The artists, in an open letter directed at OpenAI, said they are not the AI company’s ‘free bug testers, PR puppets, training data, validation tokens’.
OpenAI’s unreleased Sora, an artificial intelligence (AI) text-to-video generating model was reportedly leaked by a group of artists yesterday (26 November). Although, access to the leaked AI model has since been revoked.
The ChatGPT-maker first shared details on Sora in February. While it wasn’t made available to the public, some visual artists, designers and filmmakers got early access to the model to give OpenAI feedback.
However, yesterday, in protest at being OpenAI’s “unpaid R&D”, artists leaked the model and accused the company of using artists as “PR puppets”.
In an open letter signed by more than 600 artists on Hugging Face, a public repository of AI models, the group said they received access to Sora with the “promise to be early testers, red teamers and creative partners”.
However, they believe that they are being “lured into ‘art washing’ to tell the world that Sora is a useful tool for artists”.
The group said that hundreds of artists provide OpenAI, a company valued at more than $150bn, “unpaid labour through bug testing, feedback and experimental work”, with a few artists receiving the opportunity through a competition to screen their Sora-created films.
The group claimed that this was “minimal compensation”, which pales in comparison to the “substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives” and said that every output they created needed to be approved by OpenAI’s team before they could share it.
While the group behind the leak clarified that they are not against using AI for art, they claimed to not agree with how the Sora program is being rolled out. “We are sharing this to the world in the hopes that OpenAI becomes more open, more artist friendly and supports the arts beyond PR stunts.”
In March, OpenAI released some videos created by visual artists and directors using Sora, which included a short film titled Air Head, made by Toronto-based multimedia production company and indie pop band Shy Kids.
“Since we introduced Sora to the world last month, we’ve been working with visual artists, designers, creative directors and filmmakers to learn how Sora might aid in their creative process,” OpenAI wrote at the time.
TechCrunch, which initially reported the leak, said that any user could generate a 10-second video up to 1080p resolution by typing a short text description on the front-end that the group had leaked (before it was shut down).
Meanwhile, The Verge reported that OpenAI would not confirm whether the alleged Sora leak was authentic or not.
Last year, OpenAI released Dall-E 3, its upgraded text-to-image generating model, which the company claimed is able to understand “significantly more nuance and detail” than previous iterations.
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