Was the recent flood of generative AI videos featuring incredibly fresh-faced teenagers nostalgically reminiscing about how much better the world was in the ’80s and ’90s. As the adolescent AI humans smile and show off era-specific hairstyles, the clips cut to dreamlike footage of sun-drenched cul-de-sacs and vintage cars, and songs like “Everyone wants to rule the world” and inspired songs Donkey Kong country soundtrack play in the background. This is all very strange – like bragging that you peaked in high school.
As weird as the movies are, there’s a relatively easy-to-understand logic at work here. On the one hand, this content appeals to people’s fascination with the past – especially younger viewers, whose lack of direct experience with these eras can make it easier to miss the anachronistic details that generative AI models are prone to include in their video output. But these films also evoke an idealized vision of the past in which everyone is beautiful, most people are white, and everyone has an inexplicable knowledge of how stressful life will be in 2025. This kind of nostalgia is a neoconservative fantasy for people allergic to opening history books.
However, it’s much harder to parse the reasoning behind some of Gen’s more absurd AI clips, which feature long-dead stars doing things they never actually did. There are countless videos of celebrities behaving in ways that are far from reality: Michael Jackson steals fried chicken, Stephen Hawking at the X Games, Einstein becomes UFC champion, Bob Ross caught by the police for… painting murals without permission(?), Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana fight in a WWE promotional match. The rampant racism, ableism and sexism depicted in the clips make everyone feel like they’re in the gutter Family guy cut gags. But on the Sora app, this trash “comedy” seems to be something everyone enjoys.
For some reason, Fred Rogers is often the main character in these videos, where he can be seen rapping with Tupac, getting kinky with women like Marilyn Monroe and showing off a closet full of weapons. None of these deepfakes are particularly convincing, and most of them still have watermarks indicating they were created using OpenAI’s Sora model. But as terrible as this crap is, it’s everywhere, and the view counts suggest that – whether it’s out of love, hate or ambivalence – people can’t help but watch. At least that’s what the team behind the recently launched social video app OpenAi probably wants you to think.
It’s pretty obvious what OpenAI stands to gain from flooding the Internet with Sora-generated videos. Content is another way the company can promote its technology and normalize the concept of people signing up to a sloop factory for entertainment. This appears to be the end of the Sora app, where generating a video is as simple as typing a few sentences into a suggestion box. OpenAI and its competitors want to be seen as the source from which a revolutionary new type of art has emerged – one that gives people the opportunity to express their creativity in ways that were not possible before.
The creators of these videos, such as Jake Paul, Snoop Dogg, and Shaquille O’Neal, apparently bought into the idea, or at least were paid to pretend to do so, in order to convince their gullible fans that pouring water from a trough is actually cool. But when you watch enough of this stuff (and it isn’t a lot), it becomes clear how unimaginative and unfunny it is. There’s also a distinct sense that none of these creators can imagine anything beyond “what if this dead star did some crazy shit that would give their agents a heart attack?”
The content of these videos says a lot about the current state of artificial intelligence gen. But it says even more about how gradualism has impacted the technology’s performance death of monoculture.
Although some argued that society felt more cohesive when everyone watched the same TV shows and movies – the mythical water cooler job talk – the monoculture was not without its drawbacks. It was a time when decision-making power in pop culture was concentrated in a select group of – usually – old, white men. Monoculture has created structural barriers around the activity of creating art for the masses, and modern technologies such as the internet and social media have enabled people to bypass these gatekeepers.
It’s no coincidence that many of gen AI’s founders have leaned heavily on the idea that their products aim to empower people and “democratize” art creation. At least that was the promise. But when you browse the Sora app and see dozens of videos with the same basic prompts, such as “a celebrity or animal has been stopped by the police on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol,” it’s hard not to see the platform as a place where users are encouraged to exploit familiar archetypes rather than create something truly original or even remotely interesting.
Where exactly is the “good” AI gen content?
Aside from the Sam Altmans of the world who stand to benefit directly from this content, it’s hard to tell who these kinds of videos are intended for and what they’re supposed to find funny about them. You could argue that all this nonsense was intended to appeal to Zoomers and the generation alpha kids who made it happen they claimed that brain rot was part of their identity. But the humorous element of these films is not exactly like that Work if you don’t understand who these AI generated people are. Without this context, pointe shoes become much uglier. Fred Rogers flirting with Marilyn Monroe is now “Here’s an senior man being a sexual pest”; Stephen Hawking is now “this guy has ALS and uses a wheelchair.”
While AI proponents insist that this technology can generate meaningful art, the Sora app really illustrates the formal derivativeness that makes these types of videos easy to dismiss as sloppy. This all sounds like content designed for social media virality rather than creative human expression. These clips can get a staggering number of views online, but “number growth” isn’t a reliable metric to determine if they’ll actually last.
To insist that Gen. AI’s videos of Jeffrey Epstein leaving a courthouse are the “future of entertainment” or reflect young people’s taste in media is a cruel insult to their intelligence. This idea suggests that people do not or cannot value quality or see their own attention as something to work for. We keep hearing that this technology is getting better every day and that “good” generation AI content is just around the corner. So where is the good? How many more billions of dollars do we have to pump into this AI hype cycle before there is something worth thinking about or remembering for more than a moment?
This all looks more like a flashy trend designed to convince people that the next generation of artificial intelligence is worth getting excited about. The newness of movies seems to fade quickly because there are so many of them. So far, the only promise that AI has delivered is its scale. But this also means that we get tired of it more quickly because we are constantly flooded. And when a new, shiny new generation of AI fads emerges and people focus on it, it’s easy to imagine that everyone will forget that this moment of faux pas ever happened.