Sora

It's only been a day, but I think OpenAI really cooked with this one. Sora 2 is mindblowingly good at IP and style adaptation and understanding humor/virality.

Things that impressed me:

- How easy it is to make a "Cameo" (character) of yourself. You record a video of you saying three numbers on the screen, followed by turning your head in two directions. It then uploads and verifies the video is legitimate and stores it as your "Cameo". This only takes a couple of minutes.

- How well it understands the prompt's intention. It's able to replicate viral trends or cartoon characters exceptionally well. AI clips of South Park and Spongebob appear to be the most popular. You don't even have to write jokes for it, you can just prompt "a funny video of ____" and it will come up with its own. You can even generate people or fictional characters inside video games like Minecraft or turn famous movies into musicals.

- The Remix feature is ingenius. If there's a clip you find amusing, you can create variations of the original clip. For example, someone made bodycam footage of a dog being pulled over. Viewers remixed the video by prompting "replace it with a pig" etc. Other viewers can then scroll horizontally through different variations of the original clip, and the remixes are often funnier than the og.

- You have full control over who can use your Cameo, including only allowing select users to use your face. You can see all videos generated with your Cameo in settings, including unpublished drafts.

- Best image-to-video I've used, notably better than Veo 3 for smartphone photos. It's clear that Sora 2 was trained on social media clips/reels. It's able to emulate those fast cuts, "amateur" phone footage, and even livestream overlays and chat. The audio generation is light years ahead of Grok Imagine and I consider it better than Veo 3. It's extremely good at replicating cartoon character voices like Peter Griffin or Eric Cartman. Hell, it can even do brain rot music or voices.

- It only takes a few minutes to generate a 10 second clip. You can choose between portrait and landscape.

- The feed is customizable. The options are: "For You", "Latest", "Following", or "Pick a Mood" where you can describe what kind of content you want to watch. There's also a "Search" feature where you can lookup specific accounts and also view trending videos.

Cons:

- Viral trends get old FAST. I think this is due to how easy it is to replicate any viral clip. The novelty wears off extremely fast once a style gets popular.

- Identify/face accuracy is really hit or miss. Personally I found that it depends greatly on the quality of your original Cameo recording and the scene you're trying to make.

- Copyright violations everywhere holy fuck. Clips of Pikachu and other characters from famously litigious companies are everywhere. People are even generating Sam saying "I sure hope Nintendo doesn't sue me". I think this might cause OpenAI to censor the models to shit again, much like ChatGPT image earlier this year.

- No option to "Private" your profile, so any one can follow you. All your generations are still kept in "Drafts" until you choose to make them public.

- Only 4 invites per person. I understand the need to control the influx of users (or risk crashing their servers) but this is obviously frustrating for those who are eager to try the app but cannot get in. The number of users is still only in the thousands despite it rising to top 5 in the app store. The most liked videos have just over 1k likes, and the average "trending" video only has a few hundred likes.

- There is no option to save videos without a Sora watermark (very simlar to TikTok's). Not sure whether this is good or bad. It's not that hard to screen record to circumvent it anyway.

- No option to "Flag" or "Favorite" videos. But videos you like/heart are saved into a private album.

EDIT: Pro limit is 100 per 24 hours

I have struggled with the concept of evil my whole life. The only quote I remember about evil is “ignorance is the root of all evil” which actually isn’t even correct, Plato really said “Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil”. Anyways, like every human, I have encountered my fair share of wrongdoing. However, I have consistently been able to understand why I or somebody else wronged in someway. Almost every wrong I’ve encountered was rooted in ignorance. However, just because somebody acted out of ignorance, doesn’t make the act evil. So what is evil?

Turns out this is a deeply philosophical argument and I’m not a philosopher. But when I see a company intentionally perform an immoral action, I can’t shake the feeling of evil. The new Sora app is designed to be more exploitative than Instagram and TikTok. The data is clear on social media in its current state, it is highly addictive and destroying society. Imagine you have the power and influence to do what OpenAI can do…. Would you make a more addictive, exploitative TikTok that has the potential to disenfranchise creators (who were the only people actually benefiting from social media)?

Literally nobody asked for this, in fact people are asking for less. OpenAI makes it anyways. It’s like giving everyone meth when they are already addicted to crack. They even acknowledged the doomscrolling problem in their video! Forget putting the safeguards in place (if they actually even follow through with that), how about you just make something else? Maybe something that can help people? An intentionally immoral act from a company with enormous power and influence. This feels evil.

This looks like TikTok all over again so I’m really hoping we have learned and will be able to see through this app. I am trying to stay optimistic. How do you all think this is going to play out?

Note: If you don't know what the new Sora app is, it's essentially TikTok except all AI generated. It will learn everything about you from your in-app usage AND your ChatGPT history.