More thinking on Sora
Last night I wrote my initial reactions to the Sora release. My thoughts have evolved slightly in the 24 hours since.
The whole Sora thing is so hard to reconcile with because on the one hand, the model and technology is amazing, and I do think it’s going to lead to an explosion of interesting internet-driven creativity, but at the same time, the social implications of an infinite slop machine, are so clearly bad.
Tonight, I decided to watch one of the behind-the-scenes launch videos featuring a bunch of the product managers and engineers who worked on Sora.
Watching this, it did force me to rethink some of last night’s views. What’s obvious to me watching the video is, this is intended to be a creative app. It does seem to at least bias towards creating content and improving the 90-9-1 ratio. A bunch of the features, the cameos, the remixing, at least indicate to me that there is an explicit goal to be more about participation than pure consumption.
Watching the launch video, and them scroll through the silly videos they’ve been making internally, this feels more like Vine than any other social media app I’ve seen in a while. At least initially, it seems like the best use cases are in-jokes, memes and group chat banter.
One thing they speak about in the video is that, Sora obviously has the lowest barrier to entry of any social app, in terms of creation and participation. You don’t have to think of something witty to tweet, or take a perfect picture for Instagram, you can just prompt. You can remix a clip, you can embed yourself, or a friend in a clip.
I guess how you feel about this all comes down to whether you think these weird AI clips are really valid art at all, or just some form of psuedo-creativity. Is being a good Sora-prompter as valid and creative as writing a good blog post? Or writing a good song? Or being good at viral making viral TikToks? I’m still not entirely sure what I think, if I’m honest.
Some of the product decisions around safety and moderation do seem good too. There seem to be fairly strict rules around the cameo feature to avoid bullying and the like. For under 18s, apparently there is no infinite scroll on by default. That also mentioned a feature where, if the app senses you’ve been scrolling for too long, they’ll nudge you to create.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I strongly believe we should keep kids off of social media for longer than we do today, but, all that said, the Sora app does seem creative and fun, and the team behind it seem genuinely intersted in keeping it that way.
