For a short time on Tuesday, a group of pissed-off artists shared a tool that allowed anyone to use OpenAI’s officially unreleased Sora AI model, which takes text prompts and turns them into videos.
In an open letter titled “Dear Corporate AI Overlords,” accompanied by illustrations of figures raiding their middle fingers, the artists wrote that they’d been offered early access to Sora to test the product and be creative partners. Instead, they believe OpenAI wanted to use hundreds of unpaid AI artists like them for the purpose of “art washing” an exploitative business model.
“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company,” the group wrote on the AI model-hosting platform Hugging Face. “While hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened—offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.”
The letter was authored by 16 artists who said they weren’t opposed to the use of AI as an artistic tool—in fact, many of them are early adopters of AI in their work—but they felt the need to protest against an early access program that appeared to be a public relations ploy rather than an opportunity to freely experiment with and critique the tool. Any videos they created using the tool had to be approved by OpenAI before being shared, they said.
“What we don’t agree with is how this artist program has been rolled out and how the tool is shaping up ahead of a possible public release,” the group wrote. “We are sharing this to the world in the hopes that OpenAI becomes more open, more artist-friendly and supports the arts beyond PR stunts.”
The tool posted to Hugging Face no longer works and a note added to the top of the letter says that OpenAI has temporarily shut down the Sora early access program for artists.
OpenAI teased Sora on February 15 with a webpage featuring videos generated by the model and in a series of tweets from CEO Sam Altman, who posted videos on X that the model generated based on crowdsourced prompts. Altman called it a “remarkable moment” but Sora has yet to be released for use beyond a small group of early testers, some of whom were clearly not thrilled with the way OpenAI wanted to use their labor.
In their letter, the artist group urged their peers to use open-source video generation tools and encouraged AI companies to “listen to and provide a path to true artist expression, with fair compensation to the artists.”