A new program from the ChatGPT maker promises to create videos from simple text prompts, but little is known about how it will actually work. One of the Sora sample videos released by OpenAI. The entire scene was generated by AI. (Courtesy OpenAI) February 16, 2024, 4:39 PM ET Yesterday afternoon, OpenAI teased Sora, a video-generation model that promises to convert written text prompts into highly realistic videos. Footage released by the company depicts such examples as “a Shiba Inu dog wearing a beret and black turtleneck” and “in an ornate, historical hall, a massive tidal wave peaks and begins to crash.” The excitement from the press has been reminiscent of the buzz surrounding the image creator DALL-E or ChatGPT in 2022: Sora is described as “eye-popping,” “world-changing,” and “breathtaking, yet terrifying.” The imagery is genuinely impressive. At a glance, one example of an animated “fluffy monster” looks better than Shrek; an “extreme close up” of a woman’s eye, complete with a reflection of the scene in front of her, is startlingly lifelike. But Sora is …