> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Gotta juice the utilisation numbers somehow. Limiting everyone to 10 per day would kneecap them, and they’d have nothing with which to attract new investors to keep the gravy train going
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.