COLUMBIA, S.C. — A new artificial intelligence (AI) program that appears to generate convincingly realistic video is drawing attention from South Carolina experts and some concerns from internet users.
Biplav Srivastava is a faculty member at the University of South Carolina's Department of Computer Science and Engineering and has done decades of hands-on work with AI. He said this week was big for the technology as OpenAI introduced a new program called "Sora" that turns text prompts into authentic-looking videos.
"It's actually causing lots and lots of new kinds of insights," he said. "That's on the positive side, but it is also creating a challenge. How do we detect what are some of the harms of this and how do we educate people?"
According to the University of South Carolina's Insights Lab, the announcement is getting tons of engagement and conversation. Their data shows over 500,000 unique posts discussing OpenAI, Sora, and artificial video generation have been created.
According to their findings, most posts have been neutral, but there have been more positive posts than negative.
"It's a good start, and those are the situations, whether it's in design, whether it's in, whether it's in travel, coding, that it has the potential to bootstrap our experience, our learning experience, our travel experience and so on," Srivastava said.
However, the findings show some popular terms also include negative perceptions of the technology, with phrases like "streamline spread of misinformation" and "streamline propaganda."
"If I want to do good, I can find technologies to do better," Srivastava said. "If I want to bad, I can find technologies to even accelerate that."
Srivastava said that despite some people being worried about AI, he sees it as a tool that can solve problems if society learns how to use it properly.
"Generative AI is an information tool, so for example, do we have access to information about elections, about health, about money, those pressing issues, how can we use generative AI in solving?" he said. "Because if you can't, having this tool has no value if it can't solve these problems."