‘Give Me a Single Reason Why Sora 2 Should Exist’ ⇥ youtube.com

The technical accomplishments of Sora 2 are laudable and, frankly, extraordinary. Just watch the first two minutes of the live-streamed announcement, or the examples from six minutes onward. If the ability to turn a few words into all kinds of video — from photorealistic to animated — with sound does not blow your mind, I do not know what will. If I went back in time to just ten years ago to show this to myself, I would have assumed my future self came from far, far in the future.

But OpenAI, like many of its peers, is not super interested in bragging about how clever this technology is in the videos its product generates. Videos made with Sora include a “Sora” watermark that moves to a different location around the margins every few seconds, making it more difficult but not impossible to crop. But nowhere does it say “A.I. generated” on the video. And why not? Surely OpenAI ought to be proud of its achievements.

The wildest thing to me about the Sora app is that it is a social network. It looks like TikTok. You can follow users and scroll through videos in a “For You” stream-of-unconsciousness. Mine is full of several videos gutting the soul of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and replacing it with whining about the barest of restrictions enacted by OpenAI.

The social impact of this — and the new Vibes feed in Meta’s A.I. app — is a realization of an “A.I. television” that will, surely, have grave consequences because the most popular A.I. services care way too much about growth and proving their own cleverness. Sure, there are guardrails and limitations. But, as Hank Green says in a righteously ranty video, “the friction matters”.

This technology may, to some extent, break down the barriers involved in making video, but we should not pretend that is the objective here, or even halfway considered by any of these A.I. companies. They want to make gimmicks. They want to do the problems of the last twenty years of social media, but all of it is fake, and they want to call that “innovation”. I will echo Green’s call: give me a single reason why this should exist.