Linn Maung
The war on artificial intelligence supremacy has intensified with the emergence of Sora, Open Ai’s latest text-to-video AI technology, leaving China far behind in the AI race. The Open AI’s new Sora has the potential to revolutionize advertising, movie trailers and short video industries. A new AI model developed by US-based AI research company Open AI — creator of chatbot ChatGPT . — has recently become a global sensation, experts said.
Shocked by the advancement of Sora, Chinese technologists are busy assessing its impact on various sectors including film industry as they find themselves on the shaky ground.
The matter came up for discussion in the recently held annual sessions of National People’s Congress (NPC) and the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), most important political gatherings in China held annually.
Speaking at these sessions, National Political Advisor said that the emergence of Sora will bring huge impact, and it is recommended that China build offshore data centres in the port, and prioritize access for trial groups. The National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) member and Shanghai Public Diplomacy Association president Zhou Hanmin, China has continuously improved the circulation mechanism of data elements, and has promulgated laws and regulations such as the Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law in recent years. But China still has some problems with the cross-border flow of data.
The criteria for evaluating and recognizing crucial data remain ambiguous. Current laws and regulations have yet to provide a distinct definition of crucial data, resulting in a lack of clear reference standards for enterprises to differentiate between collected data and crucial data, Zhou noted. Zhou said that it will have a huge impact on the use of data, and suggested that some groups are given priority access, because the more we do not understand, the more dangerous it is.
Industry experts said that Chinese tech firms should pool more resources into accumulating more training data, improving computing capacities and cultivating talent in the field of AI-powered video generation models. AI-related stocks continued to rally in the A-share market, with Chinese cloud video solution providers Hangzhou Arcvideo Technology Co Ltd and BizConf Telecom Co Ltd seeing their shares surge by the daily limit of 20 percent on the Shanghai bourse’s STAR Market. They added the multimodal large language model, which possesses the ability to generate high-resolution video clips based on given text prompts, is an undeniable future development direction for generative AI, and will inject strong impetus into a new round of industrial development.
Liu Xingliang, director of the Beijing-based Data Centre of China Internet, a research institute specializing in the internet industry, said Sora is undoubtedly a major breakthrough for AI.Chinese tech firms should pool more resources into accumulating more training data, improving computing capacities and cultivating talent in the field of AI-powered video generation models, said industry observers.
Chinese experts especially those from the film industry prefer to critically analyse Sora “ When I see Sora, the first word that comes to my mind is ‘shock,’ like the majority in the film industry. As film producers, we understand the potential impact of AI on the various aspects of film production, some position such as works relating to movie preview would be impacted,” Ma Heliang, executive secretary-general of the science fiction film working committee of China Film Association told. But the current technology is still far from reaching the levels required for making theatrical films, or to hollow out the entire movie industry. Over the past 100 years, movies have established an emotional connection and a shared social space with the audience. It involves socializing and sharing aesthetics, making it a complex entity. It is not possible to replace this experience with a simple video clip generated by AI, Ma noted.
Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of 360 Security Technology, stated that Sora may bring a huge disruption to the advertising industry, movie trailers, and short-video industry, but it may not necessarily defeat TikTok quickly. It is more likely to become a creative tool for TikTok.
According to Global Times , many posted on Chinese social media that the emergence of Sora has highlighted the growing disparity between China and the US. Zhou said that although the development level of large-scale models in China seems to be close to GPT-3.5, there is still a one-year-and-a-half gap compared to 4.0. OpenAI should still have some secret weapons, whether it is GPT-5 or machine self-learning to generate content.
Liu Wei, director of the human-machine interaction and cognitive engineering laboratory with the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, also a frequent participator in many rounds of talks with his US counterparts on AI technology, told the Global Times that scholars in the two countries share common understanding believing that the US is leading-edge in software and hardware development and this advantage will further increase. But on AI application and data collection, US scholars admit that China has a greater lead. Liu noted that the technology is a double-edged sword. The rapid development will for sure bear strong brunt in traditional ethnics, laws and ways of production. A laissez faire approach will lead to infringe on interests of the public but an over-strict regulation will slow down the technology development.
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