OpenAI Sora: Is this the end to a drone pilot career?

This week OpenAI announce Sora, an AI powered realistic video generator that only requires a monthly subscription and an idea. In part of OpenAI’s announcement, it showed off rather convincing drone-like shots of Big Sur and coastal cities that would fool probably anyone but experts. So what does this mean for us drone pilots that hope to make a living doing this same thing?

AI now enters the video creation market

OpenAI, if you haven’t heard of them, they are the new hot tech company out of Silicon Valley that have taken the world by storm with its ChatGPT tool. The company has also leveraged its models to make DALL-E, a text prompted image generator.

Sora is the newest offering coming soon from OpenAI. In an expected next step in their line of products, Sora produces realistic (or non-realistic if you ask for it) videos of whatever you want with just a text prompt.

OpenAI gives several examples of possibilities Sora could be used in, with their given prompts. While some examples showed cartoon-ish scenes that only an AI could create, many were far more realistic and even convincing to be real, unless you looked closely.

Two examples specifically noted “drone” in their prompts and both are rather convincing for generic stock footage. The first being a sweeping orbit around a cliffside beach at California’s Big Sur. The second is another orbiting shot around a seaside church on the Italian coast.

Drone view of waves crashing against the rugged cliffs along Big Sur’s garay point beach. The crashing blue waters create white-tipped waves, while the golden light of the setting sun illuminates the rocky shore. A small island with a lighthouse sits in the distance, and green shrubbery covers the cliff’s edge. The steep drop from the road down to the beach is a dramatic feat, with the cliff’s edges jutting out over the sea. This is a view that captures the raw beauty of the coast and the rugged landscape of the Pacific Coast Highway.

sora prompt for above video

While the trees in the Big Sur clip look rather flat, but keeping focus on the lighthouse or the waves crashing into the rocks, you’ll never know it’s AI. The lighting is immaculate and even the colors look perfect for what you would expect from the conditions and time of day.

However, no matter how much your brain might try to trick you, this isn’t real, it’s made by a computer.

What do we do from here?

So what does this mean for us drone pilots? Are we out of a job?

Well I’ll have to be honest, as both a drone pilot and content creator, Sora is both concerning and extremely exciting. We now have an easy tool that will let us get video clips of any scene we want. This has a lot of potential use cases, from short b-roll to replacing stock footage. All with just a monthly subscription and no concern of copyright infringement.

However, this means that those that we had to go to for that same footage could see a reduce number of jobs or purchases from their libraries. Anyone that has made it a focus of their job capturing stock footage of locations around the world might see a hit. As Sora now makes it possible to get rather convincing and beautiful looking drone footage without the need of hiring a drone pilot.

This doesn’t change anything for us here at DroneDJ, we can’t critique or review drones by using AI footage now can we? (That was a rhetorical question, no, no we cannot.)

While one year ago we were laughing at a terrible video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that was generated with AI, I don’t think anyone is laughing now. As Marques Brownlee put it in his video, “this is the worse this technology is ever going to be.”

Does this mean the end to all drone pilot careers? No. First off drone pilots do much more than just capture cinematic video footage. Careers are available in a wide range of industries like mapping, public safety, and agriculture. Jobs that will always require someone to manage the drones in the air and can’t be replicated with AI.

However, Sora doesn’t also mean the end of drones in cinematography. First, that Sora created video of Big Sur, isn’t actually Big Sur, no matter how much it looks like it. Any ethical production company working on a project about Big Sur will need real-life footage of the area.

Second, Sora created clips still might not work for all productions. Films or videos that require a consistent look of the structures and colors around other scenes, you won’t be able to use this version of AI as there’s no way to input your content to ensure it matches. Although I’m sure with enough prompt engineering (the act of crafting the perfect AI prompt) you could get close.

Finally, even if you can get what you want out of Sora, the format or resolution still might not be what the client needs or wants. The footage on OpenAI’s page were all 1080p short clips. We don’t know yet if Sora will give us any higher resolution footage or what formats it will support but it might be safe to assume 8K Apple ProRes Raw probably won’t be in the drop down box. However, AI evolves every year and maybe one day it will.

However, Sora might turn out to be a great tool for YouTubers looking for short clips of locations or landscapes that fit the tone but aren’t required to be accurate. But what might be the bigger hit to us drone pilots is AI video being heavily adopted for commercials where accuracy is less of a concern and low cost solutions are king. I mean if you’re airing a commercial in rural America, will any of them really know or care the two second clip of an Italian coast was real or AI? Probably not.