Artificial Intelligence Hasn't Quite Mastered Gymnastics

As cool as the new Sora is, gymnastics is still very much the Turing test for AI video.

1/4 pic.twitter.com/X78dNzusNU

— Deedy (@deedydas) December 10, 2024

AI should be forgiven, since very few people have mastered gymnastics. And while we can laugh at the body horror these videos show us, there's something comforting about knowing that "intelligent" machines aren't yet perfect. I made the joke that you can tell this is AI because gymnasts don't perform en pointe, as if you couldn't tell by the arms, legs, and torso constantly changing places. At about nine seconds in, the gymnast's head flies off her body and quickly reattaches. Also notice the photographer in the back. He appears in two different places, and has four hands.

This video and three others were generated under prompts from Deedy Das using OpenAI's new Sora AI video generator. Das explained that Sora is an improvement over other video generators when it comes to gymnastics, but machines still don't understand the physics of how human bodies work at higher speeds. Trained on existing gymnastics videos, the algorithm predicts the next frame of video based on the current and previous frames, not by common sense, which human brains still excel in. Das explained how it all goes so wrong Ars Technica. Meanwhile, keep going to see the other three videos Das produced.

Give it 2 years.

— SecondAccount (@SecondA16110022) December 11, 2024

Attempt 4

4/4 pic.twitter.com/GzBtUTuspm

— Deedy (@deedydas) December 10, 2024

On the one hand, it's chilling to think these algorithms are starting to take over human tasks. On the other hand, it's pretty entertaining to see how badly they can perform. -via Damn Interesting