OpenAI just gave artists access to Sora and proved the AI video tool is weirder and more powerful than we thought

A man with a balloon for a head is somehow not the weirdest thing you'll see today thanks to a series of experimental video clips made by seven artists using OpenAI's Sora generative video creation platform.

Unlike OpenAI's ChatGPT AI chatbot and the DALL-E image generation platform, the company's text-to-video tool still isn't publicly available. However, on Monday, OpenAI revealed it had given Sora access to “visual artists, designers, creative directors, and filmmakers” and revealed their efforts in a “first impressions” blog post.

While all of the films ranging in length from 20 seconds to a minute-and-a-half are visually stunning, most are what you might describe as abstract. OpenAI's Artist In Residence Alex Reben's 20-second film is an exploration of what could very well be some of his sculptures (or at least concepts for them), and creative director Josephine Miller's video depicts models melded with what looks like translucent stained glass.

Not all the videos are so esoteric.

OpenAI Sora AI-generated video image by Don Allen Stevenson III

OpenAI Sora AI-generated video image by Don Allen Stevenson III (Image credit: OpenAI sora / Don Allen Stevenson III)

If we had to give out an award for most entertaining, it might be multimedia production company shy kids' “Air Head”. It's an on-the-nose short film about a man whose head is a hot-air-filled yellow balloon. It might remind you of an AI-twisted version of the classic film, The Red Balloon, although only if you expected the boy to grow up and marry the red balloon and…never mind.

Sora's ability to convincingly merge the fantastical balloon head with what looks like a human body and a realistic environment is stunning. As shy kids' Walter Woodman noted, “As great as Sora is at generating things that appear real, what excites us is its ability to make things that are totally surreal.” And yes, it's a funny and extremely surreal little movie.

But wait, it gets stranger.

The other video that will have you waking up in the middle of the night is digital artist Don Allen Stevenson III's “Beyond Our Reality,” which is like a twisted National Geographic nature film depicting never-before-seen animal mergings like the Girafflamingo, flying pigs, and the Eel Cat. Each one looks as if a mad scientist grabbed disparate animals, carved them up, and then perfectly melded them to create these new chimeras.

OpenAI and the artists never detail the prompts used to generate the videos, nor the effort it took to get from the idea to the final video. Did they all simply type in a paragraph describing the scene, style, and level of reality and hit enter, or was this an iterative process that somehow got them to the point where the man's balloon head somehow perfectly met his shoulders or the Bunny Armadillo transformed from grotesque to the final, cute product?

That OpenAI has invited creatives to take Sora for a test run is not surprising. It's their livelihoods in art, film, and animation that are most at risk from Sora's already impressive capabilities. Most seem convinced it's a tool that can help them more quickly develop finished commercial products.

“The ability to rapidly conceptualize at such a high level of quality is not only challenging my creative process but also helping me evolve in storytelling. It's enabling me to translate my imagination with fewer technical constraints,” said Josephine Miller in the blog post.

Go watch the clips but don't blame us if you wake up in the middle of the night screaming.

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Firefox Relay may not be as useful as you thought

A major debate has erupted online after Firefox's Relay offering was nearly added to a list of “burner” email services.

There is a list on the GitHub repository, with hundreds of burner email services, used by many service providers to prevent customers from using such tools  (such as, for example, 10minutemail) to register an account, and force them into using legitimate emails.

Companies do this for a number of reasons – to prevent abuse (someone might register hundreds of accounts to take advantage of a free offer), or to ensure that the service provider’s mailing list is useful.

Burner emails

Users, on the other hand, enjoy burner emails as they allow them to register for a service without having to sign up for a mailing list and receive multiple promotional emails every day. 

Recently, a co-maintainer of the list suggested that the “relay.firefox.com” domain be added to the list, prompting a major discussion on the forums, and drawing the attention of the media.

Relay is Firefox’s email privacy service, giving users free email aliases to use whenever they want to sign up for an online account anywhere. According to Mozilla, Relay’s goal is to preserve the privacy of its users’ email addresses, and comes as both a free service, and a paid Premium service.

Turning anti-abuse measures into weapons

Firefox Relay works by sending and forwarding email messages from the alias address to the primary email address. Besides the five free aliases, users are also allowed to get up to 150kb attachments.

Unlike burner emails, these aliases do not disappear unless deleted by the user, and are perceived by the users as “purely a privacy tool”.

“My reasoning on including this is that an email with a mozmail domain is never going to be a primary email and is always going to forward to some other address,” the co-maintainer, Dustin Ingram, explained.

But some people weren’t buying it. A GitHub user going by the alias worldofgeese said the GitHub repo “looks like it’s used, or can potentially be used, as a weapon by providers trying to rob users of one of the few defenses they have to their email address leaking, a scarily common occurrence, which are then weaponized by bad actors to flood those users' inboxes with spam.”

“Can you not do this? You look like extremely bad actors. Please don't contribute to an unsafe internet. I use Private Relay to protect my personal mail address, not as a tool for spam. I'm not even sure how a user would use Private Relay for spam, as users cannot begin email chains with a Relay address, only respond to mails delivered to those addresses.”

Via: BleepingComputer

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Windows 11 drive slowdown bug affects more users than thought – but a fix is coming

Windows 11 continues to run into trouble with drive speeds being seriously hampered, as more users are being affected by a previously flagged issue than was first thought – this isn’t just about NVMe SSDs it seems – but the better news is that Microsoft has a (hopefully imminent) fix in the pipeline.

Earlier this week, we reported on the problem with NVMe SSDs running over 50% slower in some cases with write speeds, but as noted, it turns out that this nasty storage flaw affects all disks, as Microsoft has recently admitted (as spotted by Windows Latest, which points out the problem has been observed across all sorts of online forums).

On November 22, Microsoft pushed out a cumulative update in preview, KB5007262, and under the listed fixes, a cure for this issue is present noting that it affects all types of storage medium.

Microsoft said that KB5007262 “addresses an issue that affects the performance of all disks (NVMe, SSD, hard disk) on Windows 11 by performing unnecessary actions each time a write operation occurs. This issue occurs only when the NTFS USN journal is enabled. Note, the USN journal is always enabled on the C: disk.”

As this is an optional (preview) update, you have to manually install it, and as with anything which is still officially in testing, it may also cause problems as well as solve them.

The best course of action at this point is likely to wait, because this preview update arrived a few weeks back now, and the full (finalized) cumulative update will be available for Windows 11 users on Patch Tuesday for this month, which is this coming Tuesday, December 14.


Analysis: A chance to turn over a new leaf squandered

This is another of those alarming bugs which have blighted Windows 11, and made it an unpleasant experience performance-wise for a number of users. It’s worrying to learn that it affects all types of SSDs and even hard disks as well, considering how much of a speed reduction can be caused by the problem, but at least we know that the resolution is (theoretically) just around the corner now.

Windows 11 has also witnessed a number of serious issues around performance on the desktop with File Explorer, and this is such a fundamental piece of the interface that it’s another very concerning facet of what seems to be misfiring QA (quality assurance) at Microsoft.

That isn’t a new thing, and we’ve got used to this state of affairs with Windows 10, sadly. But it’s something we hoped might be rectified, given that Windows 11 could have been a new leaf for the software giant – but Microsoft certainly hasn’t got off on the right foot here, bug-wise. Indeed, these performance problems with drives and the UI were in evidence before Windows 11 was even released, so it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t had some time to get things right.

Clearly, the drive issue was a thorny problem, and it’s better late than never with the fix – but we won’t stop banging the drum that Microsoft needs to do better when it comes to keeping its desktop operating systems in more bug-free shape than this.

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