The Scoop: OpenAI’s Sora already showing promise — and ringing alarm bells

AI-generated video is here at a massive scale and already changing how we view the world around us.

Sora, an app from OpenAI, is a free app that allows users to create their own video based on a simple text prompt. In just five days, it garnered 1 million downloads — a pace even faster than its sister app ChatGPT.

Sora isn’t just a video creation app. It also allows you to browse videos created by other users, making it a social media app of sorts as well. But this also allows us to see just how these tools are being used — and the answers aren’t always pretty.

Business Insider Katie Notopoulos reports that the app’s early adopters seem to be teenage boys. That means that the videos can lean decidedly toward the juvenile: Stephen Hawking doing skateboard tricks in his wheelchair, Mr. Rogers saying wildly out-of-character things, Logan Paul saying he’s gay.

Living people must give their permission to appear on the app — that’s why late celebrities like Rogers and Hawking are OK, as is Paul, who consented. Initially, the app required copyright holders to opt out if they didn’t want their fictional characters appearing on the app, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly realized why the internet cannot be trusted.

“I think the theory of what it was going to feel like to people, and then actually seeing the thing, people had different responses,” Altman said. “It felt more different to images than people expected.”

Why it matters: The fact that Altman did not anticipate how quickly this app would turn into videos of Nazi SpongeBob shows that OpenAI may not be ready to contain the app it created. While it theoretically doesn’t allow images of living people to be used, it’s not hard to imagine workarounds where fictional people wearing colors very similar to your company’s uniforms are engaging in unsavory behavior. Or even videos by a dead person associated with your brand could lead to negative connotations — think Walt Disney spouting hateful language.

On the other hand, the app could become a new social platform, filled with creativity and chances to connect in quirky ways, much like TikTok. Who would have ever thought that an app largely created based on lip syncing would become the juggernaut it is today?

But at the moment, there remain warning signs. As Notopolous puts it: “There are also just tons and tons of potential trust-and-safety and content-moderation nightmares. And if the tenor of the platform is already largely ‘making fun of people,’ well … that’s not great.”

Editor’s Top Reads

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Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.