman looking for excuses to raise more money.
| What a joke...
| tmaly wrote:
| I just heard people were making full length South Part episodes
| with Sora 2. But it seems now that this has been banned by
| OpenAI.
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