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For a moment, set aside all your worries and fears about the new Sora 2 app — about how using people’s likenesses could be “bad” or “create problems for society.” Don’t think about the potential copyright problems, or legal problems, or the possibly bad effects of super-realistic fake videos.
Ssshhh, I don’t want to think about any of that.
Instead, let’s talk about how Sora 2 is the most fun I’ve had online in at least three weeks. I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s new video tool, and it’s FANTASTIC.
Here’s the thing that makes Sora 2 more fun than other AI video tools: It makes it easy to create videos that star you and your friends. That sounds simple, in theory, but it’s actually an interesting secret ingredient we now know is critical for good AI slop: you!
To create an AI video on Sora 2, you have to upload a short sample video of your own face. Then it can start generating videos with your likeness, based on your prompts, like “@katienotopoulos is on a jetski being chased by a shark.” You can also choose whether to allow other people to use your likeness. (If you do allow this, you can choose whether you allow only your friends or anyone to use your face.)
This means you can make, for example, a video of you and your friend in the getaway car after you robbed a pet store, and the car is full of cats. Or you are interviewing Sam Altman for your podcast. Or of you and your colleague working in the office, and then a sasquatch comes in and scares you.
Or it could be that you and your colleague are doing ads for Dunkin’ (we are not, by the way).
You could also use it to troll your friends, like this video I made of my colleague admitting he doesn’t return the shopping cart (as far as I know, this is untrue).
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Max Read wrote back in the Will Smith-eating-spaghetti era that AI is best used as a tool for stupid jokes, or “the kind of stunning masterpiece you can produce when you combine cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology with advanced human stupidity.” I agree!!
Sora 2 is still invite-only as of Wednesday, and when I first signed up, I couldn’t find other friends and was stuck just looking at the general slop feed, which was nearly all Sam Altman videos.
Because only OpenAI employees would be daring enough to open themselves up to allowing their likenesses to be used, Altman and a few other lesser-known employees were the suggested people you could first make videos with. I suppose I chuckled a little at a few videos of Sam Altman doing things like working at McDonald’s or getting arrested, but that got old quickly.
Thankfully, soon a handful of other people I knew joined, and I started making videos with them. To be fair, the other people were work colleagues or other tech journalists who were joining to test it out. I don’t necessarily think many of my normal friends would be willing to join this app anytime soon for the obvious “bad/evil” reasons we won’t be discussing.
The point is, it was glorious fun! It’s silly and stupid. It’s funny watching videos of your own face or your friends doing weird, uncanny things. I couldn’t get enough!
This is quite different from Vibes, the AI video feed launched by Meta last week. Vibes feels pointless — just scrolling through slop that isn’t interesting or amusing. There were plenty of video clips of things that were supposed to be amusing, like “a dog driving a car,” which, frankly, isn’t really that amusing.
What Vibes was missing was ME! My face, my friends’ faces — that’s what I want to make videos of, not random slop.
Alex Heath of the Sources newsletter concurs: “It turns out that people may not mind AI slop as long as they can be part of it with their friends. That Meta, the most successful social media company in history, apparently did not understand this, while OpenAI did, is striking.”
The big question is whether I’ll still find this amazingly funny after, say, three days. Honestly … who knows? I’m kind of skeptical this will be enjoyable fun over the long term.
And once the novelty wears off, it will probably just exist as a somewhat nefarious AI slop tool, which is far less appealing to me. Ah, well.
Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, has a business partnership with OpenAI.
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