A few weeks ago one of the leading A.I. companies, OpenAI, created quite a buzz when they released a demo of Sora, their new text-to-video model. In case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is.

 Believe it or not all of the clips in that video were generated directly by Sora without modification based solely off the prompts that are shown. Understandably most of the concern expressed after the videos release revolved around people using this technology to spread misinformation, which OpenAI says they’re addressing by having ‘red teamers’ and ‘domain experts adversarially’ test ‘the model’.  I share everyone’s legitimate concerns,  but I’m also excited for how technology like this could level the playing field and allow creatives within the radio industry to produce some pretty amazing video content with a limited budget once this tech is available to the public. Here are a few of the ways I could see radio using text-to-video A.I.

Imagine a morning show talking about going to see the new Dune movie on the air. After the break they spend a few seconds typing in a prompt to generate a video that shows the team members of the show goofing around on one of the planets from the movie. They pull the best sixty seconds of audio from the on-air break, throw it under their new video footage and share it to social media with a link back to the station website to hear the full break. This could work for literally any kind of content the on-air talent talk about, especially silly or weird news stories, and it could happen with a few keystrokes. Pairing this tech with things like Radio Content Pro, that writes verbatim on-air content in radio speak, could allow on-air talent to create the video footage before they even do the live on-air break (So it’s ready to go almost immediately).

Promotionally text-to-video could be used to quickly create video footage that helps explain or promote on-air contests and promotions to be used at station and partner events in front of large crowds. On the sales front there are tons of applications, easily turning audio spots into video ads for pre-rolls and mid-rolls, creating better spec spots and short station video demos paired to audio composites.

A few years ago I wrote about how we’ve officially entered The Era of The Content Creator and that was before A.I. made it’s recent massive leaps forward. My point at the time, which is even more true now, is that people capable of creating their own content from scratch are incredibly valuable now that they’re surrounded with affordable tools to do so daily on a much larger scale. But, only if they fully embrace those tools.

What do you think? What are some ways radio could use OpenAI’s new text-to-video technology once it becomes available to the public and are you scared or excited about this kind of new tech? Comment below or email me at Andy@RadioStationConsultant.com.

Pic designed by OpenAI’s Sora.