With Sora's brutal intrusion, how can advertising professionals survive?

OpenAI released the Vincent video model Sora. What does this mean for advertisers and what challenges will it bring? This article will explore this topic in depth and explore how advertisers can stand on their own feet and find their own development path in the context of Sora.

On February 16, OpenAI released the Vincent van Gogh video model Sora, which sparked heated discussions among many technology experts and netizens.

When many AI tools generated videos before, the main problems were short video length and inconsistent images of characters before and after. According to OpenAI, Sora's biggest advantage is that it can create videos up to 60 seconds long, containing highly detailed scenes, complex camera movement angles, and multiple characters with vivid emotions.

Simply put, Sora can better understand natural language descriptions and further understand and simulate the real world.

For example, input prompt words: A fashionable woman walks on the streets of Tokyo, which are full of warm neon lights and vibrant city signs. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red skirt, black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick, and walks confidently and casually. The street is wet and reflective, creating a mirror effect of colorful lights, and many pedestrians walk around.

You will get a one-minute long video. The video depicts the scenes and characters clearly and realistically, with a very restored film texture. The movements and camera angle changes are relatively stable, and it is difficult to tell with the naked eye that this is a video generated by AI.

It is understood that before OpenAI makes Sora available to the public, it will also take some important safety measures, such as adversarial testing of the model in areas such as misinformation, hateful content, and bias. Therefore, before Sora is used, all analysis is based on the imagination of the information OpenAI has given.

OpenAI claims that the model has a deep understanding of language, and judging by the generated videos, it is indeed a technological leap, with a direct impact on the entire content industry. Advertising, as one of the industries that deals most with content and data, will of course repeatedly discuss and analyze this tool that may bring about disruptive changes.

01 Vincent Video's efficiency has leapt forward, entering a new realm of creativity

Musk said on the social platform X that "humans are willing to accept defeat" and lamented Sora's outstanding "creation". For the advertising industry, the most obvious benefit is the improvement of efficiency. After all, using AI tools to generate a complete video in a few seconds sounds very impactful and tempting. In the future, the shooting and production cycle and cost of TVC commercials may be greatly reduced.

Secondly, if you choose a theme that is suitable for AI, the video quality can also be improved. For example, stream of consciousness and surrealism are areas where AI is good at. Compared with the rigid restoration of the real world, AI can bring more possibilities for people's imagination. Zhou Hongyi predicted that Sora "may bring huge disruption to the advertising industry, movie trailers, and short video industries", which to a certain extent represents the expectation of the infinite creativity of artificial intelligence.

Finally, tools like Sora will lead to a shift in the advertising industry's business model, making lightweight operations, independent creation, and "one-person companies" more likely to be realized. Zak Kukoff, an early investor in San Francisco, USA, boldly predicted that within five years, a team of less than five people will use the Vincent video model and non-union labor to produce a movie with a box office revenue of more than $50 million. This is a complete and specific imagination of how tools like Sora can improve efficiency and unleash creativity, which shows that the content industry has full confidence in the tools.

02 Applications are not yet mature, and human labor is indispensable

While imagining endlessly, advertising practitioners must face the current state of technology and environment.

Of the 48 videos on Sora's website, some reveal glaring errors, like a basketball "punching through the model" when passing through the hoop, or a chair dug out of the sand floating in action.

OpenAI has been candid in reminding the public of the weaknesses of the Sora model, which can have difficulty accurately simulating the physics of complex scenes and cannot understand specific instances of cause and effect, such as when a person takes a bite of a cookie but the cookie has no bite mark. The model can also confuse spatial details such as "left" and "right" in the prompt words, and it has difficulty following a specific camera shooting trajectory and accurately describing events that occur over time.

If the immature model is put into use, the above-mentioned weaknesses will increase the cost of manual learning and modification. It is still unknown whether it can improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of advertising.

On the other hand, the game between technology and people is an eternal problem. There have been many discussions about "unemployment" and "losing jobs" in the advertising industry. Under OpenAI's official tweet announcing Sora, there were also a lot of comments expressing concerns and anger about the unemployment of related practitioners and the demise of small startups, questioning whether OpenAI's scientists only think about how to do it, but not whether they should do it.

Fortunately, after experiencing waves of bombardment from ChatGPT, many practitioners have been able to look at this issue relatively objectively. It may also be that they have become numb after hearing too many "wolf cries". To borrow a sentence from director Zhang Dapeng, "In fact, the impact on the advertising industry is more than just AI. It has long been impacted by short videos and various things. Every industry, like every person, is not eternal, and you have to accept change."

Advertising is not only closely connected with practitioners, but also brings a very humanized feeling to consumers. Smart Industry New Media Zhidongxi believes that creative videos made with AI are difficult to connect with people emotionally. When consumers are moved by a brand video, but find that it is generated by AI, will they feel a little disgusted? When everything virtual becomes beyond reality through artificial intelligence, the rough reality becomes particularly valuable.

Author: TOP Jun

Source: WeChat public account "TopMarketing"