- Sora goes live in the UK, EU, and other European countries
- You need a ChatGPT Plus or ChatGPT Pro account to use it
- Video quality and length depends on how much you pay
OpenAI’s Sora launched in the US back in December, and now users in the UK and the EU can join in the AI video generating fun – although you still need to be a paying user to be able to play around with the technology.
As announced by OpenAI, ChatGPT Plus ($20-per-month) and ChatGPT Pro ($200-per-month) users in the UK and EU can now log into Sora to start producing their own videos. As you would expect, the more you pay, the more videos you can make, and the better those videos will be.
The doors have opened to a select number of other non-EU countries in Europe too: Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland. As yet there’s no word on when the rest of the world is going to get access.
Sora isn’t part of the ChatGPT interface: it gets its own standalone website. If you’re a paying ChatGPT user, you can log in using the same credentials, and start generating videos with simple text prompts once you’ve confirmed your age.
Let’s make some AI movies
As a ChatGPT Plus subscriber in the UK, once I heard this news I immediately hustled along to the Sora website to start producing my own movie blockbusters. ChatGPT Plus users can create videos up to 720p in resolution, and up to 5 seconds in length.
This is all handled via a rather confusing credits system – with higher resolution clips costing more credits. A five-second, 720p video at a 16:9 resolution costs 60 seconds, and ChatGPT Plus users like me get 1,000 of them per month. Square videos and 480p videos use up fewer credits.
I was ready to pack in tech journalism for a career making films and shows from my home office – but to be honest the clips I got were rather rudimentary, janky, and generic, like stock photos pasted together and given some uncanny movements.
Still, the featured videos showcase is impressive (if a bit scary), and my colleague Lance Ulanoff has liked what he’s seen with Sora – so I probably need to try better prompts. I just won’t be making anything Netflix-worthy for the foreseeable future.
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