OpenAI releases seven Sora videos from select filmmakers, artists, ad agencies, and musicians; Fairly Trained CEO Ed Newton-Rex calls the move “artistwashing”

OpenAI has been releasing a steady drip of videos generated by its new highly realistic AI model, Sora, but the text-to-video …

VentureBeat 2024-03-26 Carl Franzen

Context & Ripple Effects

Sora had just been introduced as a research product for a limited group of creators and security experts, following its initial text-to-video unveiling. The new releases make selected creative collaborators part of the model’s public-facing demonstration strategy.

The showcase also lands amid concern over OpenAI’s undisclosed training data, an issue raised alongside the model’s debut. Newton-Rex’s criticism turns a product demo into a test of whether creator participation conveys meaningful consent or merely endorsement.

First-order effects

OpenAI gains seven polished Sora examples and visible collaborators to demonstrate the model’s creative range while access remains selective.
The “artistwashing” charge puts the participating creators and OpenAI’s creator-outreach approach under immediate scrutiny, especially around the distinction between collaboration and endorsement.

Second-order effects

Agencies and artists considering early AI-video partnerships face a sharper reputational calculation: participation can offer influence and visibility, but may also be framed as legitimizing opaque model development.
Competing generative-video providers are incentivized to differentiate their creator programs through clearer access, attribution, or training-data policies rather than demos alone.

Third-order effects

If high-profile creative showcases continue without broadly trusted rules on training data and creator consent, commercial adoption of synthetic video may be shaped as much by rights legitimacy as by output quality.
The episode points toward a market in which controlled early access becomes both a safety mechanism and a governance flashpoint, with creator representation central to how frontier media tools earn acceptance.

The trend: Generative-video companies are moving from technical reveals to creator-led commercialization, making provenance, consent, and access governance competitive issues.

Discussion

@gdb Greg Brockman on x
Sora for artists and filmmakers: [video]
@aka_lacie Lacie on x
> “Working with Sora is the first time I've felt unchained as a filmmaker,” he states. “Not restricted by time, money, other people's permission, I can ideate and experiment in bold and exciting ways.”
@chris_osborn Chris Osborn on x
as someone who has spent the past ten years curating showcases of contemporary cinema formally/thematically concerned with how new technology has upended our ways of seeing, in my expert opinion: looks like shit 👍
@shiringhaffary Shirin Ghaffary on x
OpenAI just put out testimonials from filmmakers about how they're using an early version of its video generation model, Sora. This comes ahead of another week of mtgs between OpenAI + Hollywood studios and directors, as we reported last week https://openai.com/...
@ednewtonrex Ed Newton-Rex on x
Artistwashing: when you solicit positive comments about your generative AI model from a handful of creators, while training on people's work without permission/payment.
@openai @openai on x
A glimpse of our early work with artists and filmmakers to see how Sora can help bring ideas into reality: https://openai.com/...
@boringstein @boringstein on x
sub-garry's mod output here
@ednewtonrex Ed Newton-Rex on x
@Clockrelativity Yes, I imagine they did. No idea how much. But they lobby for gen AI training to be considered fair use, and there is evidence of them using copyrighted work without permission in other key models. If they have licensed all the data Sora is trained on, I will be …
@paultrillo Paul Trillo on x
Sora is at its most powerful when you're not replicating the old but bringing to life new and impossible ideas we would have otherwise never had the opportunity to see. Check out more of my experiments on the blog post https://openai.com/...

Chronicles