• How has the prospect of creating artificial realities in motion unveiled a spectrum of opportunities for manufacturers?

The application of AI in manufacturing has the potential to transform the way products are designed and launched to market. OpenAI’s latest machine learning tool Sora can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions – a manufacturer could potentially take a drawing off a page and show it in motion in real-life situations and operate it to perfection long before any physical product is built.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can also analyse data sets – from performance to production schedules – and use this information to identify trends and predict outcomes. This could be invaluable for manufacturers to recognise patterns and forecast disruptions, leading to improved overall product quality.

• What is the profound impact of being able to animate conceptual designs, long before a physical product has materialised, on market testing and demand generation processes?

Being able to animate conceptual designs allows manufacturers to test the waters and predict customer demand well before a product goes to market. This can result in significant cost savings, improved product efficiency and enhanced product quality.

Manufacturers could also use additional AI/ML techniques to optimise production processes through its predictive maintenance and real-time monitoring capabilities.

• What is the inherent and increasing risk of technologies like Sora inadvertently or intentionally misleading customers?

Even as Sora offers a faster and less costly way than the current human-led approach using computer generated imagery, it can encourage unethical practices. If the creation process allows a product to perform beyond expected capabilities, presumably but not always with a disclaimer, then the customer could be easily and deliberately misled.

The reality is that there will always be challenges when it comes to rapidly evolving technologies but legislative bodies will need to ensure that the industry adopts ethical practices to prevent any misuse.

• What are your thoughts on technologies like Sora potentially opening the door to negative or defamatory content about products or individuals within a company?

The creation of defamatory or biased content is a potential hazard with Sora, where a competitor, their agent, or even a dissatisfied consumer has a quicker method to create negative content about a product or individuals within an organisation.

The best way to overcome this is for providers of these public services to prohibit the use of copyright and private input and, in all cases, watermark the output so that the ability to trace back to the originator acts as a deterrent.

Once the industry accepts and moves on from those concerns, the benefits of Sora to manufacturers in democratising media and mitigating training and quality challenges can be realised.

• What are the positive implications of this technology in an industry grappling with worker and skills shortages?

There is enormous opportunity to use text to create just-in-time training videos to support skills growth in manufacturing. Currently, the manufacturing sector lacks worker capacity and skills to produce the content in a timely and cost-effective manner.

There is an urgent need to develop training modules to address the lack of talent, and upskill professionals with the right tools to successfully scale up operations. This is where Sora might step in to use text to create realistic and imaginative training videos to support skills growth and quickly respond to lost experience.

It could generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. McKinsey and Company predicts that generative AI has the potential to increase Australian labour productivity by 0.1 to 1.1 percentage points a year through 2030, so there is a real opportunity for manufacturers to harness this tech to bolster business competitiveness.