OpenAI released its groundbreaking video app Sora 2 last week, and things just got real. Or did they get unreal?

You can tell that this is a watershed moment from the urgent responses from agencies like Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency, which use words like “exploitation” and “significant risk”. It's easy to see why legacy media groups might want to adopt a defensive posture. Creators too, could find their identities, styles, and voices replicated without consent or compensation, while their economic value is extracted by the very systems they "opted-?" to help train.

But with every threat is also an opportunity, a chance to re-assess the nature of the marketplace and rise to the challenge of meeting its new demands. Legacy media has a profound stake in the existing industrial structure that, until recently, gave it a virtual monopoly on the practice of mass storytelling. Independent digital content creators could realize in Sora, a chance to further level the playing field. Sora's “cameos” represent a tool with extraordinary potential for creators to monetize themselves and their brands at an unprecedented scale. With the proper frameworks in place, excitement over this new technology is the flipside to the anxiety in the face of radical change, and neither side is wrong in its position.

At the Creators Guild of America, we embrace change, but we do not embrace chaos. While we cannot wait to see the visionary work our members will create with Sora and other emerging technologies, new infrastructures must arise to ensure all creators are properly protected, credited, and compensated. Our CGA Rider establishes strong protections for members, forbidding employer-signatories from providing or selling a creator’s work or N/I/L for AI digestion or training. Through Creator ID and our upcoming Hue technology, we aim to strengthen provenance, validate human creators, and ensure their work receives proper credit wherever it appears.

Sora 2 prompts questions that our laws and culture will have to reckon with, not only in terms of the legal use of owned or copyrighted content, but in terms of what we collectively regard as authentic and how we reach that judgment. There's a cynical perspective that says we are living in a post-truth world. For the health of our industry and society, we can't allow that conviction to become conventional wisdom. It means that now more than ever, we must fight for the ability to trace and trust what is real, and who is responsible.

It will require us to foreground the human origin of a piece of content even when the seamlessness of the machine-generated sound and image seems to obscure its source. We will have to learn to be wary without reflexively defaulting to dismissal. At the Creators Guild of America, we intend to hold fast to and inculcate these ideals.

The simple truth is that this is the only way forward. For creators, for audiences, and for the integrity of storytelling itself.