On Wednesday, a video from OpenAI’s newly launched Sora AI video generator went viral on social media, that includes a gymnast who sprouts additional limbs and briefly loses her head throughout what seems to be an Olympic-style ground routine.
Because it seems, the nonsensical synthesis errors within the video—what we wish to name “jabberwockies”—trace at technical particulars about how AI video turbines work and the way they may get higher sooner or later.
However earlier than we dig into the small print, let’s check out the video.
An AI-generated video of an unimaginable gymnast, created with OpenAI Sora.
Within the video, we see a view of what seems like a ground gymnastics routine. The topic of the video flips and flails as new legs and arms quickly and fluidly emerge and morph out of her twirling and reworking physique. At one level, about 9 seconds in, she loses her head, and it reattaches to her physique spontaneously.
“As cool as the brand new Sora is, gymnastics continues to be very a lot the Turing check for AI video,” wrote enterprise capitalist Deedy Das when he initially shared the video on X. The video impressed loads of response jokes, similar to this reply to an identical publish on Bluesky: “hello, gymnastics professional right here! this isn’t humorous, gymnasts solely do that once they’re in excessive misery.”
We reached out to Das, and he confirmed that he generated the video utilizing Sora. He additionally supplied the immediate, which was very lengthy and cut up into 4 elements, generated by Anthropic’s Claude, utilizing advanced directions like “The gymnast initiates from the again proper nook, taking place along with her proper foot pointed behind in B-plus stance.”
“I’ve recognized for the final 6 months having performed with textual content to video fashions that they battle with advanced physics actions like gymnastics,” Das advised us in a dialog. “I needed to attempt it [in Sora] as a result of the character consistency appeared improved. General, it was an enchancment as a result of beforehand… the gymnast would simply teleport away or change their outfit mid flip, however general it nonetheless seems downright horrifying. We hoped AI video would be taught physics by default, however that hasn’t occurred but!”
