Raw Story

US firm OpenAI debuted a tool last week that can generate highly realistic snippets of video from just a few lines of text, leading content creators to wonder if they are the latest professionals about to be replaced by algorithms.

Reactions to the tool, called Sora, have ranged from head-over-heels enthusiasm to alarm over the future direction of the industry.

YouTuber Marques Brownlee called it "frightening" and "threatening" to see an AI doing his job.

On the other hand, Caleb Ward, one half of AI filmmaking duo Curious Refuge, told his YouTube followers he could not wait to get his hands on the tool.

Yet both Ward and Brownlee agreed that it was a massive moment for their industry.

"I can't stress enough how big a deal this is for the filmmaking and creative world," said Ward, who recently went viral with a trailer he created for a Wes Anderson-style Star Wars movie.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in its announcement that Sora was not yet available to the public.

The announcement did not specify use cases but said "a number of visual artists, designers and filmmakers" had been chosen to help test it.

'Like an amoeba'

The firm accompanied its statement with sample videos including a stylish woman walking along a Tokyo street, a cat waking up its owner in bed, and a group of charging woolly mammoths.

The internet immediately lit up with awe and praise, as is common with OpenAI products.

"I was shocked by their quality," Anis Ayari, an AI engineer and streamer known as Defend Intelligence, told AFP.

He suggested the tool could one day be used to create entirely virtual presenters.

But there were also plenty of dissenters who felt the videos were still firmly stuck in the "uncanny valley", where glitches in otherwise photo-realistic images can leave viewers feeling queasy.

Commentator Ed Zitron wrote that in OpenAI's cat video "the owner's arm appears to be part of the cushion and the cat's paw explodes out of its arm like an amoeba".

He wrote in his newsletter that AI video tools were too expensive and resource-hungry to ever be genuinely useful.

And styles of clips could not be harmonised, making the tools useless for creating anything other than tiny snippets.

AI fatigue

Sora enters a marketplace that is heating up, with Google, Stability AI and several other smaller players already in the game.

YouTube itself announced last September it was developing a tool to let creators make AI-generated videos and background pictures.

However, the tools already available have hardly taken the world by storm.

French streamer FibreTigre said he had tried AI video tools but ended his experiment.

He said he was worried about the ethics of using tools trained on other artists' work, and ultimately the programs did not do their job well enough.

"They're just ugly," he said of AI videos.

He said he could see a future where viewers would have a "huge amount of fatigue" with AI and would cherish anything that was not artificial.

© 2024 AFP

Lawyers for Donald Trump late Thursday night launched a multi-pronged effort to toss out of court Special Counsel Jack Smith's prosecution of the ex-president in the classified documents case, which includes charges under the Espionage Act. Many legal experts were stunned, not only by the move, but by the shallowness of the arguments.

The motions will be decided by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed by then-President Donald Trump during his last year in office.

"Mr. Trump’s lawyers made a barrage of legal arguments in seeking to circumvent a criminal case that many legal experts consider the most ironclad of the four against him," The New York Times reported just past midnight, observing that some of the claims presented by attorneys for the indicted ex-president "tested the bounds of credulity or clashed with prior court rulings."

"They attacked the law he is accused of violating, questioned the legality of the special counsel prosecuting him and argued that he is shielded from prosecution by presidential immunity," the Times reported, adding that many of the arguments "appeared designed to delay the case from moving toward trial, a strategy that Mr. Trump has pursued in all of the criminal proceedings he is facing."

READ MORE: ‘Reached His Limits’: Engoron ‘Brings the Hammer Down’ on Trump Attorney

Politico late Friday morning added the seven different motions filed were "a grab bag of arguments that the charges are legally faulty, that prosecutors have targeted him for political reasons and that the special counsel spearheading the case had no legal authority to bring it."

Nearly two weeks ago Trump, citing his claim of "presidential immunity," asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay proceedings in Special Counsel Smith's other court case against him, the election interference trial. The Court agreed to take up the case but has not released its decision.

Now, citing the same or similar arguments, Trump is plowing forward.

"Trump claims that he designated the classified materials 'personal' and he took his 'personal records' to Mar-a-Lago with him," MSNBC legal contributor Katie Phang reported Thursday night.

Phang points to this section, the opening of Trump's motion:

"President Donald J. Trump respectfully submits this motion seeking dismissal of Counts 1 through 32 on the basis of presidential immunity, as these charges stem directly from official acts by President Trump while in office," it reads. "Specifically, President Trump is immune from prosecution on Counts 1 through 32 because the charges turn on his alleged decision to designate records as personal under the Presidential Records Act ('PRA') and to cause the records to be moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. As alleged in the Superseding Indictment, President Trump made this decision while he was still in office. The alleged decision was an official act, and as such is subject to presidential immunity."

READ MORE: ‘Handmaid’s Tale’: Biden Campaign Blasts Trump Christian Nationalism Plans

After the FBI executed a legal search warrant of Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence and resort in 2022, agents retrieved "11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities," The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

The federal government, in total, has recovered from Trump "more than 300 classified documents" with classified markings, totaling over 700 pages, The New York Times reported in August of 2022.

"Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts said," The Washington Post also reported at the time. "Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries might view exposing their nuclear secrets as a threat, experts said."

Back in October, NBC News reported, Trump "allegedly shared sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with an Australian billionaire who is a member of his Mar-a-Lago club."

Meanwhile, legal experts were stunned by Trump's attorneys' overnight motion to toss the case.

"This motion is insultingly stupid," wrote national security attorney Brad Moss. "Trump is arguing he designated all these highly classified records as PERSONAL records, and that he therefore had the right to keep them. Even if that was a plausible argument, this is a motion to dismiss: he can’t introduce news facts."

Former U.S. Ambassador and former Obama "Ethics Czar" Norm Eisen, an attorney and CNN legal analyst, Thursday night wrote, "I just finished reading Trump’s absolute immunity motion in the MAL [Mar-a-Lago] docs case."

"If this were allowed, POTUS could declassify all of our most sensitive secrets when leaving office & sell them to Putin 5 minutes later," he noted, adding: "As bad as Seal Team 6 hypo[thesis] in 1/6 case."

In a more in-depth examination, Moss explained, "If Trump's immunity arguments in the DC and FL cases actually succeed, Joe Biden can do the following: 1) declare Trump a threat to election integrity and have him imprisoned immediately, at a minimum, 2) declare the entire Trump Org a threat to national security and seize all of its assets."

He continues: "3) cancel the election, 4) if, by some chance, he is forced out of office, he can walk out of the White House with 15 moving vans full of every classified secret he wants and sell them to the highest bidder. And no one could do anything to prosecute him for any of it. He can pardon anyone he wants while in office and who helped him commit any illegal act he could think of to do #1-#3, and he can then claim immunity for himself if he is later indicted."

READ MORE: MAGA Is a ‘Russian Intel Op’: Experts Respond to Allegation GOP Using Kremlin Propaganda

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ testimony began Thursday with a wink and a bang when she signaled hello to someone in the courtroom — then accused the lawyer questioning her of lying.

“It is ridiculous to me that you lied ... and yet here we still are,” Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, the lawyer hoping to remove the district attorney from Donald Trump’s Georgia election racketeering case.

“It seems today like a lawyer writes a lie then it's printed for all the world to see.”

Merchant hopes to prove at Thursday’s hearing that Willis’ personal relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade disqualifies her from prosecuting Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election in the state.

Willis came out on the offensive and appeared to stagger Merchant, whose questions were peppered with ums, with the strength of her anger.

“I told you what happened,” snapped Willis, when Merchant repeated a question. “Is there something you didn’t understand?”

At another point, when confronted about the dates that the relationship started, she responded, "That's a lie, that's one of your lies."

Willis said she probably uttered some “choice words” when she received Merchant’s motion because she was not a “southern gentleman” like Wade.

ALSO READ: Prison president: How Donald Trump could serve from behind bars

Wade testified earlier that he did not date Willis before she hired him in 2020 because he was battling cancer and was afraid to socialize during the pandemic.

Willis snapped when Merchant demanded information about a 2019 conference that she and Wade both attended.

“You tried to implicate I slept with him at that conference, which I find to be extremely offensive,” Willis said.

“When someone lies on you and it's highly offensive when they implicate that you slept with somebody the first day you met with them.”

People who watched the live stream were stunned by Willis’ courtroom battle with Merchant.

“Wow,” wrote Victor Shi, a 2020 delegate for Joe Biden, on X. “Willis is on absolute fire right now.”

Watch the video below or click here.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley seemed to forget the date of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, moments after calling for mental fitness tests for presidential candidates.

During a Sunday interview on CBS, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan noted that Haley was pushing the cognitive tests.

"You have made mental acuity a signature issue for your campaign for the better part of the past year," Brennan observed. "You're handing out paper copies now of a cognitive assessment. When do you plan to take it?"

"I have no problem taking it," Haley insisted. "And what I've said is we need to have mental competency tests for anyone over the age of 75. I don't care if we do it for 50 and up."

ALSO READ: Anti-abortion Florida congresswoman dumps husband's stem cell stock amid gov lawsuit

Haley suggested that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump had been "diminished" by age.

But moments later, it was Haley who couldn't remember the date of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The last thing we ever want to do is side with Russia," she said during a defense of NATO. "What we always need to remember is America needs to have friends."

"After September 10th, we needed a lot of friends," Haley added. "We can never get to the point where we don't need friends."

Watch the video below from CBS or at the link.

The super PACs backing former President Donald Trump's political rivals for the 2024 nomination were "money pits" that did next to nothing to challenge the former president's dominance, former GOP strategist Tim Miller wrote in a scorching analysis for The Bulwark.

This comes after extensive reporting about Never Back Down, the super PAC of failed Trump rival and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who himself called out how inept their efforts had been.

"Much can be said about about the incompetence, self-dealing, and cowardice of the Republicans who were charged with challenging Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign. Marc Caputo covered it colorfully and thoroughly earlier this week," wrote Miller. "But after you have cut through all the tweets and trivia and backbiting and biorhythmic disruption that spilled out of the DeSantis 'campaign' — if you can even call it that — there is one strategic choice that stands out."

READ MORE: Biden connects the dots: Trump’s 'Big Lie' is the new 'Lost Cause'

Namely, wrote Miller, records show that the major super PACs representing the non-Trump Republican candidates -- like DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, which raised a combined $225 million -- spent just 2 percent of their revenue targeting Trump, versus supporting their candidates and attacking the non-Trump rivals.

And when these super PACs did target Trump, contended Miller, they only released "limp-wristed" efforts.

"With these resources, Trump’s opponents availed themselves of the best Republican consultants money could buy," wrote Miller. "Those political strategists in turn had titans of industry — millionaires and billionaires — at their disposal. These wealthy individuals were willing to offer their private-sector expertise and burn ungodly sums of their personal fortune to advance the interests of Tim, or Nikki, or Ron. DeSantis even had the world’s richest man giving him free rein and free PR in his personal global town-square on the campaign’s announcement day."

A similar pattern happened in 2016, noted Miller. But "at least in 2016, those choices were defensible. We had never seen a candidate like Trump before, and there was reason to believe that in the end, Republican voters would come to their senses — as they had in every other nominating contest in living memory. We didn’t know what we didn’t know."

"There was no excuse to make the same mistakes this time," he concluded.

Former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway recently wrote a story for the New York Times making some recommendations for whom he should select as his next vice president.

However, The Daily Beast's Michael Ian Black speculates that the entire point of the Conway column was to manipulate Trump into seeing her as VP material, despite the fact that she's never held elected office.

Black argues that Conway has proven herself to be a very deft power player in the Trump White House, where she worked for four years and never suffered Trump's wrath the way countless others did during his tenure.

READ MORE: MTG swears Trump not behind border bill attack: 'Anyone voting for it is a traitor'

In particular, Black argues that Conway is "shameless" enough to unlock the keys to Trump's "syphilitic mind" with a combination of all-out flattery and the promotion of Trump's own business interests.

"She happily promoted Trump brands during her time in the White House, to the point that the Office of Special Counsel recommended she be fired for multiple violations of the Hatch Act," writes Black. "Further, she understands that loyalty-as-obsequiousness is precisely what Trump desires."

As an example of this, he cites Conway's claim that "Trump is someone who is not fully understood for how compassionate and what a great boss he is to women," despite the fact that Trump "was ordered to pay over $80,000,000 for defaming E. Jean Carroll, who had previously been awarded millions in damages when a jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting her."

The bottom line, he concludes from reading her op-ed, is that "Kellyanne wants in."