OpenAI’s Sora Lets You Make Silly Videos of You and Your Friends | Invesloan.com

The most prominent AI company in the world just threw its hat into the social media ring.

On Tuesday, OpenAI launched a stand-alone video app called Sora that feels like an uncanny version of TikTok or Instagram Reels, populated solely by AI-generated content.

Invite-only Sora — launched alongside OpenAI’s latest audio and video generation model Sora 2 — lets users create 10-second videos from short, written prompts. The hero feature is “Cameos,” which inserts users and their friends into these clips (with their permission).

Is AI social media’s next frontier? Could Sora pose a threat to major social platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and Meta? How will users and brands feel about a content sandbox that’s entirely AI-generated? Business Insider senior reporters Sydney Bradley and Geoff Weiss, who cover media and AI, discussed the opportunities and challenges for the new platform.

A disclosure: Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, has a partnership with OpenAI.

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Sydney Bradley: Well, we’ve got a new social media app people are going wild over. Thank you for giving me an invite, Geoff. These Sora invites are a hot commodity since you only get four! Tell me, what are your first impressions?

Geoff Weiss: Absolutely. I went from being skeptical while watching OpenAI’s launch stream to quickly finding the app really entertaining. It feels like a silly novelty right now — we’ve gotten a kick around the office out of turning ourselves into Olympic figure skaters, harmonica players, and beat poets.

I’ve also noticed that I’ve been spending way more time creating “Soras” or “Cameos” — is there a name for the format yet? — than scrolling through my feed. What do you think so far?

Sydney: Immediately, I tried to prompt the app to make a cameo of me playing music and dressed like Bob Dylan, but that got flagged as “content violation.” OpenAI said in a blog post on Tuesday about launching Sora “responsibly” that the app has a “consent-based likeness” policy — meaning you can’t make videos using public figures’ likenesses unless they’re on the app and make their own public “cameo.” But with some slight prompt tweaks, I got something close to what I wanted.

Some top influencers are entering the fray early, like iJustine and Jake Paul. And Sam Altman is pretty impossible to escape on the app. He lets anyone use his likeness and already has nearly 10,000 followers — arguably Sora’s breakout star.

Geoff: Even still, there are a lot of characters appearing on the app that are copyrighted. We found videos of Pikachu doing ASMR, Super Mario being bailed out of jail by Princess Peach, and scenes reimagined in the style of SpongeBob SquarePants.

OpenAI is clearly moving aggressively in the name of disruption, and it remains to be seen how IP holders are going to be able to stem the tide if they want to. (At launch, OpenAI notified movie studios and talent agencies that they would have to proactively opt out, as The Wall Street Journal reported.)

Sydney, you’ve written a lot about how social media is becoming less social. OpenAI execs are pitching Sora as a tool for creation and connection rather than a receptacle for doomscrolling. Where do you see it in that context?

Sydney: Instagram’s definitely not as social as it used to be (even though Meta is trying to fix that). And TikTok has pretty much changed the way we consume actual content across every social media platform these days. We’re watching content and sharing it in DMs, but we (the regular ole’ users, aka non-influencers) aren’t posting endlessly into the void like we used to. Will Sora shift that in any way? It’s hard to say. The main feed is just another “For You” page to scroll through AI slop, but there are some real social elements like DMs and comments.

If Sora’s Cameos feature — especially the option to collaborate with friends and creators — takes off, then we may have a new social media behavior on our hands. Maybe it’s that shiny-new-toy effect, but even at the Business Insider office, we were sending these videos back and forth to each other

I was also chatting with Lindsey Gamble, a creator economy expert, about exactly this. Gamble said we’re “entering the era of AI-generated social media,” so maybe we’re watching a shift unfold under our noses.

Geoff: Indeed. People have been decrying the “fakeness” of social media — from filters to lifestyle curation — for a long time. And we’re also just resistant to the idea of content without any humans. But the analysts, marketing execs, and VCs I spoke with said that as the technology improves and people become more accustomed, that resistance could fall away — if we can even tell the difference anymore.

The same goes for advertisers.

“As long as their return-on-investment numbers look good, few brands spend much time digging deep enough to uncover any concerns,” EMARKETER’s Nate Elliot told me.

It’s also worth noting that AI is already deep in incumbent platforms. We’ve been turning ourselves into puppies on Snapchat via filters for roughly a decade. TikTok has tons of AI tools. Meta released a stand-alone AI app in the spring, and just rolled out its Vibes feed last week — a Sora competitor that drew some pretty fierce backlash.

Sydney: Exactly. OpenAI might just be bulldozing its way to that table with Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. I mean, look at ChatGPT’s success even without social features. Sensor Tower data from July estimated that ChatGPT was the quickest app to reach 1 billion global downloads in the past decade, dethroning shopping app Temu. This wouldn’t be the first time a tech giant without direct ties to social media has tried to cross over. Remember Google+?

Geoff: One big question on my mind is: Will OpenAI be another tech giant squashing new startups? There are already a growing number of AI-generation social networking startups. Could OpenAI rip more pages out of Meta’s playbook by copying or acquiring those teams?

Sydney: I think we have to get ready for OpenAI launching more apps. The company has already announced it’s working on a jobs and recruitment platform, which could compete with LinkedIn. Sora could very well be phase one, and we’ll grow more and more accustomed to trusting OpenAI-branded apps. Meta’s also building out stand-alone apps in a similar way with Threads and Meta AI.

On the other hand, maybe OpenAI will instead build one app that does it all. I was talking to Meghana Dhar, a tech content creator who worked at Snapchat and Instagram, about the idea of ChatGPT as a “super app of the future.” Yes, ChatGPT started as a text-based LLM, Dhar said, but it’s not hard to imagine using it for everything from shopping to texting to creating content (like Sora).