{"id":639249,"date":"2026-04-29T22:23:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T22:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/639249\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T22:23:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T22:23:23","slug":"soras-downfall-signals-broader-problems-with-ais-creative-utility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/639249\/","title":{"rendered":"Sora\u2019s downfall signals broader problems with AI\u2019s creative utility"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI officially discontinued its video generation tool, Sora<\/a>, on April 26, 2026.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a computer scientist who\u2019s been developing AI tools and studying their evolution and adoption<\/a> for the past decade, and I wasn\u2019t surprised by OpenAI\u2019s decision to shut down Sora.<\/p>\n

To me, the challenges Sora faced reflect deeper limitations of AI\u2019s creative capacities that are becoming harder to ignore.<\/p>\n

Problems from the start<\/p>\n

OpenAI unveiled Sora<\/a> on Feb. 15, 2024, as an AI tool that gave users the ability to create short videos from text prompts. To pull this off, the technology essentially predicted how images would change from frame to frame based on what it had \u201clearned\u201d from millions of hours of existing footage.<\/p>\n

But from the start, there were problems with it.<\/p>\n

First, Sora was expensive to run. Generating video requires far more computing power than creating text or images<\/a>, making it challenging for OpenAI to keep costs under control. Nor was it bringing in enough revenue to justify those costs, especially compared with other AI products that are cheaper to operate and easier to monetize. According to The Wall Street Journal, Sora was losing US$1 million per day<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Second, the early hype \u2013 TechPowerUp declared Sora the \u201cText-to-Video AI Model Beyond Our Wildest Imagination<\/a>\u201d \u2013 didn\u2019t seem to translate into lasting engagement. After the initial buzz faded, users seemed to struggle to find consistent, practical uses for the technology. <\/p>\n

Finally, tools like Sora exist in a legal gray area<\/a>, where concerns about copyright and ownership of visual content force companies into a cautious, defensive stance. In practice, this has meant strict prompt controls that prevent references to copyrighted characters or films; blocking outputs that look like living people or intellectual property; and establishing legal safeguards, such as watermarks and metadata tags, on outputs. <\/p>\n

Put together, these challenges likely forced OpenAI to redirect its resources elsewhere, especially as competition across the AI industry has intensified.<\/p>\n

A symptom of larger issues<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s also a pattern that isn\u2019t unique to Sora\u2019s failure to thrive.<\/p>\n

Many generative AI programs geared toward creative fields have encountered a common problem: rapid initial adoption, followed by declining sustained engagement. <\/p>\n

Many users appear to try image and video generation tools like Midjourney and Stability AI out of curiosity. But if stagnating traffic data is any indication<\/a>, few creative professionals seem to be integrating them into their regular workflows.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a><\/p>\n

After experiencing rapid initial adoption, Midjourney and Stability AI, two of the most well-known text-to-image and text-to-video generative AI platforms, have each experienced declining engagement. Midjourney\u2019s estimated organic traffic data appears in the graph on the top, while Stability AI\u2019s appears in the graph below.
\n Ahmed Elgammal\/Ubersuggest<\/p>\n

OpenAI and other companies rolled out prompt-based image and video tools with the hope that the efficiency of their product would provide an attractive alternative to the time-consuming process of producing films, photographs and graphic design. Instead of spending a lot of time and money filming a video, you could simply write a prompt, and AI \u2013 trained on billions of pieces of human-generated content \u2013 would render it for you.<\/p>\n

Generative AI\u2019s counter-creative bias<\/p>\n

So what happened?<\/p>\n

AI-generated outputs of text and images can look impressively real. The bots seem to follow instructions well and appear to give users control.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s an important catch. Under the hood, these systems are built to imitate what they\u2019ve already seen, and that\u2019s especially the case for images and videos. They\u2019ve been trained on massive collections of visual data<\/a> and rewarded for producing results that closely match the patterns contained in those visuals. That\u2019s why the outputs can look so realistic and recognizable. <\/p>\n

Because they\u2019re optimized to produce familiar outputs, they end up suppressing novelty. This, it goes without saying, doesn\u2019t lend itself to true creative breakthroughs. Even the benchmarks used by researchers to evaluate the performance of such systems tend to favor outputs that look<\/a> \u201cright,\u201d rather than those that truly shatter expectations or take an image to the next level.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, these systems don\u2019t learn from a vast repository of data that encompasses the visual world and all human artistic outputs. Instead, the data used to train these models has often been curated to favor certain images and videos that are polished, clear and visually appealing<\/a>. In effect, the training process teaches models not just what things look like, but what good-looking content is supposed to be.<\/p>\n

In a recent paper, I highlighted this problem<\/a>, which I call the \u201ccounter-creative bias\u201d \u2013 the tendency of these systems to favor familiarity over meaningful novelty.<\/p>\n

Counter-creative bias explains why so many AI-generated images and videos, even when they vary in subject or style, end up sharing a similar look and feel<\/a>. And I think it explains why so many artists and other creatives don\u2019t seem to be widely adopting these tools. Good creative work involves pushing boundaries, not simply coming up with something that\u2019s passable and palatable.<\/p>\n

The limits of prompting<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another problem with these tools.<\/p>\n

When someone uses AI to generate an image or a video via a prompt, they\u2019re already operating within the constraints of language<\/a>. <\/p>\n

An artist who wishes to use AI has to learn how to write elaborate prompts with the right keywords that compel the system to generate the desired composition, colors, lighting and aesthetics. To create an interesting image or a video, you have to cleverly manipulate words, combine odd concepts and deploy metaphors. It\u2019s an entirely different skill set. <\/p>\n

This was obvious from the beginning. When OpenAI launched DALL-E 2 in July 2022<\/a>, the company demonstrated the range of interesting images by using crafted prompts like \u201can espresso machine that makes coffee from human souls\u201d or \u201cpanda mad scientist mixing sparkling chemicals.\u201d <\/p>\n

The sources of creativity in these examples were the human-written prompts themselves, not how the AI generated the image. To make something visually creative, you have to become clever at manipulating words. Users are forced to fiddle with any number of prompt variations to reach a desired or even satisfactory result.<\/p>\n

Wading through the slop<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason Merriam-Webster<\/a> and the American Dialect Society<\/a> chose \u201cslop\u201d as their 2025 words of the year: The internet is brimming with viral AI-generated images of world leaders and wide-eyed children, designed to coax engagement but bereft of creative value. The counter-creative bias inherent to these models is reflected in the fact that many people are becoming accustomed to an AI aesthetic<\/a> characterized by hyper-polished, well-lit, perfectly composed, generically pretty images.<\/p>\n

There was a time when AI art was seen as a burgeoning form of conceptual art. <\/p>\n

In the summer of 2019, London\u2019s Barbican Centre included AI art in its exhibition, \u201cAI: More Than Human<\/a>.\u201d In November of that year, the National Museum of China in Beijing showcased 120 AI-integrated artworks<\/a>, which were viewed by over 1 million people. I championed some of the artists<\/a> incorporating this new technology into their work.<\/p>\n

Back then, creating art with AI involved constant experimentation. The AI these artists used hadn\u2019t been trained on billions of copyrighted, curated images from the internet. Instead, artists trained AI models using their own images and inspiration, while AI was allowed to manipulate pixels free of any language constraints. No universal aesthetic emerged; every AI artist seemed to come up with something unique, and their existing artistic identity shined through the medium, rather than becoming overshadowed by it.<\/p>\n

That hopeful period appears to be over<\/a>. Once pixels had to be rendered through the control of language, I think it hampered its potential as an artistic medium. And now we\u2019re left with a technology that seems best suited for memes, spam, deepfakes and porn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI officially discontinued its video generation tool, Sora, on April 26, 2026. I\u2019m a computer scientist who\u2019s been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-639249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}