When OpenAI unveiled technology called Sora last year that lets people instantaneously generate hyper-realistic videos — like a movie trailer of an astronaut traversing a barren desert planet — in response to a text prompt of just a few words, it wasn’t the quality of the footage that caught Hollywood folk off guard as much as the rapid growth of the technology initially thought to be years away from being able to be plugged into the production pipeline.
Questions swirled as studios execs chattered about AI’s place in the entertainment industry: what production processes can it streamline; to what degree can it cut costs; what are the legal and labor guardrails?
