We already knew ChatGPT maker OpenAI wanted to make the next X/Twitter, giving itself a proprietary text-based social media app where it could milk users for new training data. But its latest product is an AI slop-maker copying TikTok–and it’s already at the top of app charts.
The official Sora app, which is still invite-only (though access codes can be found through community share threads on sites like Reddit), debuted Sept. 30. It mimics the swath of short-form video apps that spawned after the 2020 TikTok boom, but of course has an OpenAI twist–aka, everything there is generated by the company’s video LLM Sora.
Sora, as you probably remember, became somewhat infamous last spring after OpenAI’s then-CTO was unable to answer a very simple question: Were YouTube videos included in its training set, against creators’ consent? OpenAI has yet to answer that question (despite supposed pressure from YouTube, which is also looking to profit off the AI bandwagon), but creators like Marques Brownlee have made pretty compelling cases for why they think their videos may have been scraped.
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The Sora app lets people text-prompt-to-slop-out short vertical videos and include generated versions of themselves and/or their friends. (OpenAI says you have to get permission from someone before including them as a “cameo” in your generated video.) These videos can be in any genre and style, including mimicking copyrighted content like TV shows and movies.
Users can also watch other people’s videos–and so can people who don’t have the app yet; they just can’t interact any further.
As Axios points out, OpenAI hasn’t yet contended with all the potential copyright issues involved in its Sora training, nor the new copyright issues allowing people to copy TV/movies will bring. Axios theorizes that maybe OpenAI hopes releasing the tool en masse will let copyright holders see what’s possible if they let their projects be ground into LLM sausage, or let users riff off their IPs in a way that could eventually be visually indistinguishable from the original.
We can’t predict how rightsholders will feel, but somehow we don’t think seeing a slop machine producing content that competes with theirs rising to #1 in app stores will make them less litigious.
This app debuts fresh off OpenAI CEO Sam Altman‘s wide-eyed-ingenue-flavored post last month where he said his company needs more infrastructure because without massive computing centers (which are seriously impacting the towns around them), it can’t do things like cure cancer or “provide customized tutoring to every student on earth.”
About the Sora app, Altman said, “Please expect a very high rate of change from us; it reminds me of the early days of ChatGPT. We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly.”
The bottom line is, whatever people use the Sora app to create, you can bet OpenAI will be watching–and scraping a fresh round of data.
