Is Sora the Beginning of the End for Openai?

What we got next: porn

In fact a fun thing to think about is what signals we could observe in markets that specifically call out AGI as the expectation as opposed to simple bullish outlook on inference usage.

The app is fun to use for about 10 minutes then that is it.

Same goes for Grok imagine. All people want to do is generate NSFW content.

What happened to improving the world?

On the other side we want to believe in something, so we'll believe in the video that will suit our beliefs.

It's an interesting struggle.

Just consider how a screenshot of a tweet or made-up headline already spreads like a wildfire: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1980221072512635117

Sora involves far more work than what is required to spread misinfo.

Finally, people don't really care about the truth. They care about things that confirm their world view, or comfortable things. Or they dismiss things that are inconvenient for their tribe and focus on things that are inconvenient for other tribes.

While there were some debris instances IRL the freeway was completely shut down per the governors orders and nobody was harmed. (Had he not done this, that same debris may have hit motorists, so this was a good call on his part)

You could see the "Sora" watermark in the video, but it was still popular enough to make it in my reels feed that is normally always a different kind of content.

In this case whoever made that was sloppy enough to use a turnkey service like Sora. I can easily generate videos suitable for reels using my GPU and those programs don't (visibly) watermark.

We are in for dark times. Who knows how many AI-generated propaganda videos are slipping under the radar because the operator is actually half-skilled.

For over a year now we've been at the point whereby a video of anyone saying or doing anything can be generated by anyone and put on the Internet, and it's only becoming more convincing (and rapidly)

We've been living in a post-truth world for almost ten years, so it's now become normalized

Almost half of the population has been conditioned to believe anything that supports their political alignment

People will actually believe incredibly far-fetched things, and when the original video has been debunked, will still hold the belief because by that point the Internet has filled up with more garbage to support something they really want to believe

It's a weird time to be alive

I find it a bit more concerning that anyone would not already understand how deeply we exist in a "post-truth" world. Every piece of information we've consumed for the last few decades has increasingly been shaped by algorithms optimizing someone else's target.

But the real danger of post-truth is when there is a still enough of a veneer of truth that you can use distortions to effectively manipulate the public. Losing that veneer is essentially a collapse of the whole system, which will have consequences I don't think we can really understand.

The pre and early days of social media were riddled with various "leaks" of private photos and video. But what does it mean to leak a nude photo of a celebrity when you can just as easily generate a photo that is indistinguishable? The entire reason leaks like that were so popular is precisely because people wanted a glimpse into something real about the private life of these screen personalities (otherwise 'leaks' and 'nude scenes' would have the same value). As image generation reaches the limit, it will be impossible to ever really distinguish between voyeurism and imagination.

Similarly we live in an age of mass surveillance, but what does surveillance footage mean when it can be trivially faked. Think of how radicalizing surveillance footage has been over the past few decades. Consider for example the video of the Rodney King beating. Increasingly such a video could not be trusted.

> I'm kinda terrified of the future of politics.

If you aren't already terrified enough of the present of politics, then I wouldn't be worried about what Sora brings us tomorrow. I honestly think what we'll see soon is not increasingly more powerful authoritarian systems, but the break down of systems of control everywhere. As these systems over-extend themselves they will collapse. The peak of social media power was to not let it go further than it was a few years ago, Sora represents a larger breakdown of these systems of control.

Everything is manipulated or generated until proven otherwise.

It smells of e/acc, effective altruist ethics which are not my favorite, but I don't work at OpenAI so I don't have a say I can only interpret.

I agree, but we will likely continue down this road...

At that moment, it simultaneously became possible to create "deep fakes" by simply forging a signature and tricking readers as to who authored the information.

And even before that, just with speaking, it was already possible to spread lies and misinformation, and such things happened frequently, often with disastrous consequences. Just think of all the witch hunts, false religions, and false rumors that have been spread through the history of mankind.

All of this is to say that mankind is quite used to dealing with information that has questionable authorship, authenticity, or accuracy. And mankind is quite used to suffering as a result of these challenges. It's nothing particularly new that it's moving into a new media format (video), especially considering that this is a relatively new format in the history of mankind to begin with.

(FWIW, the best defense against deep fakes has always been to pay attention to the source of information rather than just the content. A video about XYZ coming from XYZ's social media account is more likely to be accurate than if it comes from elsewhere. An article in the NYTimes that you read in the NYTimes is more likely to be authentic than a screenshot of an article you read from some social media account. Etc. It's not a perfect measure -- nothing is -- but I'd say it's the main reason we can have trust despite thousands of years of deep fakes.)

IMO the fact that social media -- and the internet in general -- have decentralized media while also decoupling it from geography is less precedented and more worrisome.

I think we may revert back to trusting only smaller groups of people, being skeptical of anything outside that group, becoming a bit more tribal. I hope without too many deleterious effects, but a lot could happen.

But humans, as a species, are survivors. And we, with our thinking machines will figure out ultimately how to deal with it all. I just hope the pain of this transition is not catastrophic.

Fakery isn't new, only the product of scale and quality at which it is becoming possible.

From the writing, through organized religion, printing press, radio and tv, internet and now ai.

Printing press and reformation wars is obvious, radio and totalitarianism is less known, internet and new populism is just starting to be recognized for what it is.

Eventually we'll get it regulated and adjust to it. But in the meantime it's going to be a wild ride.

I consider myself pretty on the ball when it comes to following this stuff, and even I've been caught off guard by some videos, I've seen videos on Reddit I thought were real until I realised what subreddit I was on

Our ways of thinking and our courts understand that you can’t trust what people say and you can’t trust what you read. We’ve internalized that as a society.

Looking back, there seems to have been a brief period of time when you could actually trust photographs and videos. I think in the long run, this period of time will be seen as a historical anomaly, and video will be no more trusted than the printed or spoken word is today.

This will simply take us back about 150 years to the time before the camera was common.

The transition period may be painful though.

Then you can see any conversation about the video will be even more divorced from reality.

None of this requires video manipulation.

The majority of people are idiots on a grand scale. Just search any social media for PEMDAS and you will find hordes of people debating the value of 2 + 3 / 5 on all sorts of grounds. “It’s definitely 1. 2+3 =5 then by 5 is 1” stuff like that.

Like cars making horse manure in cities a non-issue (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w61d-NBqafM)

Maybe the solution to everybody lying would be some way to directly access a person's actual memories from their brains..

It's like the old saying: They create their own ecosystem. Circular stock market deals being the most obvious, but the WorldCoin has been for years in the making and Altman often described it as the only alternative in a post-truth world (the one he himself is making of course).

[0] https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/worldcoin-crypto-p...

Anthropic has said that every model they've trained has been profitable. Just not profitable enough to pay to train the next model.

I bet that's true for OpenAI's LLMs too, or would be if they reduced their free tier limits.

It's similar to the process of electrification. Every existing machine/process needed to be evaluated to see if electricity would improve it: dish washing, clothes drying, food mixing, etc.

OpenAI is not alone. Every one of their products has an (sometimes superior) equivalent from Google (e.g. Veo for Sora) and other competitors.

It makes them look desperate though. Nothing like starting tons of services at once to show you have a vision

Also because they have the funding to do it.

Reminds me a bit of the early Google days, Microsoft, Xerox, etc,

This is just what the teenage stage of the top tech startup/company in an important new category looks like.

Ads destroy... pretty much everything they touch. It's a natural fit, but a terrible one.