OpenAI pushes its new social video app, Sora, to dominate online feeds

At least, that's probably what the team behind OpenAi's recently launched social video app wants you to think. It's fairly obvious what OpenAI stands to gain from flooding the internet with Sora-generated videos. The content is another way for the company to promote its technology and normalize the idea of people clocking in at the slop factory as a way of entertaining themselves.

That seems to be the endgame for the Sora app, where generating a video is as simple as typing a few sentences into a prompt box. OpenAI and its competitors all want to be perceived as wellsprings from which a new, revolutionary kind of art has emerged -- one that gives people the ability to express their creativity in ways that were not possible before. The people making these videos like Jake Paul, Snoop Dogg, and Shaquille O'Neal have clearly bought into that idea, or at least been paid to pretend they have in order to convince their gullible fans that mainlining slop from a trough is cool, actually.

But when you watch enough of this stuff (which isn't a lot), what becomes clear is how deeply unimaginative and unfunny it is. You also get the distinct sense that none of these creators have the ability to imagine things beyond "what if this dead celebrity did some buckwild shit that would have given their agents heart attacks?" The substance of these videos speaks volumes about the current state of gen AI. But it says even more about how this technology's output has been influenced by the gradual death of monoculture.

Though some have argued that society felt more cohesive when everyone watched the same TV shows and films -- the mythical work watercooler conversation -- monoculture was not without its drawbacks.