So Sora is making waves, prompting "AI Doomsayers" to speak on the behalf of artists, while at the same time dunking on TikTok culture.

I think the hype surrounding Sora is unjustified, for two reasons:

1. it is not new. The technology is (AFAIK) about 3 years old, OpenAI has mainly only used (and: been able to use) a lot of data - thanks to the computing power by Microsoft. The aforementioned very large (and also very clean) amount of data was in part obtained using game engines.

2. not published: this is only available internally from OpenAI, nobody external has access yet. This means that the “red teaming” phase is now underway, for example to ensure that Sora does not spit out a new, say, Leni Riefenstahl production. Sora, like GPT-4, is a Transformer, and GPT-4 allegedly suffered extremely from alignment tuning: initially creepily superhuman, then tame. (If I’m not mistaken, exactly this effect has also been proven outside of OpenAI & GPT).

So: I think more is being interpreted into this than is actually there.

Instead of being frightened, some artists are rightly excited about these tools becoming increasingly available - and a revolution like techno music may be on the horizon.