A chillwave musician uploaded this week the first entirely AI-generated music video created by OpenAI’s text-to-video model, Sora.
Washed Out’s latest song, “The Hardest Part,” was released Thursday, complete with a four-minute music video following one couple’s romance from high school through the rest of their adult lives together — speeding through scenes alluding to a wedding, childrearing and eventual death.
The video’s director, Paul Trillio, wrote in a statement shared by Washed Out’s record label Sub Pop that he had wanted to film this type of “infinite zoom” concept for a decade now, but never attempted it because he believed it would be too ambitious.
“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,” Trillio wrote. “The surreal and hallucinatory aspects of AI allow you to explore and discover new ideas that you would have never dreamed of.”
Sora, which is not yet available to the public, can generate videos up to a minute long based on an idea typed into a text box. Edited together, these clips could feasibly be used to make full-length projects. The technology had roused a mixture of excitement and concern online after OpenAI unveiled its hyper-realistic video generation capabilities in February.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The Hardest Part,” the lead single from Washed Out’s upcoming album “Notes From a Quiet Life,” is the longest music video made with Sora so far. But there’s something dream-like, almost uncanny, about the visuals — an effect that seems intentional, according to Trillio, who wrote that it’s “boring” to try and recreate reality with AI.
“I wasn’t interested in capturing realism but something that felt hyperreal. The fluid blending and merging of different scenes feels more akin to how we move through dreams and the murkiness of memories,” Trillio wrote. “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.”
Washed Out, whose real name is Ernest Greene, also wrote in a statement shared by Sub Pop that Sora managed to bring the fictitious couple’s story, centered on nostalgia and love lost, to life in ways that he believes only AI can.
“What [Trillio’s] come up with is nostalgic, sad, uplifting, and often quite strange. However, he still manages to make you feel for the characters and invested in the journey of how their lives progress,” Greene wrote, adding, “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.”
Some artists online criticized the use of AI to create the video, expressing doubt that it enhanced the video’s creativity or helped to evoke emotion from viewers.
The explosion of generative AI technology has permeated creative industries in recent years, raising questions of how this influx of new tools — enabling internet users everywhere to create music, write scripts or lyrics, and generate visual media with nothing but a few text prompts — will impact the labor of real-life artists and producers.
Concerns around generative AI were already top of mind for entertainment industry workers during last year’s labor strikes. And many musicians continue to push for protections around use of AI models. Just last month, Drake pulled his diss track “Taylor Made Freestyle” from his social media accounts after Tupac Shakur’s estate threatened to sue him for using an AI-generated version of the late rapper’s voice.
Despite a flurry of lawsuits around AI algorithms learning from human artists’ copyrighted work without consent or compensation, others in the tech space have few qualms about using the technology — often arguing that the accessibility of generative AI tools will allow lower-budget artists to pursue bigger projects.
Trillio wrote that he remains optimistic about how artists will adapt as AI reveals new technological and creative possibilities.
“This offers a glimpse at a future where music artists will be given the opportunity to dream bigger,” he wrote. “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.”
