- Flash flooding kills three in northern Thailand
- Kaur leads India to victory over Pakistan in Women's T20 World Cup
- Juventus held by Cagliari after late penalty drama
- In France's Marseille, teen 'stabbed 50 times' then burned alive
- Ruthless Gauff beats Muchova in straight sets to win China Open
- India restrict Pakistan to 105-8 in Women's T20 World Cup
- England target repeat of Pakistan Test whitewash
- Penrith Panthers win fourth straight NRL title after downing Storm
- Weary Sinner happy for day off after battling into Shanghai last 16
- Pakistan's Masood warns England still a force without Stokes
- Madrid's Carvajal to miss several months after serious knee injury
- Israel pounds Lebanon ahead of Hamas attack anniversary
- Two elephants die in flash flooding in northern Thailand
- Sabalenka targets world number one and Wuhan hat-trick
- Toddler among 4 dead in migrant Channel crossings
- Tunisia votes with Saied set for re-election
- Bagnaia sets 'example' with Japan MotoGP win to cut gap on Martin
- Intense Israeli bombing rocks Beirut ahead of war anniversary
- Mozambique vote: no suspense but some disillusion
- Austrian rapper channels anti-racist rage in Romani hip-hop songs
- Ohtani magic powers Dodgers over Padres in MLB playoff thriller
- Five of the best: Pakistan-England Test thrillers
- Man sets arm on fire as marches across US mark Gaza war anniversary
- Vietnam's young coffee entrepreneurs brew up a revolution
- Trump rallies at site of failed assassination: 'Never quit'
- Too hot by day, Dubai's floodlit beaches are packed at night
- Is music finally reckoning with #MeToo?
- Fans hail Trump's 'guts' as he returns to site of rally shooting
- Lebanon state media says 'very violent' Israeli strikes hit south Beirut
- Guardians maul Tigers, miracle Mets rally in MLB series openers
- Lebanon state media says Israeli strikes hit south Beirut
- Miami on track for MLS record points after win in Toronto
- Madrid beat Villarreal but Carvajal suffers knee injury
- Madrid beat Villarreal to move level with Liga leaders Barcelona
- Monaco take top spot in Ligue 1 with win at Rennes
- French rugby player on rape charge whistled but 'serene' on return
- Madrid beat Villarreal to level Liga leaders Barca
- Thuram treble fires Inter past Torino and up to second
- 'Fight': defiant Trump jets in to site of rally shooting
- Toddler among 3 dead in migrant Channel crossings
- Mexico City's new mayor sworn in with pledges on water, housing
- Israel on alert ahead of Hamas attack anniversary
- Guardians maul Tigers in MLB playoff series opener
- Macron criticises Israel on Gaza, Lebanon operations
- French rugby player whistled but 'serene' on return amid ongoing rape case
- Kovacic stars as Man City sink Fulham to get title bid back on track
- Retegui hat-trick fires five-star Atalanta to hammering of Genoa
- Heavyweights Australia, England off to World Cup winning starts
- Visiting UN refugee agency chief decries 'terrible crisis' in Lebanon
- Spinners come to party as England defeat Bangladesh at T20 World Cup
'It's frightening': YouTubers split over OpenAI's video tool Sora
US firm OpenAI debuted a tool last week that can generate highly realistic snippets of video from just a few lines of text, leading content creators to wonder if they are the latest professionals about to be replaced by algorithms.
Reactions to the tool, called Sora, have ranged from head-over-heels enthusiasm to alarm over the future direction of the industry.
YouTuber Marques Brownlee called it "frightening" and "threatening" to see an AI doing his job.
On the other hand, Caleb Ward, one half of AI filmmaking duo Curious Refuge, told his YouTube followers he could not wait to get his hands on the tool.
Yet both Ward and Brownlee agreed that it was a massive moment for their industry.
"I can't stress enough how big a deal this is for the filmmaking and creative world," said Ward, who recently went viral with a trailer he created for a Wes Anderson-style Star Wars movie.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in its announcement that Sora was not yet available to the public.
The announcement did not specify use cases but said "a number of visual artists, designers and filmmakers" had been chosen to help test it.
- 'Like an amoeba' -
The firm accompanied its statement with sample videos including a stylish woman walking along a Tokyo street, a cat waking up its owner in bed, and a group of charging woolly mammoths.
The internet immediately lit up with awe and praise, as is common with OpenAI products.
"I was shocked by their quality," Anis Ayari, an AI engineer and streamer known as Defend Intelligence, told AFP.
He suggested the tool could one day be used to create entirely virtual presenters.
But there were also plenty of dissenters who felt the videos were still firmly stuck in the "uncanny valley", where glitches in otherwise photo-realistic images can leave viewers feeling queasy.
Commentator Ed Zitron wrote that in OpenAI's cat video "the owner's arm appears to be part of the cushion and the cat's paw explodes out of its arm like an amoeba".
He wrote in his newsletter that AI video tools were too expensive and resource-hungry to ever be genuinely useful.
And styles of clips could not be harmonised, making the tools useless for creating anything other than tiny snippets.
- AI fatigue -
Sora enters a marketplace that is heating up, with Google, Stability AI and several other smaller players already in the game.
YouTube itself announced last September it was developing a tool to let creators make AI-generated videos and background pictures.
However, the tools already available have hardly taken the world by storm.
French streamer FibreTigre said he had tried AI video tools but ended his experiment.
He said he was worried about the ethics of using tools trained on other artists' work, and ultimately the programs did not do their job well enough.
"They're just ugly," he said of AI videos.
He said he could see a future where viewers would have a "huge amount of fatigue" with AI and would cherish anything that was not artificial.
L.Mason--AMWN