OpenAI’s Sora: Viral AI video platform or just brain rot? - Parmy Olson

Key topics:OpenAI launches Sora, an AI video app likened to TikTokCritics slam Sora as hype-driven and socially harmfulRivalry grows with Meta’s Vibes and Google’s Veo3.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Parmy Olson.Americans living next to vast artificial intelligence data centers now know what their higher utility bills are paying for: a new social-media time suck.OpenAI’s Sora is essentially the AI version of TikTok. Scan your face and record a few seconds of your voice and then use text prompts to generate videos of you — or a highly realistic, AI generated avatar of you — jumping out of an airplane with parakeets or dribbling a soccer ball on Mars. If that sounds to you like a step toward dystopia, you’re not alone. The backlash to Sora this week was swift and brutal, calling out OpenAI’s hypocrisy in pledging to cure cancer but launching a trough for AI slop instead.Sam Altman responded in classic slippery fashion on X: En route to noble goals, it was “nice to show people cool new tech,” he tweeted. It’s certainly nice when you’re on course to burn through $115 billion in cash over the next few years, or when new investors like Nvidia Corp. would like to see a return on the $100 billion pledged toward your growth. Sora probably offers the clearest path yet to OpenAI hoovering up some advertising revenue.While it’s easy to dismiss Sora as another form of AI brain rot, it could go as viral as ChatGPT. OpenAI has released it at a time when Facebook users are sharing overly glossy images of elderly couples and when AI videos of babies accidentally getting on airplanes and then piloting them are getting hundreds of millions of views on Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube.Don’t ask me why people love this stuff, but it’s the reason Meta Platforms Inc. tried to land grab the AI video space last week with Vibes, a similar AI-video feed. While OpenAI’s Sora seems more social and meme-worthy by featuring users or their friends, Meta’s AI videos are longer and come from more creators. The goal is largely the same: emulate TikTok’s enormous success with an artificial twist.Both approaches could gain traction. Meta has years of experience optimizing content for eyeballs, while OpenAI’s videos are technically superior, able to simulate real-world physics as with this Sora video of water refracting through a glass.Better character consistency also puts Sora ahead of Google’s Veo3 — until now seen as the best AI video generator — which could produce that all-important social-media stickiness. .Read more:.Nvidia backs OpenAI with $100bn for next-gen AI powerhouses.There’s something to Altman’s claim that Sora could spark creativity. It’s far quicker to post videos on Sora than it is to film and upload them to TikTok, where passive scrolling is pervasive. OpenAI says it’s also learned from the costs of social media and designed Sora as a place to create and post rather than get addicted. To that end, it says users will have greater control over Sora’s feed, to make scrolling a more positive experience.The prevailing question on social media has been to ask why OpenAI has released Sora at all. The answer is plastered with dollar signs: Generating millions of AI videos will be computationally expensive for OpenAI, but it could also build on the momentum set by TikTok and the trust created by ChatGPT to become a popular new platform for socializing and entertainment.OpenAI now has product-development royalty in its executive ranks who will almost certainly turn this video feed into a natural space for ads. Doing so would be far easier than trying to insert contextual advertising into ChatGPT.But the more obvious costs go beyond AI chips. Just look at this Sora video which shows CCTV-style footage of Altman stealing, ironically, Nvidia Corp. chips from Target:That this was posted by one of OpenAI’s own engineers — who presumably had the boss’s consent to use his likeness — shows the level of disconnect that enthusiastic developers have when they throw transformative tech into the world. Sora requires users to get consent from a friend to generate their likeness, but what happens when they create videos of people they know — or people of a different ethnicity — committing crimes, and posting them on X? That’s why public rebellion against Sora is so heartening. New epithets against AI chatbots like “clanker” show people have developed a healthy skepticism around how AI should be plugged into their lives, largely thanks to the shadow cast by social media. Young people are especially aware; 48% of teens say that social media harms people their age, up from 32% in 2022, according to a Pew study published earlier this year.Altman’s claim of a “Cambrian explosion” rings hollow because any tool built on the perverse incentives of social media is not truly designed with creativity in mind, but addiction. Sora may spark a new wave of digital expression, but it’s just as likely to entrench the same attention economy that has warped our online lives already. .© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

OpenAI’s Sora: Viral AI video platform or just brain rot? - Parmy Olson

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