Goodnight, sweet Sora. You were a wonderful tool for trolling my friends, but you burned too bright (and used too much compute) to stay around in this harsh world.
For a brief moment, I absolutely loved Sora. I loved making silly videos of my friends and me. I loved that I could use my friend’s face to put them in ridiculous situations, like falling over while roller-skating at their desk, experiencing gastric distress, or singing in a ska band.
I was addicted to making these, churning them out, often starting a new one while waiting for the previous one to render, and sometimes hitting the hourly limit that OpenAI had to impose after some people (oops) were burning through all that free compute. I drained my phone battery by midday.
But a few days after its initial launch, the small handful of my friends and colleagues who had any interest in joining had already joined. None of my normal friends who didn’t work in tech or media had any interest in this at all and found it fairly unpleasant.
Also, I couldn’t help notice that on the feed of videos, there seemed to be very few women using the app, or at least allowing others to make videos featuring their likenesses. That makes sense; women’s experience on the internet has rightfully informed them that it would be a very bad idea to allow strangers to make videos with your face. What I discovered was that Sora had a pervert problem: Although nudity or sexual content was banned, people were making non-nude fetish content like feet videos with random women’s likenesses.
Now, OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it will be shutting down Sora, its stand-alone video generation app, and its deal with Disney is dead. An OpenAI spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is focusing its resources on other parts of the business. It seems that Sora was one of the “side quests” that was a distraction and a drain on compute.
Sora became a bore-a
Eventually, my friends all seemed to get bored with the app. As I do at most parties, I stuck around longer than everyone else, but eventually I, too, found that the novelty had worn off. I rarely opened the app after the second week.
This was, I imagine, a problem: making videos of yourself is fun, but watching videos that strangers make of themselves is not fun. The idea of a social feed of AI-generated videos is simply not something that people are interested in. Around the same time, Meta also tried this with an app of AI videos, and it was even more boring.
The last few years have taught us that humans — myself included — have a nearly endless capacity to watch an algorithmic feed of vertical short-form videos. However, it seems clear that this only applies to human-made content: videos of people putting on makeup, dancing in their kitchens, lip-syncing, debating, whatever. A social feed of AI video simply doesn’t work.
I am not sure that OpenAI was truly trying to create a successful social video feed; it seems more likely that this was a small experimental effort that ran its course and they’re moving on.
I’ll miss Sora in the way I miss something like ChatRoulette or BeReal: It was really fun for a short time, and then not at all, and I have zero desire to ever revisit.
Rest in peace, Sora — and thanks for the stupid memories.
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