Sora’s Obscure Facts
as merely Creative Tools, Sora, the new AI video app from OpenAI, is a game changer. Dream up any scenario and it will appear in an instant. Freddy Krueger as a participant in dancing with the stars. Mr. Rogers teaches Tupac Shakur the legendary diss rap lyric “Hit Em Up”.
But as impressive as its innovations are, so is Sora’s potential for real damage.
This has been true of generative AI for as long as the technology has existed. The capacity to exploit is inseparable from the miracle of what genAI can create. Sora simply expands the visual media’s long history of “sophisticated deceptions” into something more exotic, vivid, and unreliable. (This angle has been the focus of nearly every story ever written about the program, and for good reason.)
“Skepticism should be the default mode for many of us,” says Marlon Twyman, a quantitative social scientist at USC Annenberg who specializes in social network analysis.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman understands the risk. He has suggested that Sora could trigger a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity for art and entertainment, but it may also help to “suck us all into the same thing.” [reinforcement-learning-optimized] Steep feed.”
More significant, however, are the questions Sora raises for the future of social media and what we ask of it.
Like Vine and TikTok before it, Sora is built to be addictive. Ten second infinite scrolling videos. Users can create a digital likeness of themselves and post content (called “cameos”) by entering messages. You are not allowed to upload photos or videos from your camera roll. The app’s popularity — which surpassed 1 million downloads in its first week — is poised for this moment of declining truth, where fact and reason are increasingly valued less. However, unlike Vine and TikTok, Sora “feels like a clear artifact of the current stage of social media.” “It’s not about the people anymore.”
That’s a growing concern among developers, who say there are now too many social networking apps that have an incomplete understanding of social dynamics. Like Sora, they’re inherently antisocial and nihilistic, says Rudy Fraser, creator of Blacksky, a custom feed and moderation service for black users on Bluesky. They have given up on creating real human connection and are looking for profit to provide artificial communication and artificial dopamine to people.
Many assume that Sora represents a new era of social media, but this is wrong. All it does is revive our present life. It’s trying to keep something that people use sparingly. “We’re definitely beyond the era of hashtags, the pursuit of influence and the desire to go viral on social media,” Fraser says.
