In "Sora: The Dawn of Digital Dreams", humanity stands on the brink of a new epoch, where the OpenAI Sora technology interweaves the fabric of reality and imagination into a tapestry of digital dreams. Set against the backdrop of a futuristic metropolis, this narrative explores the duality of technological advancement—its power to create and to corrupt. As society navigates the blurred lines between the authentic and the artificial, "Sora: The Dawn of Digital Dreams" invites readers to ponder (...) the essence of human experience in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

Sora from Open AI has shown exceptional performance, yet it faces scrutiny over whether its technological prowess equates to an authentic comprehension of reality. Critics contend that it lacks a foundational grasp of the world, a deficiency V-JEPA from Meta aims to amend with its joint embedding approach. This debate is vital for steering the future direction of Artificial General Intelligence(AGI). We enrich this debate by developing a theory of productive imagination that generates a coherent world model based on (...) Kantian philosophy. We identify three indispensable components in the coherent world model that enable genuine world understanding: latent representations of isolated objects, an a priori law of change across space and time, and Kantian categories. Our analysis reveals that Sora is limited because of its oversight of the a priori law of change and Kantian categories, flaws that are not rectifiable through scaling up the training. V-JEPA learns the context-dependent aspect of the a priori law of change. Yet it fails to fully comprehend Kantian categories and incorporate experience, leading us to conclude that neither system currently achieves a comprehensive world understanding. Nevertheless, each system has developed components essential to advancing an integrated AI productive imagination-understanding engine. Finally, we propose an innovative training framework for an AI productive imagination-understanding engine, centered around a joint embedding system designed to transform disordered perceptual input into a structured, coherent world model. Our philosophical analysis pinpoints critical challenges within contemporary video AI technologies and a pathway toward achieving an AI system capable of genuine world understanding, such that it can be applied for reasoning and planning in the future. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to show that the philosophy of Mihai Şora can both be seen as a phenomenological treatment of being and as a general theory of being in its most rigorous sense. At least, this philosophy could be designated as a phenomenological ontology which opens up itself towards an originally metaphysical perspective based on a specific type of knowledge of the sort of “global disclosure”. I will argue too that within Şora's philosophy one can have a twofold (...) approach: one starts from what we could call the phenomenology of the “common givenness” (“ordinary/ quotidian givenness”) and then proceeds (in a phenomenological manner) to a general theory of being, which is represented in Şora's philosophy by the constitution of the model of the “sphere with the null ray”; the second commences with the treatment of the ontological model as such (the model, which is already formed, represents in the end the symbolic structure of reality), that is, from this “general theory of being” (or of the constitution of being) and then advances step by step towards various (phenomenological) applications of this ontological model to the multifaceted spheres of the domain of being (the sphere of language, of temporality, of ethics, of the social, of politics, etc.). (shrink)

Filmmaking with Artificial Intelligence Image Generation Models In just about one year, OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT 4 has caused panic in our daily lives. After a year, OpenAI introduced Sora, a moving image-generating model from text, similar to DALL-E for still images. Even though Sora is not yet available to the public, the very potential itself has raised issues in film production from the perspectives of producers and studios, as well as directors, actors, writers, and editors. In this (...) chapter, the role and expected impact of AI video generation technologies, such as OpenAI Sora and Stable Diffusion 3, will be considered in regard to filmmaking. To discuss these issues, it is necessary to further analyze the concept of artificial intelligence, what it means, and how it is misunderstood by the general public. These misunderstandings also lead to sci-fi fantasy and doomsday talk, adding nothing valuable to the debate. Once this concept is defined, the argument of why an artificial general intelligence akin to a human being is unlikely will be set, mostly referring to Hubert Dreyfus and David Chalmers. However, even though the good old-fashioned AI seems impossible, the AI tools we have now seem to be enough to cause many of the problems that the thought of a complete artificial intelligence also brings forth. It is important to treat these tools as tools and not entities in their current forms to focus on the more practical problems regarding human labor, interaction, and experience in the world. In this regard, it is important to look back in history to see how technology has shifted ways of making films. When thought of as such, it becomes clearer that these tools will likely not end human involvement in the practice of creating art but transform the methods and aesthetics of film production, challenging conventions in both artistic and commercial works in some ways and exaggerating them in others. Furthermore, the chapter will consist of the investigation of the impact of various AI tools on human creativity. Regarding human creativity, commercial films will most likely go through a paradigm shift. Production companies will most likely regard this shift as a way of improving performance and production. However, this advancement poses dire questions in the field and pursuit of creating art. AI tools help automate and accelerate the filmmaking process at the cost of filmmaking as an art form. The discussion will address why commercial filmmaking will see a paradigm shift and loss of some human labor, but in an optimistic world of philosophical thought, film as fine art will gain much in return. This is because AI tools in their current and foreseeable state are not capable of willing to make art due to their limitations regarding embodied cognition, experience, unconsciousness, and intuition. These things make us what we are more than we think. There is no better way to explain why human beings make art than to show how tools do not matter but the ideas and the will to do it. -/- . (shrink)