{"id":187919,"date":"2025-10-03T18:49:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T18:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/187919\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T18:49:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T18:49:09","slug":"why-you-need-to-pay-attention-to-sora-2-and-our-future-ai-unreality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/187919\/","title":{"rendered":"Why you need to pay attention to Sora 2 and our future AI unreality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n A version of this article first appeared in the \u201cReliable Sources\u201d newsletter. You can sign up for free here<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n If you work in the media industry or simply care about the quality of the information ecosystem we all inhabit, you need to pay attention to Sora 2.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThis feels to many of us like the \u2018ChatGPT for creativity\u2019 moment,\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog post<\/a> announcing the product, and many early testers agree. Sora 2 is an AI video generator, a TikTok challenger, and a social network all in one. And right now, at Altman\u2019s urging, the feed is full of Altman \u201cdeepfakes.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Now, Sora 2 might just be another online fad, a reality-deadening distraction that people will soon tire of. But more likely it\u2019s a new form of communication, turning users into the stars of AI-created mini-movies \u2014 copyright owners and professional actors and scam victims be damned.\n <\/p>\n

\n Sora 2, currently the no. 1 free app in Apple\u2019s US App Store, is part of a fast-growing (and so destabilizing it\u2019s frightening) phenomenon. It comes fast on the heels of Meta releasing a new AI video feed called Vibes. And it adds to a season full of heightened stress about \u201cAI slop.\u201d Unreal videos are moving from a concerning sideshow to being the centerpiece of our feeds.\n <\/p>\n

\n For former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, the biggest takeaway about Sora and Vibes is that consumers are valuing AI-generated videos \u201clike they do traditionally created good short form vids.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n For users, it\u2019s not necessarily a question of \u201creal\u201d versus \u201cfake,\u201d but rather \u201cfun to watch\u201d versus \u201cboring.\u201d And with Sora\u2019s \u201ccameos,\u201d which turn people into playable characters, your actual face is inside the artificial reality, so what\u2019s \u201cfake\u201d anymore?\n <\/p>\n

\n Stating the obvious: The implications for human-made news and info are massive. As Scott Rosenberg wrote for Axios<\/a>, \u201cFeeds, memes and slop are the building blocks of a new media world where verification vanishes, unreality dominates, everything blurs into everything else and nothing carries any informational or emotional weight.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Making disinfo \u2018extremely\u2019 easy and real<\/p>\n

\n For a brief moment in history, video was evidence of reality. Now it\u2019s a tool for unreality.\n <\/p>\n

\n Two teams at The New York Times tried out Sora, which is currently invite-only, and the resulting stories reflected the power and the possibility of the technology. Reporters Mike Isaac and Eli Tan led with<\/a> the amazing, \u201cjaw-dropping\u201d creativity that Sora has unleashed before turning to the \u201cdisconcerting\u201d aspects of the app. Tiffany Hsu, Stuart A. Thompson and Steven Lee Myers led with<\/a> the app\u2019s ability to make disinformation \u201cextremely easy and extremely real.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n NPR\u2019s Geoff Brumfiel noticed<\/a> that OpenAI\u2019s \u201cguardrails\u201d against unwelcome content \u201cappeared to be somewhat loose around Sora. While many prompts were refused, it was possible to generate videos that support conspiracy theories. For example it was easy to create a video of what appeared to be President Richard Nixon giving a televised address telling America the moon landing was faked.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n That\u2019s kind of the whole point \u2014 to be able to create almost anything. \u201cPrioritize creation\u201d is the way Altman put it. And the result, as Hayden Field wrote<\/a> for The Verge, is that \u201cit\u2019s getting hard to tell what\u2019s real.\u201d Or rather, it\u2019s getting even harder.\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s natural to wonder what concepts like \u201chigh-quality,\u201d \u201cedited\u201d and \u201cfact-checked\u201d will mean in a world of infinite and mostly AI-generated content. The war for attention is ferocious and yet it\u2019s barely even started, considering what seems to be coming.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cEver since the early days of social media and YouTube, there has been more content created than people could ever watch, so we allowed algorithms to sort through it all and tell us what we watch, and we saw what happened to the media landscape, to our attention economy,\u201d Human Ventures co-founder Joe Marchese told Reliable Sources.\n <\/p>\n

\"For<\/p>\n

\n \u201cNow we are entering an entirely new epoch where Generative AI will allow for the creation of infinite content, at ever lower costs, meaning the means of distribution, the platforms and their algorithms, are going to have to adjust again, and the business models we built, however shaky on top of the platforms and their algorithms, are about to be upended, again,\u201d he continued.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe future of the attention economy, that all us humans have to live in together, feels more chaotic than ever.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n With that in mind, here are a few of this week\u2019s best reads about Sora and the implications for all of us.\n <\/p>\n

\n Platformer\u2019s Casey Newton recapped \u201cwhat everyone is saying about Sora<\/a>.\u201d In sum: \u201cIt\u2019s cool. It\u2019s scary. It\u2019s a hit.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Over at Business Insider, Katie Notopoulos tried to set aside<\/a> all the \u201cworries and fears\u201d about Sora and wrote about how deliriously fun it is. It\u2019s addictive \u201cbecause it\u2019s starring you.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt turns out that people may not mind AI slop as long as they can be part of it with their friends,\u201d Alex Heath wrote in Sources<\/a>. \u201cThat Meta, the most successful social media company in history, apparently did not understand this, while OpenAI did, is striking.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cShould public figures be fair game in this game? The lawyers are going to have a field day in this brave new world,\u201d Spyglass reporter M.G. Siegler wrote<\/a> after making a video of John F. Kennedy saying that his favorite movie is the Care Bears.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe difference with Sora 2, I think, is that OpenAI, like X\u2019s Grok, has completely given up any pretense that this is anything other than a machine that is trained on other people\u2019s work that it did not pay for, and that can easily recreate that work,\u201d wrote<\/a> 404 Media\u2019s Jason Koebler.\n <\/p>\n

\n And another big question: Will studios sue? \u201cTalks are underway,\u201d Winston Cho reported<\/a> for The Hollywood Reporter.\n <\/p>\n

\n Pondering the longer-term consequences of these tools can be overwhelming. Historically, people have primarily been consumers of media, not creators. What does it mean when we\u2019re all creators first and foremost?\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s good to be instinctively wary of AI hype artists, but some of these predictions from tech investor Greg Isenberg feel spot-on. \u201cIn 5-10 years,\u201d he wrote<\/a>, \u201cpeople won\u2019t ask \u2018what\u2019s your favorite show?\u2019 they\u2019ll ask \u2018what\u2019s your favorite generator?\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n We also have to ask, as the aforementioned Casey Newton does<\/a>, \u201cwhat happens when the majority of video we consume is not just synthetic but also highly personalized: tuned not just to our individual tastes and interests but also to our faces and voices.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n If you think today\u2019s information bubbles divide us, wait until each of us lives in a bubble designed for one.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A version of this article first appeared in the \u201cReliable Sources\u201d newsletter. You can sign up for free…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-187919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}