Someone leaked OpenAI's Sora

If you thought ChatGPT was the scariest thing to come from OpenAI, then you’ve never met Sora. This is the company’s upcoming video generation platform, and it’s poised to really mess up the film industry. Well, some of the people testing OpenAI’s Sora have leaked it, and it led to several users gaining access to it.

OpenAI unveiled Sora back in February, and it was really our introduction to uncanny AI-generated videos. We’re sure that the company initially wanted it to be available by now, but it’s faced some significant setbacks. OpenAI wants to get this right (and maybe avoid pulling a Google). As such, we might have to wait a bit more time before we see a public release. So, let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

Disgruntled testers have leaked OpenAI’s Sora

A new project mysteriously appeared on Hugging Face, the developers platform, and it had https://sora.openai.com/backend/video_gen in the code. This tied it to Sora, and it intrigued curious coders. The project gave users access to the video generator, and several people were able to start generating videos.

In its state, people could generate 10-second videos at up to 1080p. We’ve already seen several clips floating around on the internet, and some of them landed on X.com. The videos themselves are nothing special, and they have the typical AI video traits. Though, some of them do show a scary level of consistency.

Why did this happen?

Sora wasn’t leaked by a team of hackers or any malicious group. Instead, a team of testers orchestrated this leak. In a strongly worded open letter, a team of early testers expressed their gripes with the company. They refer to themselves as artists, but we don’t know what that word means in this context. We don’t know if they’re referring to filmmakers who contribute their work to train Sora, or people who merely write prompts.

In any case, the letter says that “ARTISTS ARE NOT YOUR UNPAID R&D”. For context, OpenAI opened a program that gave a number of people access to Sora to help test it and red team it. However, these individual have reviewed no compensation for their work.

“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback, and experimental work for the program for a $150B [$150 billion] valued company.” Among the hundreds of people selected, only a few of them will have their videos screened.

So, the people in the program are upset for not getting paid properly for their contributions. Along with that, the artists feel that this program is more of a publicity stunt for PR rather than for artistic expression.

No Sora for you!

If you wanted to try Sora for yourself, you’re out of luck. Just three hours after the leak, OpenAI took Sora down. So, playtime is over.

At this point, we don’t know which individuals were behind the leak. We’re sure that, if identified, they’d be kicked out of the program. They leaked Sora to light a fire under OpenAI to bring change, but that’s not likely to happen. OpenAI seems to be unscathed.