From The Washington Post
Friends took my face with the viral Sora app. I laughed. Then I got scared.
By Geoffrey A. Fowler
Recently I watched a video of myself getting arrested for drunken driving. Then I watched myself burn an American flag. Then I watched myself confess to eating toenail clippings. None of it happened. But all of it looked real enough to make me do a double take.
Friends made the videos using Sora, a new artificial intelligence app from the maker of ChatGPT that’s now the No. 1 iPhone download. I gave them access to my face. I never agreed to what they’d do with it.
Sora, made by OpenAI, makes it disturbingly easy to put people’s faces and voices into AI videos. You record a short selfie video to create a “cameo” profile and choose who can access it — friends, everyone or just yourself. Anyone with access can type a few words describing what they want to see you doing and generate a clip in minutes...
In a statement, OpenAI told me “you are in control of your likeness end-to-end with Sora.” When I asked why users don’t approve videos before they’re created, the company thanked me for the feedback. Translation: We know this is a problem. We shipped it anyway.
“We should have a lot more control over our identity,” said Hany Farid, a University of California at Berkeley professor who has studied AI-generated media for years. “But making the product safer makes it less viral, so nobody wants to do that,” he added...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
