As spotless innovative instrument, Sora, the modern AI video application from OpenAI, is a game changer. Think of any scenario and it will appear in the blink of an eye. Freddy Krueger as a participant ON Dancing with the Stars. Mr. Rogers teaches Tupac Shakur lyrics of the legendary rap diss “Hit Em Up”.
But just as his innovations are extraordinary, Sora can do real harm.
The same has been true of generative AI for as long as the technology has existed. The capacity for abuse is inextricably linked to the miracle that genAI can create. Sora simply expands the visual medium’s long history of “sophisticated deception” into something weirder, more lively, and more untrustworthy. (This point of view has been the subject of almost every story written about the app so far, and for good reason.)
“Skepticism must be the default attitude for many of us these days,” says Marlon Twyman, a quantitative sociologist at USC Annenberg who specializes in social network analysis.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman understands the risks. He suggested that Sora could spark a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity in art and entertainment, but could also lend a hand “pull us all into [reinforcement-learning-optimized] swill feed.”
More extraordinary, however, are the questions Sora raises about the future of social media and what we expect from it.
Like Vine and TikTok before it, Sora was built to be addictive. Ten-second videos. Infinite scrolling. Users can create digital likenesses of themselves and post content (called a “cameo”) by entering prompts; you can’t upload photos or videos from your camera roll. The application’s popularity – it exceeded 1 million downloads in the first week – has reached this moment of vanishing truth, in which facts and reason have less and less value. But unlike Vine and TikTok, Sora “seems like a clear artifact of this stage of social media,” Twyman says. “It’s not about people anymore.”
This is a growing concern for developers, who say there are too many social media apps today that have a flawed understanding of social dynamics. Like Sora, they are “naturally antisocial and nihilistic,” says Rudy Fraser, creator of Blacksky, a custom streaming and moderation service for Black Bluesky users. “They have given up on supporting real human connections and want to profit from providing people with artificial connection and manufactured dopamine.”
Many will assume that Sora represents the modern era of social media, but this is a misconception. All it does is revitalize our current one. Trying to maintain something that people have less and less employ for. “We have certainly moved beyond the era of hashtags, the pursuit of advantage and the desire for virality on social media,” says Fraser.