Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) is one of the best musicals - if not the best - in the history of cinema, but it is much more. It is a film about how the silent film universe had to adapt in a very short time to the arrival of sound, how it changed the way works were produced and those it left out of the business. We don't know yet if there will one day be a movie about how the Hollywood industry adapted to the arrival of AI, but we know it's already knocking on its doors. Last month OpenAI presented Sora, an AI capable of creating highly realistic sequences, and next week the company's CEO, Sam Altman, will meet with directors of the cinematographic mecca. The question is no longer whether one day we will see a movie created entirely with artificial intelligence. The question is when it will happen.
According to the Bloomberg agency, OpenAI has meetings scheduled in Los Angeles with Hollywood studio executives, media executives and heads of talent agencies. The goal is to form alliances with the entertainment industry and get filmmakers to use Sora in their work. This AI is not yet available to anyone who wants to use it, but the artificial intelligence startup has given access to some directors to try it out. This week some short films made with Sora have been published. They are no longer 10-second videos, but works of art that are impossible to distinguish from a creation using a camera. As amazing as the one of the woman walking through Tokyo at night. Here you can see them all.
At the moment, Sora is not generally open. At the time it will be a subscription service and its use, since it is video, will consume a lot of computing resources. The most used video generation tool from text in the world now is Runway. Studios already use this technology for previsualizations and storyboards, or to add additional sequences. Their AI model seems to be a few steps behind Sora. But it is only a matter of time before you perfect your results.
A video starts in which Barack Obama is sitting in an armchair. It is him there is no doubt. No? He starts to speak. It's his voice: "Some people are losing their minds because the video below is generated by AI. I'm also a deepfake, and you should be careful when you watch a video on the internet." Amazing. It has been created using artificial intelligence by a company called Argil.ai. All they need to create a realistic virtual clone is a two-minute video of someone speaking into the camera, without any editing. From there, the AI creates a virtual version of the person and recreates both their gestures and their voice. In any language. You just have to write a script to make it speak and say what we want in the language we want.
It must be remembered that the strike of screenwriters and actors last year in Hollywood was largely motivated by the opposition of both groups to the use of artificial intelligence in the film industry. After months of conflict, the sector's unions managed to get the production companies to accept some safeguards. Will they avoid using Sora and other AI tools to make movies? Time will tell, but the situation is beginning to resemble that of the talkie whirlwind that swept away the silent film stars.
