Sora’s Slop Hits Different
One of the more interesting aspects of Sora has been the revelation (to me) that I was both right about Meta with regard to social AI, but perhaps wrong about it overall. I say “perhaps” because the jury is still obviously very much out about all of this. We’re not even a week into Sora starting to soar. Is there staying power here? We’ll all see.
All that said, I’m continuing to love Sora in ways I didn’t expect. Again, in my mind when I tried to think of a social network for AI content, I assumed it would be a feed of ‘cute pandas eating ice cream’ and the like. And again, that’s sort of what Meta launched with ‘Vibes’. While perhaps impressive technologically, as a social feed, it’s stupid. After five seconds of scrolling, no one gives a shit. To be fair, a lot of content falls under that umbrella on the web! But at least your mom would love what you blogged back in the early 2000s (speaking from experience). AI slop has no mother to love it. Except for maybe Zuck.
Anyway, what’s different, and what I underestimated about Sora, is that the AI content here is not just randomly generated things. It’s content that’s either loaded with “cameos” from your connections or it’s “real” world content that’s, well, hilarious. Not all of it, of course. But a lot of it! In this regard, it’s really not too dissimilar from TikTok — and back in the day, Vine! This is a lot more like those social networks but with the main difference being that it’s a lot easier to create such content thanks to AI.
I think that’s the real revelation here. It’s less about consumption and more about creation. I previously wrote about how I was an early investor in Vine in part because it felt like it could be analogous to Instagram. Thanks in large part to filters, that app made it easy for anyone to think they were good enough to be a photographer. It didn’t matter if they were or not, they thought they were — I was one of them — so everyone posted their photos. Vine felt like it could have been that for video thanks to its clever tap-to-record mechanism. But actually, it became a network for a lot of really talented amateurs to figure out a new format for funny videos on the internet. When Twitter acquired the company and dropped the ball, TikTok took that idea and scaled it (thanks to ByteDance paying um, Meta billions of dollars for distribution, and their own very smart algorithms).
In a way, Sora feels like enabling everyone to be a TikTok creator.
Again, we’ll see how it ends up. But my own personal experience is to be less intimidated and more open to trying things with regard to creation. And that’s perhaps the biggest potential hiccup in this movement — if every “fun” path gets locked down due to content/copyright constraints, the train will stop quickly. It’s annoying to think about an idea only to try it — and wait for it — to fail. OpenAI needs to figure that part of the creation equation out. Either you tell users that something will fail immediately, or you get the rights to ensure they don’t fail. Easier said then done, of course!
Speaking of IP, I don’t have to say it’s obviously the elephant in the room here because that’s the definition of elephant in the room. I have no idea how this plays out — or how it should. My initial thought is that Hollywood should try to leverage this new platform and play nicely with it, but that’s almost infinitely harder given that the entire industry is already worried about AI. To many, this will seem like validation of that concern.
At the same time, this all so obviously feels like where the world is headed. Like Napster back in the day. This genie is not going back in the bottle. Even if you bottle up OpenAI here, the models to do all of this locally are coming. Fast. You won’t be able to stop that. The question is when and how to embrace it, I guess.
Speaking of, can we all just take a step back and recognize how far this technology has come in just a few short years? I vividly recall being so excited about DALL-E because it was the first easy tool that let me turn thoughts into images. Fast forward a few years and those pictures look comically rudimentary now. Technology is doing its thing. But insanely fast. We can now create realistic (enough) videos of (almost) anything in (nearly) real time. Be cynical and/or pissed off all you want. That’s incredible.
And again, a lot of this stuff — slop or not — is funny. Really, truly funny. Sora is scaling comedy in a way that we’ve never seen. We thought Vine then YouTube then TikTok did that, but this is really doing that. Maybe it gets old, fast. Or maybe this is just the beginning. It doesn’t take a lot to think about a world in which there are people who are really, really good at coming up with the best prompts for this network. Are those lesser "creators"? That will be a debate...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler