Why are there so many animals in AI videos?

ILast week, Open AI, a company specializing in artificial intelligence, presented the new program Sora. After ChatGPT and DALL-E, which generate images and text, Sora is supposed to generate complex videos from text prompts. Sora's announcement comes just weeks after Google unveiled its Lumiere text-to-video conversion program.

Access to Sora and Lumiere is still very limited, so conversations about the program are based primarily on the 48 sample videos posted by Open AI as well as associated claims. The videos, some of them impressive, show kites flying through the forest like a flock of birds, or close-up images of animals.

The selection of published claims and videos is interesting because it illustrates the global claim that Open AI makes: videos from Japan, Chinese New Year, a general view of Santorini, and a drone view of the California coast. Sora even transcends time and produces animated images of a gold rush in California or a street scene in Lagos in the year 2056. There are also some videos with AI surrealism, such as a man reading while sitting on a cloud or sharks walking through a cloud. Swimming streets of New York.

Google's Lumiere also focuses on nature shots, landscapes, underwater scenes, steam locomotives, and sailing ships. Software companies particularly like to feature images of animals, often featuring dogs and other cute, furry animals in particular. Also because animating fur is difficult and convincing animal videos can demonstrate the software's capabilities. Above all, bugs in animal recordings don't look as scary as they do in videos with humans. One, for example, shows a pack of wolf pups frolicking around, their number constantly changing as they move as the animals turn to each other.

A video like this with a group of people would be horror movie quality. The laughing grandmother in front of her birthday cake in Sora's video looks like a robot and produces horror effects similar to the distorted human limbs in computer-generated images a few years ago.