Knight wonders if, soon enough, clients will use Sora over hiring him to produce footage of a foreign country and splice their product with the video. His workload has already shrunk following the pandemic and spillover from the U.S. writer’s strike last year. AI, he fears, could make for a third act of reduction.
Forrester’s Pattisall said Sora is “close to production quality,” and that its ability to fit the 15-, 30- and 60-second formats of most video players is a reason that advertisers will be even more intrigued.
Others, like Wesnaes, do not view Sora as yet producing the kind of video that should warrant much concern. Wesnaes could see the AI platform creating B-roll, as well as stock material for brands, but nothing of “Super Bowl quality,” he said.
OpenAI agrees, and readily admits on Sora’s landing page shortcomings that still need work. Complex physics, for example, may not be accurately reflected in videos. And ambiguities in a prompt can still easily confuse the platform.
Common ground for a path forward
With so much investment fueling AI development, creative practitioners have good reason to fear that their voices are at risk of being drowned out. But to reject the technology would be unwise, said Andrew Shepherd, a freelance videographer.
“We can use these AI tools as just tools,” he said.
Forrester’s Pattisall sees a similar path forward for the ad industry at large, in which AI can be taken for both its exciting implications and concerning ones, not either/or. Through this approach, creatives must embrace developments in technology, while understanding that the need for creativity is not going away.
Indeed, originality was found to be the most significant factor in lowering a marketing job’s likelihood to be automated by AI, according to a report conducted last year by Pattisall and fellow Forrester analyst Michael O’Grady.
The degree to which Sora will actually shake up advertising’s creative process will depend on how widely it is used once it becomes publicly available, Pattisall said.
Upon launch, both creatives and tech leaders will need to apprehend a series of other obstacles introduced by AI. Deep fakes could become a much bigger issue as a result of Sora’s realism, said McCann’s Horwitz. Brands have been victims of this tactic, and are likely to be affected by forthcoming federal policy addressing deep fakes.
Ogilvy’s Wesnaes expects Sora will eventually drive more AI-generated ads, and not the kind that are purposefully clumsy, as seen by numerous marketers over the past 15 months. But these efforts could also attract a higher level of scrutiny from consumers used to the execution of traditional advertising.
“Now that you can create something of proper length and quality, you can create something that could receive pushback,” said Wesnaes.