Watch the First Music Video Produced by OpenAI’s Sora Text-to-Video Generative AI Model

Chillwave musical artist Washed Out has released a music video directed by Paul Trillo for a song on Washed Out’s upcoming album, which was created using OpenAI’s new Sora generative AI model.

Sora AI Music Video

Though generative AI has been producing synthetic audio and video musical performances in tandem with the technology’s development, “The Hardest Part” music video seen above pushes into new territory as it has official sanction from the artist behind the song and was built entirely using a generative AI engine. “The Hardest Part,” taken from Washed Out’s upcoming “Notes From A Quiet Life” album. Trillo is known for innovating in his work, and in this case, that meant finding a way to bring a years-old idea he had that an endless zoom observing the life of a couple over many decades of their lives. Until now, Trillo’s ambitions have exceeded the capabilities of traditional video production methods.

“I was specifically interested in what makes Sora so unique. It offers something that couldn’t quite be shot with a camera, nor could it be animated in 3D, it was something that could have only existed with this specific technology,” Trillo said. “The surreal and hallucinatory aspects of AI allow you to explore and discover new ideas that you would have never dreamed of. Using AI to simply recreate reality is boring. I wasn’t interested in capturing realism but something that felt hyperreal.”

OpenAI’s Sora, the tool behind this creative leap, is designed to generate realistic and imaginative videos from text instructions. While still in the experimental phase and not yet widely released, it is currently being tested and refined in collaboration with visual artists, designers, and filmmakers. This feedback is crucial as OpenAI aims to make Sora a valuable asset for creative professionals, enabling them to push the boundaries of traditional visual storytelling. Ernest Greene, who uses Washed Out as his stage name, had nothing but praise for the video produced by Trillo.

“I’ve been a fan of Paul for a long time and he is amazingly skilled at incorporating cutting-edge visual effects that elevate a story instead of simply supplementing it with shock and awe,” Greene said. “I think that Paul is right when he says that this video could only be made using this new AI technology. In my opinion, the hallucinatory quality of Sora clips feel like the beginning of a new genre unto itself – one that is surreal and unpredictable and entirely unique to traditional cinema or even animation.”

The use of Sora in creating the music video for “The Hardest Part” not only showcases the potential of AI in artistic creation but also sets a precedent for future projects in the music and film industries. While not the first of its kind—with examples like Google’s VideoPoet, Meta’s Emu, and startups like Pika and Runway collection already demonstrating similar technology—Sora has captured attention for the high quality of its outputs. Trillo suggested he understands concerns over replacing the whole process of creating a film with AI but doesn’t necessarily share them. He sees a future where there’s a compromise and generative AI and synthetic media enhance a creator’s abilities.

“While some people feel this may be supplanting how things are made, I see this as supplementing ideas that could never have been made otherwise. Many artists in this industry are constantly compromising and negotiating their ideas with the reality of what can be made. This offers a glimpse at a future where music artists will be given the opportunity to dream bigger,” Trillo said. “An overreliance on this technique may become a crutch and it’s important that we don’t use this as the new standard of creation but another technique in the toolbelt.”

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