Sora’s demand on launch day causes OpenAI to pause new account creation

Want to try OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video tool now that it’s released to the public? Looks like you’ll have to be patient.

At 10 a.m. PT on Monday, the San Francisco-based company made its video generation product available to anyone with a paid ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscription plan, but later discontinued the ability to create new accounts due to strong demand.

“We are currently experiencing heavy traffic and have temporarily disabled Sora account creation,” reads a message on Sora.com. “If you’ve never signed up with Sora before, please check back soon.”

OpenAI didn’t say how many people were able to create accounts on Monday or when the feature will be available again, although users who gained access are sharing their creations on social media.

What is OpenAI’s Sora video tool?

Sora creates short, realistic, high-resolution videos from written text prompts, and users can also input their own visuals for remixing and mixing. ​OpenAI first introduced Sora in February, but at the time only made it available to a select group of artists, designers and filmmakers, who shared the surreal results of their experiments in March.

Now ChatGPT users can tinker with the new version, called Sora Turbo, everywhere except the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Economic Area, which includes members of the European Union, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, which are not Part of the EU but participating in the EU internal market.

“Our Christmas present to you is here: Sora is here,” OpenAI wrote on X, alongside an image of a Christmas decoration twirling in front of a tree. “We hope this early version of Sora will help people discover new forms of creativity.”

Sora Turbo users can create videos up to 1080p resolution and up to 20 seconds long in vertical or square widescreen format. The Sora landing page shows sample videos ranging from photorealistic – a busy city street, a snowy landscape – to surrealistic, such as a wide-open mouth full of tiny flowers and a rocket that fires colorful streamers instead of flames as it rises from a launch pad a cartoon ocean.

To let the imagination run wild, Sora.com also gives some amazing examples of prompts and the resulting videos: “Open large doors to a library. Replace doors with French doors. Transform the library into a spaceship. Remove the spaceship and add a jungle. Replace the jungle with a moon view.”

Artists who leaked Sora share their thoughts

The highly anticipated launch of Sora comes after a group of aggrieved artists who were previously granted access to Sora leaked the tool late last month. They did this to draw attention to their position that OpenAI had exploited their unpaid or underpaid work to “artfully” launder its image and divert attention from artists’ concerns that their work training AI datasets without recognition or compensation would be used. The AI ​​shut down Sora hours later.

“Artists are not your unpaid research and development,” the artists said in an open letter to the company. “We are not your free bug testers, PR puppets, training data or validation tokens.”

At the time of the leak by the group calling itself “PR Puppets,” an OpenAI spokesperson responded: “Hundreds of artists in our alpha have shaped the development of Sora and helped prioritize new features and security measures.” Participation is Voluntary, there is no obligation to provide feedback or use the tool.” This year, OpenAI hosted its first Artist in Residence, Alexander Reben, who converted Sora’s AI-generated images into 3D models, which he then converted into converted into marble sculptures.

However, the tense back and forth between OpenAI and some artists continues. On Monday, several people involved in the leak published a series of essays titled “Art in the Cage of Digital Reproduction,” further elaborating on their anger and dissatisfaction with the alleged behavior of OpenAI and other “corporate AI overlords.”

“What is needed is a meaningful reinvestment of the wealth generated by these companies that could benefit the greatest number of artists,” artistic director Federico Bomba wrote in an essay. “No symbolic micro-grants or hollow gestures, but millions of dollars, euros, yen or pesos went directly into empowering the global artistic community to experiment, innovate and push boundaries.” This is what people expect from a company should claim to value the skills and contributions of artists.”

Now that Sora is out, who can use it?

With Sora now officially available to the public, those with a ChatGPT Plus account can create up to 50 Sora videos per month at 480p resolution or fewer videos at 720p resolution. The new Pro plan enables 10x more Sora usage and higher resolution and longer duration videos.

“We are working on tailored pricing for different user types, which we plan to make available early next year,” Open AI said in a blog post on Monday.