due to an overwhelming surge in demand for the Sora tool at its release, OpenAI has momentarily halted new registrations.
Keen to test out OpenAI's Sora text-to-video tool now that it's publicly accessible? Look like you'll have to be patient first.
At 10 a.m. PT on Monday, the headquartered in San Francisco company introduced their generative AI product to anyone with a paid ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscription. However, shortly after, they halted the creation of new accounts due to overwhelming demand.
A notice on Sora.com reads, "We're currently dealing with high traffic and have momentarily disabled Sora account creation. If you've yet to log into Sora, please try again soon."
OpenAI chose not to comment on the number of individuals who managed to create accounts or when the account creation process will resume, despite users who managed to gain access sharing their work on social media.
What Is Sora’s Video Tool by OpenAI?
Sora generates short, high-fidelity videos using written text prompts, and users can incorporate their own visual assets to remix and blend. OpenAI presented Sora in February, but only made it available to a select group of artists, designers, and filmmakers, who shared the peculiar results of their experiments in March.
Now, ChatGPT users located anywhere (except the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the European Economic Area) have the opportunity to experiment with the rapid version of Sora called Sora Turbo.
“Our festive gift to you is here: Sora is here,” OpenAI wrote on X, alongside a picture of a holiday ornament spinning in front of a tree. “We hope that this early version of Sora will help people explore new forms of creativity.”
Sora Turbo users can create videos with up to 1080p resolution, lasting up to 20 seconds, in various aspect ratios. Sora's main webpage displays sample videos, ranging from realistic scenes (a bustling urban street, a snowy landscape) to the surreal (a wide-open mouth full of tiny flowers, a rocket blasting colorful streamers instead of flames).
The Sora.com website offers examples of even more mind-boggling prompts and the odd results they produce (e.g., "Open large doors into a library. Replace doors with French doors. Transform the library into a spaceship. Remove the spaceship, add a jungle. Replace the jungle with a lunar view").
Presenting Sora's Artists
Sora's eagerness to arrive came less than two weeks after a group of frustrated artists who had received early access to Sora disclosed the tool to garner attention to their accusation that OpenAI had exploited their unpaid or underpaid labor to "whitewash" its image by diverting focus from the artists' concerns that their work was being used to train AI datasets without acknowledgement or payment. AI closed down Sora shortly after the artists had leaked the tool.
“Artists are not your unpaid R&D,” the artists stated in an open letter to the company. “We are not your free beta testers, PR mouthpieces, training data, validation tokens.”
At the time of the leak by the group known as "PR Puppets," an OpenAI spokesperson responded, “Hundreds of artists in our alpha have contributed to the development of Sora by suggesting new features and safeguards. Participation is voluntary, and there's no requirement to offer feedback or use the tool.” This year, OpenAI hosted its first artist-in-residence, Alexander Reben, whose AI-generated imagery he transformed into marble sculptures.
The tense exchange between OpenAI and certain artists persists, however. On Monday, the same group of individuals who had leaked the tool published a series of essays titled “Art in the Prison of Digital Reproduction.” Their essays expand on their anger and dissatisfaction with OpenAI and other "AI corporate overlords."
Who Can Make Use of Sora Now?
With Sora now available to the public, those who subscribe to the $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus plan can generate up to 50 Sora videos per month at 480p resolution, or fewer videos at 720p resolution. The new ChatGPT Pro plan, which costs $200 monthly, allows for 10 times more Sora usage, along with higher-resolution videos with longer durations.
“We’re working on customized pricing for various types of users, which we plan to make available early next year,” Open AI noted in a blog post about Sora's release. “We're introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its potential and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it's employed responsibly as the field advances.”
Despite the halt on Sora account creation due to high demand, OpenAI continues to encourage innovation in the field of video creation. With Sora, users can generate short, high-fidelity videos using written text prompts and their own visual assets, allowing for a new form of creative expression in the realm of science and technology.
