Purely creative instrument, Sora, OpenAI’s new AI video application, is a game-changer. Imagine any scenario and it appears in an instant. Freddy Krueger as a candidate for Dancing with the stars. Mr. Rogers teaches Tupac Shakur the lyrics to the legendary rap diss “Hit Em Up.”
But just as his innovations are remarkable, so is Sora’s potential for real harm.
This has been true for generative AI for as long as the technology has existed. The capacity for abuse is inseparable from the miracle of what genAI can create. Sora simply expands the visual medium’s long history of “elaborate deceptions” into something strange, more vivid, and unreliable. (This angle has been the focus of almost every story written about the app so far, and for good reason.)
“Skepticism has to be a default disposition for many of us as we navigate this time,” says Marlon Twyman, a quantitative social scientist at USC Annenberg who specializes in social network analysis.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman understands the risk. He suggested that Sora could usher in a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity for art and entertainment, but that it could also contribute to “all of us being sucked into a different world.” [reinforcement-learning-optimized] slope food.
But more notable are the questions Sora asks about the future of social media and what we ask of it.
Like Vine and TikTok before it, Sora is designed to be addictive. Ten second videos. Infinite scrolling. Users can create a digital image of themselves and post content (called a “cameo”) by entering prompts; You are not allowed to upload photos or videos from your camera roll. The app’s popularity – it surpassed 1 million downloads in its first week – is ripe for this moment of decaying truths, where facts and reason have increasingly diminished value. However, unlike Vine and TikTok, Sora “clearly feels like an artifact of the current stage of social media,” Twyman says. “It’s not about the people anymore.”
It’s also a growing concern among developers who say there are now too many social media apps that have a poor understanding of social dynamics. Like Sora, they are “inherently antisocial and nihilistic,” says Rudy Fraser, the creator of Blacksky, Bluesky’s personalized feed and moderation service for black users. “They have given up on fostering real human connection and are seeking to profit from providing people with artificial connections and manufactured dopamine.”
Many will assume that Sora represents a new era of social media, but that’s not true. Sora attempts to reanimate our current character. It’s about trying to hold on to something that people need less and less. “We’re certainly past the age of hashtags, influence chasing and social media’s desire for virality,” says Fraser.
