Billing itself as 'the first official commissioned music video collaboration between a music artist and filmmaker made with OpenAI's Sora video model', Paul Trillo's video for Washed Out - American singer-songwriter and producer Ernest Greene - is stirring up conversation and controversy. 

The video for The Hardest Part features an infinite zoom of a couple's life across different decades, achieved by stitching together a montage of dreamlike scenes created with OpenAI's Sora video model. In other words, the filmlike images have been created within the program, based on available datasets.

The result is surreal and unpredictable, but not that far from reality and evidently a definitive step forward in what we have previously seen from AI in music videos in terms of the sophistication of the imagery. You could definitely believe that at least some of this footage had been shot by real humans. And of course, a lot of people would argue that it has - but not specifically for this project.

"I had the seed of this video concept 10 years ago, where we do an infinite zoom of a couple's life over the course of many decades, but I have yet to attempt it because I figured it'd be too ambitious for a music video," says Trillo, whose recent video for Jacque's Absolve also features an imaginative use of AI. "While the technology is experimental and cutting-edge, I wanted to do something that also felt like a classic music video that would hold your attention no matter what tech was being used in the process.

"I was specifically interested in what makes Sora so unique. It offers something that couldn't quite be shot with a camera, nor could it be animated in 3D, it was something that could have only existed with this specific technology. The surreal and hallucinatory aspects of AI allow you to explore and discover new ideas that you would have never dreamed of. Using AI to simply recreate reality is boring. I wasn't interested in capturing realism but something that felt hyperreal. The fluid blending and merging of different scenes feels more akin to how we move through dreams and the murkiness of memories.

"While some people feel this may be supplanting how things are made, I see this as supplementing ideas that could never have been made otherwise. Many artists in this industry are constantly compromising and negotiating their ideas with the reality of what can be made. This offers a glimpse at a future where music artists will be given the opportunity to dream bigger. An overreliance on this technique may become a crutch and it's important that we don't use this as the new standard of creation but another technique in the toolbelt.”

Ernest Greene - aka Washed Out - adds: “The Hardest Part is a story about nostalgia and love lost. With the video, I wanted to bring this narrative to life in a sincere way that was also exciting and unexpected. I’ve been a fan of Paul for a long time and he is amazingly skilled at incorporating cutting-edge visual effects that elevate a story instead of simply supplementing it with shock and awe. What he’s come up with is nostalgic, sad, uplifting, and often quite strange. However, he still manages to make you feel for the characters and invested in the journey of how their lives progress.

"I think that Paul is right when he says that this video could only be made using this new AI technology. In my opinion, the hallucinatory quality of Sora clips feel like the beginning of a new genre unto itself - one that is surreal and unpredictable and entirely unique to traditional cinema or even animation.”