OpenAI’s Sora was the creepiest app on your phone — now it’s shutting down

Summary

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it is shutting down Sora, a TikTok-like social app that launched six months ago. OpenAI did not give a reason for the shut down, nor did it share information about when it will officially be discontinued. When Sora first opened up as an invite-only social network, it seemed like everyone was clamoring for an invite. But like Meta’s Horizon Worlds — the company’s virtual reality social platform — which is also in turmoil despite once being central to the company’s infamous metaverse, Sora didn’t have real staying power. Though the underlying Sora 2 video- and audio-generation model is scarily impressive, there was not sustained interest in an AI-only social feed. Sora was intended to function like an AI-first TikTok, cloning the recognizable vertical video feed interface. Its flagship feature, “cameos,” allowed people to scan their faces and make realistic deepfakes of themselves. These “cameos” could be made public, allowing anyone to make videos of their “cameo.” (Cameo took OpenAI to court over the name of this feature and prevailed, forcing the company to change it to “characters.”) In a turn of events that surprised literally no one, this glorified deepfake app was weird as hell. At launch, Sora felt like an under-moderated minefield of creepy Sam Altman videos. I will never be the same after watching a realistic clone of the OpenAI CEO walking through a slaughterhouse of fattened pigs and asking, “Are my piggies enjoying their slop?” VIDEO Sora was not supposed to allow people to generate videos of public figures who did not explicitly opt-in, but it was all too easy to evade OpenAI’s guardrails. Sure enough, deepfakes of real people like civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and actor Robin Williams emerged, prompting both of their daughters to go on Instagram and ask users to stop making videos of their deceased fathers. After making dozens of videos in which Sam Altman steals Nvidia chips from a Target, users shifted ge...