The artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT has launched its video generation tool in the UK amid a growing debate over copyright between the tech sector and creative industries. Beeban Kidron, a film director and crossbench peer, said the introduction of OpenAI’s Sora adds another layer of urgency to the copyright debate, as the government faces criticism over its plans to allow AI firms to use artists’ work without permission.
San Francisco-based OpenAI is making Sora available to UK users who pay for ChatGPT. The tool stunned film-makers when it was revealed last year, with the film and TV mogul Tyler Perry pausing an $800m expansion of his Atlanta studio complex after saying the tool might make building sets or traveling to locations unnecessary. It was launched in the US publicly in December.
OpenAI released examples of Sora’s use by artists from across the UK and mainland Europe, where the tool is also being released on Friday. Josephine Miller, a British digital artist, created a two-minute video of models wearing bioluminescent fauna and said the tool would open more doors for younger creatives.
Kidron said the launch underlines the importance of the debate over copyright and AI in the UK, which centers on government proposals to let AI firms use copyrighted work to train their models. She added that if copyrighted material was taken without license to help train Sora, it would have breached YouTube’s terms of service. OpenAI said use of copyrighted material to build Sora complied with copyright law and the tool was built using a wide range of datasets.
Sora offers users the option to make clips of varying lengths and can then be extended to make longer videos. Features include displaying the clip in a variety of aesthetic styles, including “film noir” and “balloon world” where objects are represented as inflatables. Clips can take a minute to generate at a low resolution and four minutes or longer at a higher resolution. A “storyboard” option allows users to tweak the video by editing a more detailed version of the prompt created by the underlying AI model that powers Sora.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/28/openai-sora-video-generation-uk-amid-copyright-row
