If recent discussions of Donald Trump seizing the algorithm have put you off TikTok, maybe you’ll be interested in this rival video app.
OpenAI, the company which makes ChatGPT, has announced they are launching a new app to share shortform clips.
The only catch is that everything will be AI-generated, so you’ll never see a real person unboxing their latest make-up haul, giving their thoughts on Nigel Farage, or dancing on a train station platform.
You can use your own photo to make a ‘cameo’ in these videos, something which was missing when Google’s Veo 3 lauched their high profile video generation software earlier this year.
This could be fun if you want to see a video of yourself riding a duck like a jockey, as seen in their promo video, but it also has more sinsister possibilities.
An OpenAI employee demonstrated this by sharing artificially generated CCTV footage of his boss Sam Altman shoplifting in Target, boasting it was currently the most viewed on the app:
It’s not just Sam Altman who thinks there’s a market for sharing our AI creations, alternatively termed ‘slop’ by those who think all this fake content is leading to a dead internet.
Meta also launched a social media platform for AI videos just days earlier, called ‘Vibes’, which includes the option of reposting your clips to other Meta sites like Instagram and Facebook.
Basically, this all means we can expect to see even more AI-generated videos than we already do, such as the clip which went viral this week of a woman dropping a large boulder on a glass-bottomed bridge, sending everyone plunging to the rapids below.
If you haven’t seen that particular one, you may have seen similar, as the prompt of the boulder-dropped woman has become a meme. And if you’re so inclined, now you can even become the boulder-dropper yourself.
Open AI boss Sam Altman himself acknowledged the risks of his new video app powered by the model Sora 2, saying that while he views it as a ‘compelling’ way to connect and create, those at the company also feel some trepidation’.
Writing on X, he said: ‘Social media has had some good effects on the world, but it’s also had some bad ones. We are aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we can imagine many ways it could be used for bullying.
‘It is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed.’
He said his vision was to help users set their own intentions for the app, whether that was connecting with friends, getting fit, starting a business, or ‘if you truly just want to doom scroll and be angry, then ok, we’ll help you with that’.
How can I download the Sora app for iOS and Android?
Sora is currently only available as an iOS app in the US and Canada, and you need an invite to download it. But the company say it is set to ‘expand quickly’, so announcements about Android and other countries may well come soon.
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