Sora Video Generator Has Reportedly Been Creating Biased Human Representations Across Race, Gender, and Disability

March 23, 2025

An investigation by WIRED revealed bias in OpenAI's video generation model, Sora. In a test using 250 prompts, Sora was more likely to portray CEOs and professors as men, flight attendants and childcare workers as women, and showed stereotypical depictions of disabled individuals and people with larger bodies.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

GOVERN 3.1 — similarity 0.645, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.636, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.623, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: openai
Alleged developer: openai
Alleged harmed parties: marginalized-groups, women, people-with-disabilities, people-with-larger-bodies, lgbtq+-people, people-of-color, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1000

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

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