Does Sora Represent the Beginning of the End for Film and TV Production as We Know It?

Back during the Hollywood strikes of last year the rights of writers and actors with regard to the usage of their work to train the artificial intelligence (AI) that many anticipate replacing some or all of what they do were a key point of contention.

This was an entirely legitimate concern for the writers and actors to have, given that even a slight chance of artificial intelligence doing just that justified their attempting to protect themselves (certainly in the wake of their experience of the streaming boom). Still, as one less bullish than most on the relevant technologies I have been skeptical that the day when AI really could do all that the actors and writers fear (and the executives doubtless hope). After all, consider how in the 1990s we were made to expect that the stars of today would soon be seen interacting with the stars of yesteryear on screen as a matter of course; and just a little while after, that the day had come in which fully computer-generated backgrounds would replace traditional sets. In both cases the technology was oversold--and the fact proved again and again over the years (as when Rogue One presented Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarquin).

However, the chatter surrounding Open AI's Sora is making me wonder if the moment when the technology does start to really matter in the ways they talked about might not actually be so far away. Granted, it is months away from being usable by the public, and thus far produces only short videos with significant imperfections--but it is easy to picture a more developed, more robust, version, backed by human clean-up efforts, enabling a film studio (as against some casual online user) to deliver the equivalent of today's megabudgeted blockbuster fare at considerably lower cost, enough so that they will find it cost-effective to make parts of movies this way, and eventually whole films. The result is that the writers and actors who fought to secure rights within this particular contract battle may have been not only prudent, but prescient, in their stance--and their defeat in that battle potentially catastrophic for their professions.