Toys R Us released a video made with a new artificial intelligence tool at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, but not everyone wants to be the Toys R Us AI kid. The toy retailer said in a statement that this is the first branded video created using Sora, a text-to-video tool from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Sora isn’t public yet, but the company got special early access.
The 1-minute video, generated by artificial intelligence, features a young boy representing Toys “R” Us’ late founder Charles Lazarus. He falls asleep and wakes up in a dreamland filled with various toys, including an animated version of the store’s mascot, Jeffrey the Giraffe. The store played the wistful song “I Wanna Be a Toys ‘R’ Us Kid” and displayed a photo of the real Lazarus with a costumed version of Jeffrey Group photos.
A trailer is posted on YouTube, but you’ll need to visit the Toys “R” Us Studios website to watch the full video.
Toys “R” Us closed its last U.S. stores in 2021, but later opened a toy department inside Macy’s, keeping the nostalgic name alive.
But some now-grown Toys “R” Us kids are uncomfortable with their childhood idol diving into the world of artificial intelligence.
More than 9,500 people liked a tweet posted by writer and comedian Mike Drucker on .’ To show how this could be done, we fired our artists and dried up Lake Superior using a server farm to generate the look of a Stephen King nightmare.
Films, music and dialogue that use artificial intelligence continue to stir controversy in the entertainment industry, with concerns ranging from worries about AI replacing human workers to the ease with which AI images or sounds can be passed off as real. Sometimes the reaction to AI has been positive, such as in 2023 when former Beatle Paul McCartney said AI programs were used to extract the late John Lennon’s voice from old tapes. Producing what is known as the Beatles’ final song.
But last month, Sony Music Group and its affiliates spoke out against using the music of its artists to train artificial intelligence systems. A song that uses AI to imitate singers Drake and The Weeknd has been submitted for two Grammy Awards in 2023, forcing the music academy to scramble to formulate rules around AI and its awards. Singer Taylor Swift and President Joe Biden have both had their voices imitated by people trying to deceive others. Every new endeavor in artificial intelligence seems to bring more problems, and for a brand as well-known as Toys “R” Us, backlash seems inevitable.
“We will not hire giraffes”
When asked by NBC News about criticism of AI’s potential to replace human workers, Toys R Us studio president Kim Miller Olko said there is a lot of “fear” about AI. Miller Olko said about a dozen people made the video over a three-month period, the same number as people working on non-AI jobs.
“Jeffrey is an animation. He’s a cartoon,” Miller Olko told NBC. “We’re not hiring giraffes, you know what I mean? This is an animation.”
Representatives for Toys R Us and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
What is Sora?
“Sora” means sky in Japanese, and as CNET’s Connie Guglielmo wrote in February, the artificial intelligence tool has gained attention for the photorealistic videos it can create.
“Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific movement types, and accurate details of themes and backgrounds,” the company says on its website. “The model not only understands what the user is asking for in the prompt, but also how these things work. way of being in the physical world.”
Open AI also said on its website that it is building tools to help detect misleading content, such as a detection classifier that can tell when Sora generates videos, and plans to include C2PA metadata to indicate Sora’s use of products within OpenAI.
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