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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• OpenAI announced character cameos for Sora.
• Characters come with their own names and personality traits.
• Sora is temporarily available in the US without an invite code.

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If you thought your Instagram feed already had a lot of AI-generated videos of dogs doing impossible things (backflips, rockclimbing, and so on), get ready to see a whole lot more.

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that users of its Sora app could now create character cameos of animals and fictional creatures using brief video clips. Sora gives these characters their own personality traits and usernames, which can be added to videos generated in the social media-style app.

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Building off a capability allowing users to generate AI cameos of themselves, the new feature lets you “create cameos of the characters in your life and imagination: your cat, a plushie, a doodle, or an original persona dreamt up in Sora,” OpenAI wrote in its release notes. “These characters can be tagged and reused in future generations, by you – and, if you choose, by others.”

The Sora app has been invite-only since its release last month, but OpenAI announced Wednesday that users in the US, Canada, Japan, and Korea could access it without an invite code for a limited time.

How to create a character cameo

Once you’ve created an account on the Sora app, you’ll see a prominent “See characters” button toward the top of your account page, above your post gallery. Click that, then “Create character,” and you’ll be presented with the optiont to either record a new video (which will require turning on camera access) or select an existing one from your camera roll.

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The video should include the face and body of the character you’re trying to replicate, which could be a family pet, for example. Bear in mind that it won’t allow you to generate a character cameo of a human being.

The app will then auto-generate a username, a display name, and a personality description for the character, all of which you can manually edit. It also gives you the option to list any “Restrictions,” or parameters around the kinds of behaviors you don’t want your character to be able to exhibit.

As a final step, you can select which people on the app will be able to use your new character: just you, people you’ve directly approved, “mutuals” (users who follow you, whom you follow back), or everyone. Then click “Done.” You’ll be able to view the finished product, along with all of your other characters, by clicking the same “See characters” button on your profile homepage.

My experiments

To get a feel for the new character cameo feature, I first uploaded a video of a young raccoon in a tree that had been buried in the video library on my phone for years. Sora named the character “Rooftop Rascal,” and described it, anthropomorphically, as “a clever, wide-eyed raccoon with a mischievous grin and a knack for napping treasures from the treetops.” For no explicable reason whatsoever, as its only restriction, I specified that it could only do a single dance: the dougie.

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When I clicked a button to generate a video (without adding any prompt), Sora spat out a short video of a raccoon on the rooftop storing metal trinkets in a little wooden box, like a thief hoarding his stolen treasure. The character also briefly moved spastically in what, I guess, could be construed as an attempt at a dougie, encumbered by its short arms and legs.

Screenshot: Sora

The videos you upload don’t need to include an actual animal, though. As another test, I uploaded a snippet from a video I took during a trip to Mexico City that shows a succession of Aztec statues depicting the heads of serpents lining a walkway at the Museo Nacional de Antropología.

The resulting “Lava Lizard Sage” character, as it was dubbed by the app, “shares cryptic riddles and gently wiggles along the earth, moss and leaves clinging to its rough surface.”

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Videos of this character were strange, borderline disturbing. One of them showed its rocky body slithering towards the camera, its empty eye sockets staring blankly ahead as its mouth uttered words that were spoken in a voice that sounded a bit like James Earl Jones as Darth Vader.

Screenshot: Sora

“I was born in fire, cooled by centuries, and carry embers in my belly,” it says.

Like all videos generated by Sora, videos featuring custom characters include the app’s watermark, which bounces across users’ screens.