Sora: Tyler Perry stops £800m studio expansion amid rapid rise of AI

Media mogul Tyler Perry is set to rethink an upcoming $800 million studio expansion amid the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in modern media.

Perry told the Hollywood Reporter that his new development would be shelved as there was “no need to it” due to his recent observations of the AI text-to-chat tool Sora.

Sora is the AI app developed by OpenAI and allows users to generate snippets of sixty-second video clips from a few lines of text. The tool is currently in a testing and security phase to limit the way the potential outputs of the app could be used to misinform or misdirect people.

Perry would go on to say that he has “been watching AI very closely and watching the advancements very closely. I was in the middle of, and have been planning for the last four years, about an $800 million expansion at the studio, which would’ve increased the backlot a tremendous size — we were adding 12 more soundstages.”

His construction work is now “indefinitely on hold because of Sora and what I’m seeing. I had gotten word over the last year or so that this was coming, but I had no idea until I saw recently the demonstrations of what it’s able to do.”

Perry continued that he would no longer have to be limited by location or have to travel for example.

“If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like nothing. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains, I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me,” he said in the interview.

As we reported last week, Sora has received a lot of attention for being able to take small prompts and turn them into a video clip. The app is not available to the public on a subscription basis like ChatGPT.

A statement on the company website has said “We’re sharing our research progress early to start working with and getting feedback from people outside of OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon.”

Perry responded to a question about the livelihoods of those working on his films, saying “I think of all of the construction workers and contractors who are not going to be employed because I’m not doing this next phase of the studio because there is no need to do it.”

He concluded that workers needed to be considered in lockstep with the digital advancements, saying that he hoped “that as people are embracing this technology and as companies are moving to reduce costs and save the bottom line, that there’ll be some sort of thought and some sort of compassion for humanity and the people that have worked in this industry and built careers and lives, that there’s some sort of thought for them.”

With the application of this AI technology still very much in the test phase, time will tell if the decision to halt this studio work will be seen as a potential piece of foresight from the world-famous film maker.

Featured image: Midjourney

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