OpenAI announced today that it is discontinuing development of its AI video generation platform, Sora, to focus its talent and hardware on competing with Anthropic's Claude for the agentic and code-generation markets. Sora's much-delayed and unremarkable second release a few months ago failed to impress AI filmmakers and gain much market share. It excelled at realism and action-scene generation, but was not competitive with Google's Veo 3.1 in dialogue and lip-sync generation. What has taken the community by storm is the release of Kling 3.0 and Kling Omini, with excellent character consistency, voice-generated dialogue, and multi-shot prompting that can take multiple-shotlist instructions and make camera framing and motion decisions based on text
The Higgsfield AI app has become a preferred platform to aggregate AI filmmaking tools. It's Cinema Studio 2.5 is based on Kling 3.0 under the hood for video and Nano Banana 2 for image generation. What the community is really waiting for, though, is the release of Seedance 2.0 in the US and Canada. This model is so good that the Motion Picture Association (MPA) has taken it to court, seeking a cease-and-desist order to prevent its use by US citizens. This should be resolved once they add stronger IP protection guardrails, but these will only affect US users, not worldwide AI filmmakers, especially in China. China, under the CCP, does not respect IP (or any private property rights), and developers there can create films featuring any character, living or dead, that ever appeared in its training data.
US AI filmmakers will be sending their money to Kling and Seeadance for the best models, making Beijing the AI Hollywood of the world. Virtually all short form advertising, micro-dramas, annimation, and other non-narrative filmmaking will be dominated by AI production, centered in China, in a few years. The CCP will control and censor the output to conform with its state policies that prevent any political criticism or negative depiction of the CCP or any positive depiction of the US or its military.
Google's Veo is the last US AI generation tools standing, and it is heavily censored and moderated by Google, preventing creative filmmakers from approaching most adult topics or sequences. This will further drive AI fillmmkers to the Chinese models and their NSFW distilled spinoffs. US AI filmmakers may try to get around the limits by using VPNs, but this risks legal problems and demmonitization of their content if it violates US restrictions.
AI filmmaking is moving rapidly toward a system that has been ceded to the Chinese under the control of the CCP. Let's hope US law and common sense catch up with the technology before it is too late.
What a story! We hope so!
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Considering we haven't even upgraded our infrastructure in over 30 years, I seriously doubt the government is going to try and catch up. They're too busy focusing on oil, war, and the Dow.
Bytedance has put the release of Seedance 2 on hold indefinitely, for reasons of copyright infringement and as ordered by the US Senate cannot permit its use in the US until privacy and copyright concerns are addressed. Good luck to them on that one.
Great article!!