Eshu Marneedi

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios¹:

OpenAI released a new Sora app Tuesday that lets people create and share AI-generated video clips featuring themselves and their friends.

Why it matters: The move is OpenAI’s biggest foray yet to turn its AI tools into a social experience and follows similar moves by Meta.

Driving the news: The Sora app on iOS requires an invitation. An Android version will follow eventually, OpenAI told Axios.

• The social app is powered by Sora 2, a new version of OpenAI’s video model, which also launched Tuesday.
• Sora 2 adds support for synchronized audio and video, including dialogue. OpenAI says Sora 2 is significantly better at simulating real-world physics, among other improvements.

I got access to the Sora app and, much to my chagrin, perused some of the videos from people whom I follow and the wider web. My goodness, it’s worse than I thought. I won’t even try to sugarcoat this in large part because it’s impossible to. It’s as bad as any rational, sentient creature would believe. The people watching this slop — usually elderly citizens or little children with irresponsibly unlimited internet access — aren’t sentient and do not have the mental acuity to decide this content is actively harmful to their well-being. Forget the abdication of creativity for a bit, because we’re past that discussion. The year isn’t 2024 anymore. How is this a net positive for society?

There is historical precedent for making tools that, in the short term, replace creativity or other skilled human labor. When the photo camera was invented, painters who made their living from painting portraits of people had to be disgruntled. You could’ve tried to make this argument in the artificial intelligence art genre, and while more creatively inclined people like myself would roll their eyes, you could find a crowd on social media who agreed with you. But who’s agreeing to this? There is no argument for what we’re seeing on Sora and Facebook today: thousands — nay, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands — of AI-generated “videos” of the most insane nonsense anyone has ever conceived. Fat people breaking glass bridges is not intellectually stimulating content.

It’s one thing when a company builds a blank text box with a blinking cursor, inviting people to come up with prompts to make video slop. That at least requires some sentience and acuity. One can’t sit back and be force-fed AI-generated content when they must actively seek it. But when we give bot farms the ability to force-feed elderly people and children the nastiest, disgusting, lowest-common-denominator scum content, we’re actively making the world a dumber place. And when we give these bot farms a bespoke app to deliver this bottom-of-the-barrel slop, whether it be Meta AI or Sora, we’re just encouraging and funding the dumbness of society. This is not complacency — we are actively poisoning vulnerable members of society. The ones most susceptible to thought germs and scams.

Here’s the Silicon Valley contrarian’s take on this nonsense: What’s so bad about a morbidly obese woman breaking a glass bridge and killing everyone atop a mountain? What’s wrong with making a video of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, stealing from a store? After all, the internet is full of much worse things. And to that end, I have to ask: What internet are these people using? You can find as much horrible, illegal, vile content on the internet if you search for it. The reason ChatGPT, Instagram, Facebook, etc., are commonly used websites is that they usually don’t harbor bad content. The danger on these websites is not vile content, but “brain rot.” Scams, spam, bot replies, misinformation, bigotry — internet soot that clogs the airways and acts as the world’s poison.

AI-generated content adds to this pile of internet soot we, as a collective society, have either been embracing or regurgitating. This is the most dangerous content on the internet, not because it is literally prone to causing the most real-life harm, but because collectively, it damages society beyond words. For heaven’s sake, people, the literary rates are falling. We live in the 21st century, where, if someone can’t pass an English exam, they can get ChatGPT to tutor them for free. How is this happening? It’s internet brain rot — non-intellectually stimulating content that is making people lose their minds. This is not a problem confined to a few age groups. It will insidiously haunt every demographic that spends even 15 minutes a day looking at social media.

I am not a behavioral psychologist or philosopher. I write about computers. And I think it doesn’t take a philosopher to see that the computers are causing one of the worst brainlessness epidemics in decades. Keep thinking, please.