Last week, Washed Out released a music video using Sora, an AI text-to-video technology. It was hailed as the first formal Sora collaboration between OpenAI and a musician and director of the video, Paul Trillo.
Washed Out's leader, Ernest Greene, immediately received criticism, including some from Trevor Powers of Youth Lagoon.
The four-minute music video for Washed Out's latest song, 'The Hardest Part,' released on Thursday, fast-forwards over sequences hinting at a wedding, childrearing, and final death. The video follows a couple's romance from high school through the rest of their adult life together.
In a statement released by Washed Out's record label, Sub Pop and Trillo said they wanted to shoot a concept known as "infinite zoom" for ten years, but he never got around to it because he thought it would be too ambitious.
"I was specifically interested in what makes Sora so unique. It offers something that couldn't quite be shot with a camera, nor could it be animated in 3D, it was something that could have only existed with this specific technology," Trillo said.
He added that AI's surreal and hallucinatory aspects allow people to explore and discover new ideas they would have never dreamed of.
Washed Out, whose real name is Ernest Greene, also wrote in a statement shared by Sub Pop that Sora brought the fictional couple's story of longing and broken love to life in a way that he feels only AI can.
Greene wrote that what Trillo's come up with is nostalgic, sad, uplifting, and often quite strange. However, he noted that he still manages to make people feel for the characters and invested in the journey of how their lives progress.
Furthermore, he expressed his opinion that the hallucinatory quality of Sora clips feels like the beginning of a new genre unto itself, surreal and unpredictable and entirely unique to the traditional cinema or even animation.
Artists online also questioned the use of AI to create the video, questioning whether it improved the video's creativity or elicited strong feelings from viewers.
