OpenAI Says Sora Video Generator May Allow Nudity

"OpenAI has a challenging decision to make around this."

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OpenAI isn't ruling out that its forthcoming Sora video generator might create nudity — and that could be bad news for the company.

In a sweeping interview with the Wall Street Journal about the forthcoming tool, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati suggested that the company hasn't yet figured out the whole nudity thing.

"I’m not sure," Murati told the WSJ's reporters when asked about nudity. "You can imagine that there are creative settings in which artists might want to have more control over that. Right now we are working with artists, creators from different fields to figure out what’s useful, what level of flexibility the tool [should] provide."

It's a surprisingly candid answer that may have been overlooked during the interview's now-infamous YouTube training data moment, but some experts are worried that if Sora does allow for "creative" nudity, it may open the proverbial porn floodgates.

"OpenAI has a challenging decision to make around this, because for better or worse, the reality is that probably 90 percent of the demand for AI-generated video will be for pornography," Daniel Colson, the founder and executive director of the AI Policy Insitute (AIPI), told Quartz. "That creates an unpleasant dynamic where, if centralized companies creating these models aren’t providing that service, that creates an extremely strong incentive for the gray market to provide that service."

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Given how easy it is to exploit AI models into providing outputs that go against their guardrails, there'll almost certainly be people trying to trigger Sora into making porn anyway, which does indeed put the world's foremost AI firm in a situation in which its' damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

As public polling indicates, people are not only concerned about the use of AI models to generate deepfake porn as they did with those disgusting images of Taylor Swift earlier in the year, but 86 percent also believe the companies behind such easily-exploited tools should be held accountable for their loose guardrails.

"That really points to how the public is taking this tech seriously," Colson continued. "They think it’s powerful. They’ve seen the way that technology companies deploy these models and algorithms and technologies, and it leads to completely society-transforming results."

It's a salient set of concerns that the general populace seems to understand — so why doesn't OpenAI?

More on Sora: Tyler Perry Nixes Huge Film Studio Expansion, Says He Can Just Green Screen in Backgrounds From OpenAI's Sora