OpenAI is at war with its own Sora video testers following brief public leak
OpenAI has cut off testing access to its Sora video generation platform after a group of artists briefly shared their own early access in a publicly usable webpage Tuesday. The group, going by the moniker PR Puppets, claims the stunt was a protest against being asked to work as unpaid R&D and bug testers while participating in "art washing" of AI tools. But OpenAI says participation in the early alpha test is voluntary and has no requirements that testers provide feedback.
PR Puppets posted its "Generate with Sora" access point to Hugging Face at about 8:30 Eastern time Tuesday morning, according to Git commit logs. Quickly, AI experts on social media noticed the posting and confirmed that the page connected to endpoints on OpenAI's actual Sora API and hosting on a videos.openai.com domain, presumably with authentication tokens provided to testers by OpenAI itself.
That access was revoked within hours, but not before plenty of eager followers managed to generate their own videos and share them on social media. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Washington Post the company is temporarily pausing all test access to Sora to evaluate the situation. Other users dug into the code to discover hints of different modes and "styles" that might be in development for Sora.
