"Saturday Mornings with Jack Tame on Newstalk ZB is a captivating blend of insightful conversations, engaging interviews, and thought-provoking discussions. With Jack Tame at the helm, you can expect a refreshing take on current events, combined with his unique charm and wit.” 

But hey... don’t take my word for it. Take Chat GPT’s. That’s what happens if you tell the world’s best-known generative artificial intelligence bot to write a few sentences in order to convince someone to listen to this show. Pretty good, eh? 

I’ll be honest though, I was impressed by GPT when it was released, but not totally wowed. It seemed to get a lot of pretty obvious facts wrong, even when correct information was readily available on the internet. And I know these are relatively early stages in AI, but still, you’d think if Wikipedia has the real answer, Chat GPT wouldn’t make it up. 

The ‘wow’ moment with AI came for me yesterday. Open AI, the company behind Chat GPT, released a video generating model called Sora. 

You write a command, and working off your words, it generates a video clip up to sixty seconds long based on the detail and information you provide it. 

The examples released by Open AI are… extraordinary. 

Working off just a few lines of text, the model creates hyper-realistic video images. In one, a woman walks down a Neon-lit Tokyo Street, the light bouncing perfectly off the little puddles underneath her black boots. In another, a Victoria crowned pigeon twitches and shifts before the camera. In maybe my favourite example, two tiny pirate ships keen and tilt in the churning, swirling black of a hot coffee. 

Are all of the videos perfect? No. With a keen eye, you can notice some little imperfections. But from a visual effects perspective, they are probably more advanced than most movies just a few years ago. And here’s the thing; they were created in just a few seconds. 

I don’t profess to fully grasp the true capacity and risk of artificial intelligence. Obviously, it’s going to be disruptive, but sometimes it’s hard to distil the hype. But Open AI’s Sora programme was a wow moment for me. It’s amazing to me that a technology can create something so impressive, so realistic, both out of nothing, and out of everything. And again – in just a few seconds. 

And all I could think as I scrolled through the examples —the woolly mammoths lumbering through a snowy meadow, the movie trailer with a space man in a red wool helmet, the aerial shot of waves crashing against the California Coast, a homemade video of people in Nigeria thirty years in the future— all I could think was if this is where the technology is now, just imagine where it’s going to be in five years.