Sora, AI Bicycles, and Meta Disruption
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
OpenAI knew that, played fast and loose with IP laws because… they wanted that bit of popularity to impress investors or something… then the lawyers got nervous and now they’re dialing it back down.
It’s a trick they can pull once but that’s it.
I suspect the more limited it inevitably becomes due to lawyers being lawyers, the more its popularity will wane.
Ironically enough, that’s why I think open-source models will still come out ahead in the long term. People really want to make videos with Pikachu in them.
In what data centers would these open models be run such that copyright laws will not apply?
Serious question. Trying to figure all this out.
Is it that you think people will run the models on their own laptops or phones? Or will there be some offshore municipality where the models can be served from that is out of the reach of copyright laws? Do you have another idea in mind entirely? How are you thinking on all this?
However, the way the parent worded it ie $1 of compute electricity - requires the compute to exist and temporarily be loaned. Otherwise “just a $1” would require a massive capex to buy/build compute.
You could make them with public figures that aren’t alive any more for a day or two longer, but those get blocked now, too.
That said: I think you’re ultimately right, it’s just that it’s more of a past tense thing. My primary remaining fun use case is to push as close to the guardrails as possible to make embarrassing funny videos of my friends and family members, who are doing the same to me.
If you can’t generate videos of real people or movie characters getting arrested or doing insane things, no one is going to care about Sora anymore.
Consider the Studio Ghibli phenomenon. It was fun to create and share photos of your loved ones in Ghibli aesthetics until that novelty wore off
Video models arguably have a lot more novelty to juice. But they will eventually get boring once you have explored the usually finite latent space of interesting content
First of all I almost never use these video services with the sound on. I know I'm not the only one, because many services have captions on by default. Sora doesn't seem to have a solution for this yet.
Second, I have almost no desire to see videos with @Sama cameos. I get served a bunch of them every time. Along with MLK, Lincoln, Kennedy etc. @Sama isn't funny to me, and raping the likenesses of some of those figures doesn't really work for me.
Third, there's not enough creativity and range in the videos. I see way too many of the same videos over and over and over. The riffs on the 1980s/90s TV commercial with the kid opening the sucky Christmas present. Ok, maybe there's a small iota of humor once or twice, but not enough to sustain endless remixes of the same thing.
I also hate just about all Jim Carrey films (except maybe the Truman Show) but many other people seem to love them. Perhaps Sora just isn't for me.
What do you think about Cable Guy? It is essentially a somewhat social realist movie about the total nightmare of having a typical Jim Carrey character in your life. You might like it.
I don't understand tiktok at all, but when I go for my daily walks I see groups of kids (10-15) standing on benches in groups of 3-5, each of them doomscrolling on their phone, kids walking while scrolling (and the permanent deformed neck that come with it), it's the norm not the exception.
But Meta knows AI slop poses a problem for their business model. When anyone can churn out engaging content without needing perfect lighting, a six-figure ad deal, or even a face or voice, there’s little incentive for users to stay locked into the influencer-driven attention economy that fuels Meta’s ad revenue. They don’t just want your attention, they want it monetized. And right now, AI slop is too democratic to profit from.
Are people locked into the influencer economy because of the "polish" of the videos?
I feel like people are more locked into consumerism, and this is just the cheapest channel of delivery.
Won't much of the AI slop just become, or try to become the influencer itself?
Yes. Influencers with big production and marketing budgets will usually create more content that has the "wow" factor. With AI people can add the same "wow" factor in their videos with little to no budget. This should slowly erode the value of a platform like Instagram as AI content gets better.
Don't forget parasocial relationship
People will monetize one way or another. It may be more or less explicit with AI slop.
Additionally, I would challenge "AI slop posing a problem": AI Agents and automation of content keeps people engaged inside of a platform, inside of a niche. A democratization may lead to more expensive ad space.
Meta can certainly assist in creating slop and maintaining conversational salespersons
They absolutely can and you could’ve said the same about Stack Overflow or Quora. But in the end those platforms fizzled once AI began to democratize the creation of “good-enough” answers. The same trajectory likely awaits Instagram as AI-generated videos reach parity with user-made ones, the distinction between creator and consumer will blur. The shift is inevitable if the technology doesn't hit a wall.
Maybe companies like OpenAI will make even more money by licensing the technology that keeps us entertained, but the influencer economy will eventually collapse. I’m not saying what’s coming is necessarily better, I’m just saying Meta’s platforms are in for a rough ride.