These companies and their shareholders really are complete scum in my eyes, just like AI in miltech.
Not because the tech isn't super interesting but because they steal years of hard work and pain from actual artists with zero compensation - and then they brag about it in the most horrible way possible, with zero empathy.
Then comes losing the little humanity left the mainstream culture, exactly as Miyzaki said, leading to a dead cold and even more unjust society.
Inb4 make your own video model and see how easy it is
Sora 2 itself as a video model doesn't seem better than Veo 3/Kling 2.5/Wan 2.2, and the primary touted feature of having a consistent character can be sufficiently emulated in those models with an input image.
You need to be in the US/Canada and wait for this notification, and when you get an invite you can start using it in the app and on sora.com. And apparently you get 4 more invite codes that you can share with anyone, e.g. Android users:
> Android users will be able to access Sora 2 via http://sora.com once you have an invite code from someone who already has access
However, I still don't see how OpenAI beats Google in video generation. As this was likely a data innovation, Google can replicate and improve this with their ownership of YouTube. I'd be surprised if they didn't already have something like this internally.
- Scamming people at scale
- Nonconsensual pornography
- Juicing engagement metrics for fading social media sites
- The ongoing destruction of truth as a concept in our increasingly atomized and divided world
Obviously this will get used for a lot of evil or bad as well
Whether said fun is "worth" the social and economic costs is a separate issue.
What are the benefits of what you do? Does anyone know?
Regardless of the slop, some people will learn to use it well. You have stuff like NeuralViz - quite the sight! - and other creators will follow suit, and figure out how to use the new tools to produce content that's worth engaging with. Bigfoot vlogs and dinosaur chase scenes, all that stuff is mostly just fun.
People like to play. Let them play. This stuff looks fun, and beats Sora 1 by a long shot.
Hopefully it catalyzes
Trust in media? Soaring! Why believe your eyes or ears when you can doubt everything equally?
Journalism? Thriving! Reporters now get to spend their days playing forensic video detective instead of, you know, reporting news.
Social harmony? Better than ever! Nothing brings people together like shared paranoia and the collective shrug of “I guess truth is dead now.”
Honestly, what could possibly go wrong?
https://www.tiktok.com/@dreamrelicc
Before AI, each video on this channel would have taken a large team with a Hollywood budget to create. In a few more years, one person may be able to turn their creative vision into a full-length movie.
(half sarcastic, but you could make the argument that most art has no benefit besides to the person that made the art)
Things are cool because they are unique, very hard to create, and require creativity. When those things become cheap commodities, they are no longer cool.
Making better tools is better for everyone: the median usage of those tools downstream is a separate issue.
People need to be exposed to what is real. Not more artificial stuff.
I think this is the point at which humanity will finally puke and reject this crap.
Just because a small segment of people like it doesnt mean the mass majority will.
Yes, but at the same time the value of video production will quickly drop to 0. Or to whatever it costs to generate that video in terms of tokens.
It's not that I disagree with the criticism; it's rather that when you live on the moving edge it's easy to lose track of the fact that things like this are miraculous and I know not a single person who thought we would get results "even" like this, this quickly.
This is a forum frequented by people making a living on the edge—get it. But still, remember to enjoy a little that you are living in a time of miracles. I hope we have leave to enjoy that.
I think this is not nearly as important as most people think it is.
In hollywood movies, everyone already knows about "continuity errors" - like when the water level of a glass goes up over time due to shots being spliced together. Sometimes shots with continuity errors are explicitly chosen by the editor because it had the most emotional resonance for the scene.
These types of things rarely affect our human subjective enjoyment of a video.
In terms of physics errors - current human CGI has physics errors. People just accept it and move on.
We know that superman can't lift an airplane because all of that weight on a single point of the fuselage doesn't hold, but like whatever.
But clearly we also see some major downsides. We already have an epidemic of social media rotting people's minds, and everything about this capability is set to supercharge these trends. OpenAI addresses some of these concerns, but there's absolutely no reason to think that OpenAI will do anything other than what they perceive as whatever makes them the most money.
An analogy would be a company coming up with a way to synthesize and distribute infinite high-fructose corn syrup. There are positive aspects to cheaply making sweet tasting food, but we can also expect some very adverse effects on nutritional health. Sora looks like the equivalent for the mind.
There's an optimistic take on this fantastic new technology making the world a better place for all of us in the long run, after society and culture have adapted to it. It's going to be a bumpy ride before we get there.
Like, it should be preferable to keep all the slop in the same trough. But it's like they can't come up with even one legitimate use case, and so the best product they can build around the technology is to try to create an addictive loop of consuming nothing but auto-generated "empty-calories" content.
Pretty much the same problem we all work on every day in $DAY_JOB.
However, personalization (teleporting yourself into a video scene) is boring to me. At its core, it doesn't generate new experience to me. My experience is not defined by photos / videos I took on a trip.
however as they hint at a little in the announcement, if video generation becomes good enough at simulating physics and environments realistically, that's very interesting for robotics.
If you never expected Altman to be the figurehead of principled philosophy, none of this should surprise you. Of course the startup alumni guy is going to project maligned expectations in the hopes of being a multi-trillion dollar company. The shareholders love that shit, Altman is applying the same lessons he learned at Worldcoin to a more successful business.
There was never any question why Altman was removed, in my mind. OpenAI outgrew it's need for grifters, but the grifter hadn't yet outgrown his need for OpenAI.
I understand the cynicism but this is in fact not the job of a businessman. We shouldn't perpetuate the pathological meme that it is.
Sounds about as plausible as "ironically taking heroin".
> Nobody's going to get their news from Sora because it's literally 100% fake.
I'm with Neal Stephenson ("Fall", in this case) on this prediction, although I really hope I'm wrong.
I agree. At best, short videos can be entertainment that destroys your attention span. Anything more is impossible. Even if there were no bad actors producing the content, you can't condense valuable information into this format.
I watch videos for two reasons. To see real things, or to consume interesting stories. These videos are not real, and the storytelling is still very limited.
So, for the same reason you'd go to a local art gallery
The worst part is we are already seeing bad actors saying 'I didn't say that' or 'I didn't do that, it was a deep fake'. Now you will be able to say anything in real life and use AI for plausible deniability.
I predict a re-resurgence in life performances. Live music and live theater. People are going to get tired of video content when everything is fake.
The recent Google Veo 3 paper "Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners" made a fascinating argument for video generation models as multi-purpose computer vision tools in the same way that LLMs are multi-purpose NLP tools. https://video-zero-shot.github.io/
It includes a bunch of interesting prompting examples in the appendix, it would be interesting to see how those work against Sora 2.
I wrote some notes on that paper here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/27/video-models-are-zero-...
Going back to sleep. Wake me up when it's available to me.
1/ 0m23s: The moon polo players begins with the red coat rider putting on a pair of gloves, but they are not wearing gloves in the left-vs-right charge-down.
2/ 1m05s: The dragon flies with the cliffs on its right, but then the close-up has the direction of flight reversed with the person speaking seemingly with their back to the direction of flight.
3/ 1m45s: The ducks aren't taking the right hand corner into the straightaway. They are heading into the wall.
I do wonder what the workflow will be for fixing any more challenging continuity errors.
State of the things with doom scrolling was already bad, add to it layoffs and replacing people with AI (just admit it, interns are struggling competing with Claude Code, Cursor and Codex)
What's coming next? Bunch of people, with lots of free time watching non-sense AI generated content?
I am genuinely curious, because I was and still excited about AI, until I saw how doom scrolling is getting worse
Wasn't this always the outcome of the post labor economy?
For this discussion lets just say that AI+Robots could replace most human labor and thinking. What do people do? Entertainment is going to be the number one time consumer.
They are not. This is false, zirp ended, this is the problem. Not LLMs.
click
takes me to the iPhone app store...
Impressive that THAT was one of the issues to find, given where we were at the start of the year.
I imagine it won’t necessarily be used in long scenes with subtle body language, etc involved. But maybe it’ll be used in other types of scenes?
Like you have an exterior shot of a cabin, the surrounding environment, etc — all generated. Then you jump inside which can be shot on a traditional set in a studio.
Getting that establishing shot in real life might cost $30K to find a location, get the crew there, etc. Huge boon to indie films on a budget, but being able to endlessly tweak the shot is valuable even for productions that could afford to do it IRL.
I kid.
Art should require effort. And by that I mean effort on the part of the artist. Not environmental damage. I am SO tired of non tech friends SWOONING me with some song they made in 0.3 seconds. I tell them, sarcastically, that I am indeed very impressed with their endeavors.
I know many people will disagree with me here, but I would be heart broken if it turned out someone like Nick Cave was AI generated.
And of course this goes into a philosophical debate. What does it matter if it was generated by AI?
And that's where we are heading. But for me I feel effort is required, where we are going means close to 0 effort required. Someone here said that just raises the bar for good movies. I say that mostly means we will get 1 billion movies. Most are "free" to produce and displaces the 0.0001% human made/good stuff. I dunno. Whoever had the PR machine on point got the blockbuster. Not weird, since the studio tried 300 000 000 of them at the same time.
Who the fuck wants that?
I feel like that ship in Wall-E. Let's invest in slurpies.
Anyway; AI is here and all of that, we are all embracing it. Will be interesting to see how all this ends once the fallout lands.
Sorry for a comment that feels all over the place; on the tram :)
I love the casual reminds that we're second-class citizens each time a new technology gets released. Available in the US but always excluding Puerto Rico.
I guess copyright is pretty much dead now that the economy relies on violating it. Too bad those of us not invested into AI still won't be able to freely trade data as we please....
I know, I know. Most people don't care. How exciting.
For example, I saw a lot of people criticizing "Wish" (2023, Disney) for being a good movie in the first half, and totally dropping the ball in the last half. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm wondering if fans will be able to evolve the source material in the future to get the best possible version of it.
Maybe we will even get a good closure for Lost (2004)!
(I'm ignoring copyright aspects, of course, because those are too boring :D)
dvngnt_•1h ago