Tech Explained: Here’s a simplified explanation of the latest technology update around Tech Explained: What Is Sora in ChatGPT? How OpenAI’s AI Turns Text Into Videos in Simple Termsand what it means for users..
A fundamental shift occurred when OpenAI unveiled Sora in February 2024. The demo videos—a woman walking through neon-lit Tokyo streets, woolly mammoths trudging through snow—looked like nothing AI had produced before. Not just impressive in a “that’s cool for a machine” way, but genuinely cinematic. The kind of footage that made people pause mid-scroll and wonder what exactly they were looking at.
Fast forward to early 2026, and Sora has evolved from a carefully curated demo into something millions of people are actually using. It sits within the ChatGPT ecosystem as OpenAI’s answer to a question that is, in many ways, obvious: if AI can write text and generate images, why not video?
What Sora Actually Is
At its core, Sora is a text-to-video AI model. You describe what you want to see in words, and it generates a video clip. For example: You want a “surfer riding an impossible wave”; “a cat demanding breakfast from its sleeping owner” or “historical footage that never existed“. The model interprets your prompt and renders it into moving images with surprising coherence—though, as anyone who’s used it knows, not without some weird quirks.
OpenAI released the first version publicly in December 2024 to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in the US and Canada. Then came Sora 2 in September 2025, bringing synchronized audio, improved physics, and a standalone mobile app that shot to the top of app store rankings almost immediately. The company has since added social features, letting users share creations and remix each other’s work. Some critics have started calling it “SlopTok“—part video generator, part social network, part harbinger of an internet drowning in AI content.
The technology builds on the same foundations as DALL-E 3, OpenAI’s image generator, but extends into the temporal dimension. Where image models capture a single moment, Sora has to understand how that moment unfolds across time—how light shifts, how objects move, how expressions change mid-sentence.
How Text Becomes Video
The technical underpinnings involve something called a diffusion transformer. The “diffusion” part means the model learns by starting with pure visual noise and gradually refining it into coherent imagery—like watching static on an old television slowly resolve into a picture. The “transformer” architecture allows Sora to maintain consistency across frames by working with three-dimensional “patches” of video data, treating time as another dimension to navigate.
One innovation that sets Sora apart is its ability to train on videos of various resolutions and aspect ratios without cropping them to standard sizes. Earlier video models often produced awkward framing because they learned from uniformly cropped data. Sora preserves native dimensions, which helps it understand composition more naturally.
The model also uses recaptioning, where detailed descriptions are generated for training videos to help the AI connect visual content with language. The result is a system that grasps something closer to the “grammar” of cinematography—camera movements, scene transitions, the relationship between subjects and environments.
What Makes This Different From Traditional Video
The comparison to conventional video creation feels almost unfair. Traditional video requires cameras, actors, locations, lighting, and post–production. Even simple stock footage involves licensing, searching through libraries, and hoping you find something close to your vision.
Sora collapses that process into a text box. A freelance marketer who needs B-roll for a social media ad can generate custom footage in minutes. An educator explaining cellular biology can visualize concepts that would otherwise require expensive animation studios. The barrier to entry for video content has dropped from “significant production capability” to “can you describe what you want?”
Compared to earlier AI video models like Runway’s Gen-2 or Meta’s Make-A-Video, Sora represents a generational leap in coherence and duration. Those tools typically produced clips of a few seconds with noticeable artifacts—morphing faces, unstable physics, objects appearing and disappearing like ghosts. Using Sora, all users can generate clips up to 15 seconds; Pro users get up to 25 seconds with the storyboard tool on web.
The addition of synchronized audio in Sora 2 addressed another limitation that made earlier AI videos feel incomplete. Now the model generates ambient noise, sound effects, and even synchronized dialogue that matches lip movements—imperfectly, but impressively enough that you stop noticing after a while.
Where Sora Falls Short
Physics remains Sora’s most visible weakness, and it’s the kind of thing you can’t unsee once you start looking. Objects sometimes float when they should fall. Liquids pour upward. A basketball bounces without being touched, rolls in impossible directions, and generally ignores Newton’s laws with cheerful abandon.
OpenAI has acknowledged these issues openly, noting the model “struggles with complex actions over long durations” and can produce “unrealistic physics.” The improvements in Sora 2 address some of these problems—OpenAI called it a leap from a “GPT-1 moment” to a “GPT-3.5 moment” for video—but not all. Videos of people performing athletic movements can still produce uncanny valley horrors: limbs bending wrong, bodies contorting in biologically impossible ways. I’ve seen generated gymnastics routines that would make an orthopedic surgeon wince.
Text rendering is another consistent weak spot. Ask Sora to create a video of someone wearing a shirt with a logo, and you’ll likely get garbled letterforms that look like they’re melting. Complex typography confuses the model reliably.
Human hands remain troublesome too—a problem shared across generative AI. While less severe than in earlier models, Sora still occasionally produces people with extra fingers or anatomically improbable joints, particularly in longer sequences with hand movements.
Realistic Use Cases of Sora
- Short-form social content is the obvious fit. The platform was essentially designed for vertical videos destined for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. A creator who needs quick concept videos, visual memes, or eye-catching clips can produce them faster than traditional filming or searching stock libraries.
- Marketing prototyping offers another practical application. Before committing to expensive production, agencies can generate rough visualizations of creative concepts. A furniture company exploring an ad campaign can mock up videos showing their products in various settings without arranging photo shoots. These won’t be final deliverables, but they accelerate ideation considerably.
- Educational visualization works for abstract concepts—chemistry teachers explaining molecular interactions, history instructors illustrating ancient civilizations. These benefit from visual representation that would otherwise require specialized animation.
- Storyboarding and pre-visualization could see adoption as filmmakers use it to generate rough versions of scenes before committing real resources.
The Disney deal announced in December 2025 hints at where this could go. Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI and licensed more than 200 characters for use in Sora—from Mickey Mouse to Darth Vader. Users will create videos featuring these characters (though not actor likenesses or voices) starting in early 2026. It’s a glimpse of how AI video might integrate with entertainment through licensing rather than pure disruption.
Accessing Sora Today
Sora access is tied to OpenAI subscriptions and region availability. ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) and ChatGPT Pro ($200/month) both include Sora access, with Pro users getting higher resolution, longer clips, no watermarks, and queue priority. The standalone Sora app is available on iOS, with Android support rolled out in late 2025 for supported regions.
The web interface at sora.com offers additional features like the storyboard tool for frame-by-frame control, but mobile usage has become central to the experience. By design, Sora encourages quick creation and sharing rather than elaborate production workflows.
Users under 18 who want to access Sora must have a parent or legal guardian’s permission. Also, OpenAI added parental controls that let guardians manage settings for teen users. Enterprise and education accounts currently lack access—a notable gap that OpenAI says it’s working on.
If you’re outside the Sora 2 supported regions, you can still use the original Sora via web if you’re in a supported country. Some users have reported success accessing Sora 2 with VPNs, but that likely violates OpenAI’s terms of service.
The Uncomfortable Questions
The deepfake potential is significant and immediate. Within 24 hours of Sora 2’s launch, security researchers demonstrated they could bypass the app’s anti-impersonation safeguards. The watermarks OpenAI applies can be removed with free online tools in minutes. A NewsGuard analysis found Sora successfully generated convincing videos for 16 out of 20 provably false claims—including content supporting conspiracy theories and disinformation narratives.
Several prominent estates, including those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robin Williams, pushed back against unauthorized depictions that appeared shortly after launch. OpenAI has since implemented blocks on certain public figures, but only after outcry.
The copyright situation remains murky and contested. By default, Sora uses copyrighted material in its training unless rights holders specifically opt out. The Motion Picture Association has criticized this approach sharply, and it remains one of the more contentious aspects of the technology.
Digital safety experts warn that platforms like Sora normalize deepfakes as entertainment, potentially eroding trust in video evidence broadly. Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, demanded OpenAI withdraw Sora entirely in November 2025, calling the release “reckless” and citing threats to democracy and personal privacy.
OpenAI counters that releasing technology publicly—with imperfect safeguards that improve over time—is preferable to keeping it hidden while others develop similar capabilities anyway.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. As of January 2026, free access has been suspended. Sora requires ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) or Pro ($200/month).
All users can generate videos up to 15 seconds. Pro users can create clips up to 25 seconds using the storyboard feature on the web.
No. Sora App is currently limited to Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Japan, Korea (South Korea), Mexico, Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, Taiwan, Thailand, United States, Uruguay, and Vietnam. India, the UK, Europe, and Australia don’t have access yet, with no announced timeline.
No. You write a descriptive prompt, and Sora handles generation. More detailed prompts—specifying camera movements, lighting, and subject details—produce better results.
Restrictions exist around public figures, and consent mechanisms apply for depicting others through the “cameo” feature. However, these safeguards have been bypassed repeatedly.
Sora 2 generally leads in visual quality and audio synchronization among consumer tools. Runway, Pika, and Google’s Veo offer alternatives with different strengths—some allow more control, others have broader geographic availability.
Plus users get watermarked videos. Pro users can generate without watermarks. However, third-party tools that remove watermarks from Plus-tier videos have proliferated, which OpenAI hasn’t been able to fully address.
Where Things Stand
Sora represents something genuinely new—not a toy demo, but a functional tool reshaping how people think about video creation. The gap between “I wish I could visualize this” and “here it is on screen” has never been shorter.
The technology will keep improving. Physics will get more accurate, and videos will get longer. Safeguards will evolve through some combination of technical measures, legal frameworks, and social norms—though the technology is moving faster than our ability to set guardrails.
What won’t change is the fundamental shift: video is no longer something you capture from reality. It’s something you can imagine into existence with a few sentences. We’re all going to have to figure out what that means—for creative work, for trust in media, for our relationship with images we used to consider proof.
Well, the tool is here. The harder conversations are just getting started.