OpenAI's Sora Video Generator Launches with Regional Restrictions and Safety Concerns

OpenAI Concerned About Illegal Activity on Sora, Releases It Anyway

OpenAI announced today that it would publicly release its much-hyped video generation AI tool to users in certain countries, after being in closed beta for nearly a year since it was first unveiled. According to a livestream on its YouTube channel hosted by CEO Sam Altman and several of the startup's other leaders and research scientists, Sora will be open to use in the US and to "most countries internationally" -- but will remain unavailable in Europe and the UK. Those are pretty significant snubs. "We're going to try our hardest to be able to launch there, but we don't have any timeline to share yet," Altman said, only saying that it would "a while." This isn't the first time that OpenAI has hit snags while trying to deploy its products across the pond. The rollout of its Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT, for example, was also delayed by several weeks, which was likely due to concerns about complying with the European Union's data privacy laws (GDPR). With Sora, the stumbling block may once again be related to the regulatory environment. "We obviously have a big target on our back as OpenAI, so we want to prevent illegal activity of Sora, but we also want to balance that with creative expression," Sora product lead Rohan Sahai said during the livestream. As CNBC noted, the startup's product chief Kevin Weil revealed in a Reddit thread in October that one of the reasons that Sora hadn't been released at that point was because they still needed "to get safety/impersonation/other things right." OpenAI hasn't elaborated on what the "illegal activity" Sahai alluded to might be -- or if they're related to the staggered rollout -- but Weil's comments and generative AI's checkered history of being misused provide us with some ideas. Misinformation and disinformation are one of the largest concerns surrounding generative AI tech. If Sora doesn't have strong enough guardrails in place to prevent it from impersonating a celebrity or a politician, that could pose a major legal liability. Similarly, this could be the case with copyright, too -- as OpenAI has faced scruitiny for the provenance of its training data. But on the user-facing side of things, image generators like ChatGPT-integrated Dall-E typically refuse prompts that include the name of artists (and this is also the case with famous figures) due to these very concerns. Sora may need more disciplining in that regard. We also can't gloss over the fact that Sora could be used to create far darker material like extremely violent imagery and child sexual abuse material (CSAM), as some people have been arrested for allegedly doing. All of these should be major worries for OpenAI. But balancing creative freedom with safety is not easy, and one might argue that releasing these AI models in their current hallucination-prone states is already playing with fire.

OpenAI releases AI video creator but it won't be coming to Europe yet

The ChatGPT maker said it is blocking particularly damaging forms of abuse, such as child sexual abuse materials and sexual deepfakes. OpenAI is releasing its AI-creating video tool to millions of users who pay for ChatGPT, marking the next wave of artificial intelligence. The company on Monday released the latest version of its Sora video generator, Sora Turbo, which will give people the ability to create 20-second video content that looks photorealistic and adds to fears of more deepfake videos. OpenAI said the product would not be available in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom yet, possibly due to regulations, which has been the case for OpenAI's other products, which reached the European market at a later date. "We're going to try our hardest to be able to launch there," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Monday. The company also wants to prevent the illegal use of the tool, "but we also want to balance that with creative expression," he added. OpenAI said that it has implemented some safeguards, which include visible watermarks and verification metadata. There will be limits in the beginning on uploading images of people, as the company said it refines its deepfake mitigations. The company said in a blog post that it was blocking particularly damaging forms of abuse, such as child sexual abuse materials and sexual deepfakes. Moderation of user content will start "a little conservative," but if it "doesn't quite get it right, just give us that feedback," Altman said. OpenAI also said Sora still has limitations. "It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations," the company said. OpenAI first presented Sora in February, but it was only accessible to select film-makers, artists, and safety testers OpenAI is not the only company to work on AI video tools. Meta is developing Movie Gen and Google has released its Veo video generator. However, both are not available publicly.

OpenAI's Sora video generator might not be available in the EU at launch

It seems that users in the EU and UK won't get access to Sora, OpenAI's video generator, at launch. A newly published help page on OpenAI's website listing the supported regions for Sora "on web and mobile" omits all EU countries. On the page, OpenAI notes that accessing Sora outside the territories listed may result in an account ban or suspension. We've reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this piece if we hear back. It's not the first time OpenAI has skipped over EU countries for an initial product launch. When the company began rolling out Advanced Voice Mode, its human-like conversational mode feature ChatGPT, this summer, EU users were left out of the early waves. In a statement provided to TechRadar this fall, OpenAI attributed the Advanced Voice Mode delay to the "additional external reviews" required by some territories. "This is a common practice to ensure [our] feature aligns with local requirements," a spokesperson told the publication. "These [reviews] can take a little time." Advanced Voice Mode later arrived for most EU customers in October. Companies beyond OpenAI, including Meta and Microsoft, have also been forced to push back AI product releases in the EU due to the bloc's complex web of data privacy regulations. Meta has been particularly vocal about compliance requirements it sees as onerous, earlier this year endorsing an open letter calling for "a modern interpretation" of European privacy laws that doesn't "reject [AI] progress."