OpenAI Releases New ‘Sora’ Video creation App
Ryan Christoffel reports for 9to5 Mac OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, has a new app in the iOS App Store: Sora. The app, as Christoffel describes it, uses “AI for video creation.”
According to Christoffel, Sora’s description reads in part the software is meant to “turn your ideas into videos and drop yourself into the action,” adding the app has been built with the purpose of being “a new kind of creative app that turns text prompts and images into hyperreal videos with sound using the latest advancements from OpenAI.”
Christoffel notes Sora represents “the first major OpenAI launch” since its latest model, GPT–5, was released to much fanfare last month. Based on some reports I’ve seen online from intrepidly nerdy early adopters, access to Sora currently is restricted to a waitlist. I haven’t yet downloaded it, but I‘ll likely be putting my name on the list soon.
From an accessibility perspective, Sora’s utility lies in a sentence in the aforementioned app description: “A single sentence can unfold into a cinematic scene, an anime short, or remix of a friend’s video.” Of course, this methodology follows the lead of OpenAI’s canonical chatbot; to wit, writing a text prompt will prompt the AI to create based on one’s instructions. Although most people are familiar with simple prompts or queries for interacting with ChatGPT—or Gemini or Claude, for that matter—the reality is, the modality is genius for accessibility. In Sora’s case, that the user is supposed to give the app a short descriptor for what to do means video creation—ostensibly reasonably complex and involved depending on creative intent, tools, etc—suddenly becomes far more accessible because AI is assuming the load and doing the grunt work. As I’ve written many times, Sora very plausibly could do for video creation what, say, ChatGPT does for web searches and other research for school essays and whatnot. Again, the salient point is, used in this manner, AI is a bonafide enabling technology that breaks down barriers to creative processes that one otherwise would be excluded from for myriad reasons. This is neither trivial nor esoteric—and it sure as hell isn’t “lazy.” I wrote about similar concepts in June 2024 when I interviewed Kantrell Betancourt about her then-new book on using Midjourney and seeing AI writ large as an assistive technology.
