You record a short selfie video to create a \u201ccameo\u201d profile and choose who can access it \u2013 friends, everyone or just yourself. <\/p>\n
Anyone with access can type a few words describing what they want to see you doing and generate a clip in minutes.<\/p>\n
You have to opt in to share your face, but you don\u2019t get to approve what people make with it. <\/p>\n
The app sends you a notification after someone creates a video of you. Sora is also a social network like TikTok, except everything you see is AI generated. <\/p>\n
You can remove a video featuring your likeness from inside the Sora app. But by then its creator has already seen it, possibly shared, and maybe even downloaded and posted it in a different social app.<\/p>\n
Sora pushes the idea of consent \u2013 or having say over how you appear online \u2013 into uncomfortable territory. <\/p>\n
Until recently, using AI to fake someone\u2019s likeness was called a deepfake and considered taboo. <\/p>\n
Now OpenAI has rebranded it as a cameo and made it the social activity of the week. <\/p>\n
Lost in the wave of LOLs is what it actually feels like to lose control of your own face.<\/p>\n
To understand both the technical and interpersonal dynamics of this, I asked my very creative colleague Chris Velazco to go wild making Sora videos of me. <\/p>\n
He made a fake DUI video and dozens more, including one of Ronald Reagan appointing me \u201cChair of the National Council of Lying to Children\u201d. The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI, but I review all tech with the same critical eye.<\/p>\n
Much of it was genuinely funny. Sora is more impressive than previous AI video tech at creating faces \u2013 the expressions, the lip movements, sometimes even the tone of voice. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s something inherently entertaining about seeing yourself in scenarios you\u2019d never experience. When you hand someone else control of that mirror, they can be creative in ways you wouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n
One of my favourites is a video Chris made of me being berated by a reality TV chef for a bad dish, in which I make a face people who know me say is eerily accurate.<\/p>\n
I might have left it there \u2013 just harmless fun between friends. <\/p>\n
Then Chris made a video of me telling an off-colour joke in the office. I felt my stomach drop. It wasn\u2019t something I\u2019d ever say, but it wasn\u2019t outside the realm of plausibility. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s what made it disturbing. I could imagine showing it to someone, watching them watch it, seeing the question form in their mind: did he actually say that?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a journalist with a platform and a byline. What about actually vulnerable people, from the victims of abuse to targets of online fraud? <\/p>\n
Imagine high school. <\/p>\n
Picture someone\u2019s face showing them shoplifting, using drugs, saying slurs \u2013 sent to employers, parents, schools.<\/p>\n
I called up Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has deep experience helping abuse victims deal with digital threats. <\/p>\n
\u201cVideos of friends shoplifting at Target are much more dangerous for some populations than others,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
\u201cFundamentally, what OpenAI is misunderstanding is power dynamics.\u201d<\/p>\n
What you can, and can\u2019t, control about your face<\/p>\n
In a statement, OpenAI told me \u201cyou are in control of your likeness end-to-end with Sora\u201d. When I asked why users don\u2019t approve videos before they\u2019re created, the company thanked me for the feedback. Translation: We know this is a problem. We shipped it anyway.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should have a lot more control over our identity,\u201d said Hany Farid, a University of California at Berkeley professor who has studied AI-generated media for years. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut making the product safer makes it less viral, so nobody wants to do that,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The cameo-sharing defaults make it worse. When you sign up, Sora automatically sets your cameo to share with \u201cmutuals\u201d \u2013 anyone who follows you and you follow back in its social network function. Most people won\u2019t keep track of that list.<\/p>\n
\u201cFriends now do not remain friends indefinitely \u2013 people\u2019s relationships do change,\u201d Galperin told me. <\/p>\n
You\u2019re essentially trusting everyone you\u2019ve ever followed back to never become an ex, an enemy or just someone with bad judgment.<\/p>\n
After the launch, Sora gave users a bit more control. Under cameo preferences, you can now write in guidelines for how you want to be portrayed in other people\u2019s videos, which includes \u201crestrictions\u201d for what should be off-limits. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re continuing to hillclimb on making restrictions even more robust, and we will add new ways for you to stay in control of your cameo in the future,\u201d wrote Bill Peebles, the head of Sora, on X.<\/p>\n
OpenAI also says Sora has guardrails against sexual, violent and otherwise harmful content. You can\u2019t make a video of someone undressed, but I\u2019ve got videos of crowds spitting on me, someone slapping me, and me flipping off a baby. (The AI raised the wrong finger, but still.) To make a video of someone \u201cbeing nasty\u201d, you just type their name and \u201cbeing nasty\u201d.<\/p>\n
Sora videos also contain a visible watermark, to help people know they\u2019re fake. But my designer showed me she was able to crop it out with video editing software from Adobe in about five minutes.<\/p>\n
How a fake video can hurt<\/p>\n
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman set his Sora cameo to share with everyone. <\/p>\n
In the app\u2019s first week, he has appeared in many videos acting goofy. When I asked what he learned from the experience, OpenAI wouldn\u2019t say. But Altman isn\u2019t a regular user \u2013 he has the power to ban anyone from the app.<\/p>\n
Online creator Justine Ezarik, who is known as iJustine, also opened her cameo to everyone, then found people making sexualised videos throwing liquid on her body.<\/p>\n
In an email, Ezarik said she wasn\u2019t surprised it happened, and she now actively monitors every draft and deletes anything that crosses a line. Most users won\u2019t have the time, attention or technical savvy to do that.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s sparking important conversations,\u201d she said, including \u201cabout how these tools can be misused to harm or bully people\u201d.<\/p>\n
Non-celebrity users could face a different set of complications. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m concerned about the use of these videos as instruments of harassments and also as instruments of grift \u2013 ways of fooling people into thinking their friends are in trouble and need money,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
So what should you do? Jules Terpak, a Gen Z online creator, told me she thinks regular users would be \u201cquite open to opening up the feature to friends\u201d but not the public, a dynamic she has already seen among her peers.<\/p>\n
For close friends who communicate well, this might be fine. But even then, there\u2019s a minefield. <\/p>\n
\u201cI would feel the need to ask a friend if I could post the cameo before doing so,\u201d said Terpak, who previously worked as an advice columnist for the Washington Post. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s necessarily harmful to privately create with their identity if they gave me the approval to do so via the app\u2019s settings, but even so, I intuitively feel like I\u2019d still want to check in before actually publishing.\u201d<\/p>\n
That instinct \u2013 to ask permission even when you technically have it \u2013 is the consent culture OpenAI should have built into the app. Instead, they\u2019ve outsourced it to the courtesy of individual users.<\/p>\n
After my experiment with Chris, I changed my Sora settings to \u201conly me\u201d \u2013 meaning only I can make videos of myself. It defeats the social purpose of the app, but that\u2019s the point. If you\u2019ve already created a cameo, you can delete it in settings, though that doesn\u2019t remove you from videos already created.<\/p>\n
Chris apologised for making me uncomfortable. Now imagine it in the hands of someone who wouldn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n
– Gerrit De Vynck and Drew Harwell contributed to this report.<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You record a short selfie video to create a \u201ccameo\u201d profile and choose who can access it \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,8239,2724,11924,363,364,14146,52488,52486,36979,4189,5818,1872,18940,1445,8455,17881,52485,4977,33325,111,139,69,3240,23853,45416,145,223,107,52487,6382,416,5143,26226,102],"class_list":["post-64699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-american","tag-app","tag-arrested","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-burn","tag-clippings","tag-confess","tag-drink","tag-driving","tag-eating","tag-face","tag-flag","tag-friends","tag-getting","tag-got","tag-laughed","tag-my","tag-myself","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-recently","tag-scared","tag-sora","tag-technology","tag-the","tag-then","tag-toenail","tag-took","tag-video","tag-viral","tag-watched","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}