Sora 2
Mood
skeptical
Sentiment
mixed
Category
tech
Key topics
AI video generation
Sora 2
OpenAI
OpenAI released Sora 2, an AI video generation model, sparking debate about its capabilities, potential applications, and societal implications.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
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Very active discussionFirst comment
15m
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151
Day 1
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Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
9/30/2025, 4:55:01 PM
49d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
9/30/2025, 5:10:25 PM
15m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
151 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
10/2/2025, 9:09:13 PM
47d ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
These companies and their shareholders really are complete scum in my eyes, just like AI in miltech.
Not because the tech isn't super interesting but because they steal years of hard work and pain from actual artists with zero compensation - and then they brag about it in the most horrible way possible, with zero empathy.
Then comes losing the little humanity left the mainstream culture, exactly as Miyzaki said, leading to a dead cold and even more unjust society.
Communism is tossing the frog into boiling water (tens millions of dead), capitalism is boiling it slowly (poor people in first world countries might not afford a dentist but they're not starving yet).
We need a system that rewards work - human time and competence.
There are really only 2 resources in the world - natural resources and human time. Everything else is built on top of those. And the people providing their time should be rewarded, not those who are in positions of power which allow them to extract value while not providing anything in return.
Does anybody here really think rich people deserve to just get richer faster than any working person can? Does anybody really believe that buying up homes and companies and raking in money for doing absolutely nothing is what we should be rewarding?
Then put your name behind it.
Where do you live? Their value has been steadily appreciating in a lot of places in the west due to high demand.
That's because the value of the land under the houses is so high; the house itself is nothing special. But even then, it's mostly because of Prop 13, and it only works out if you live in the house yourself. There's still noone cornering the market in California houses. Almost all landlords only own 1-2 properties.
It's risky to own a lot of buildings, and worse the risks are correlated if they're all in the same place (there could be a flood or wildfire etc.)
Commercial real estate is different because your tenants are (more) professional.
This is not just about copyright infringement or plagiarism.
Automatically generating text, images and videos based on training data and a tiny prompt is fundamentally about taking someone's work and making money off of it without giving anything in return.
No matter what text you put in the prompt you'll get /something/. Just because you put "studio ghibli anime" in the prompt doesn't mean you're going to actually get that out of it. It'll just be kind of yellow and blobby.
(Also, the style isn't from "people" but a specific guy named Yoshifumi Kondo who isn't around anymore.)
Though… I'm always surprised how respectful Westerners are about Miyazaki. Meanwhile you read other Japanese directors and they're saying all kinds of things about him.
Kids are happy that homework takes less time. Teachers are happy that grading the generated homework takes less time. Programmers are happy they can write the same amount of code in less time. Graphic designers are happy they can get an SVG from a vague description immediately. Writers are happy they can generate filler from a few bullet points quickly.
But then someone comes along, notices people are not working most of the time, fires three quarters of them and demands 4x increased output from the rest. And they can do it because the "AI" is helping them.
Except they don't get paid any more. The company makes the same amount of money for less cost.
So where does the difference go? To the already rich who own the company and the product.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:This_Is_Fine_(meme)....
Here is a direct example of a derived work, to the point where the prompt is "n orange-brown anthropomorphic dog sitting in a chair at a table in a room that is engulfed in flames, happy dog sitting on chair at a table viewed from the side, dog with a hat, room is burning with fire all across the room".
That's covered by Fair Use, I suppose they will argue this if they get sued. Interestingly, commons doesn't allow Fair Use, but the according to commons, "this is not a derived work".
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests...
You tell me if that was a derivative image or not. I argued it was, and the argument was completely ignored.
Inb4 make your own video model and see how easy it is
Sora 2 itself as a video model doesn't seem better than Veo 3/Kling 2.5/Wan 2.2, and the primary touted feature of having a consistent character can be sufficiently emulated in those models with an input image.
Its no use building technology when its not married with the humanities and liberal arts.
I assume if you ask normal people how AI affects their lifes they'd think about annoying callcenter menus, deep fake porn and propaganda videos, and getting homework done. Not sure if any of this is a positive experience for the mind.
It's 2025 and most speech controls for car navigation don't work, Siri is a pile of sh*t and millionaires are trying to convince us that we should either use their AI or a google which has significantly reduced the quality of their search result pages.
It's like a false choice dilemma which allows back-to-the-roots companies such as Kagi to emerge, and I'm happy about it.
Completely agree. The way I think about life is - how will people look back 50 years from now, and make remarks about what is happening?
I don't expect Sora2 to be SOTA. The Chinese models are further ahead in video/image gen
I predict that this will move some people over, and IG/TT will lose marketshare.
You need to be in the US/Canada and wait for this notification, and when you get an invite you can start using it in the app and on sora.com. And apparently you get 4 more invite codes that you can share with anyone, e.g. Android users:
> Android users will be able to access Sora 2 via http://sora.com once you have an invite code from someone who already has access
But if you do, that signals to the company this is all perfectly okay.
However, I still don't see how OpenAI beats Google in video generation. As this was likely a data innovation, Google can replicate and improve this with their ownership of YouTube. I'd be surprised if they didn't already have something like this internally.
This is something I would not like to see, I prefer product videos to be real, I am taking a risk with my money. If the product has hallucinated or unrealistic depiction it would be a kind of fraud.
- Scamming people at scale
- Nonconsensual pornography
- Juicing engagement metrics for fading social media sites
- The ongoing destruction of truth as a concept in our increasingly atomized and divided world
Obviously this will get used for a lot of evil or bad as well
Regardless of the slop, some people will learn to use it well. You have stuff like NeuralViz - quite the sight! - and other creators will follow suit, and figure out how to use the new tools to produce content that's worth engaging with. Bigfoot vlogs and dinosaur chase scenes, all that stuff is mostly just fun.
People like to play. Let them play. This stuff looks fun, and beats Sora 1 by a long shot.
Hopefully it catalyzes
Trust in media? Soaring! Why believe your eyes or ears when you can doubt everything equally?
Journalism? Thriving! Reporters now get to spend their days playing forensic video detective instead of, you know, reporting news.
Social harmony? Better than ever! Nothing brings people together like shared paranoia and the collective shrug of “I guess truth is dead now.”
Honestly, what could possibly go wrong?
https://www.tiktok.com/@dreamrelicc
Before AI, each video on this channel would have taken a large team with a Hollywood budget to create. In a few more years, one person may be able to turn their creative vision into a full-length movie.
(half sarcastic, but you could make the argument that most art has no benefit besides to the person that made the art)
Things are cool because they are unique, very hard to create, and require creativity. When those things become cheap commodities, they are no longer cool.
Making better tools is better for everyone: the median usage of those tools downstream is a separate issue.
AI pictures today are much less impressive than Dall-E 2 pictures were a few years ago, despite the fact that the models are much better nowadays. Currently AI videos can still be impressive, but this will quickly become a thing of the past.
Then people will move from trying to create art to creating "content". That is, non-artistic slop. Advertisements. Porn. Meme jokes. Click bait. Rage bait. Propaganda. Etc.
Then you have Chimamanda Adichie, who has sold millions of copies and won several awards, including the BBC National Short Story Award, widely described as "one of the most prestigious awards for a single short story"
Then another Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, won the Nobel fucking Prize in Literature in 1986. Or is that measure not good enough for you, your highness ?
Not only do you come across as racist, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Congratulations.
You were thoroughly proven wrong so now your new standard for literary greatness is "writers that average people know" ? (which is really just code for 'writers I know', because millions do know those writers, I wasn't sharing some secret). I guess that means we can throw out Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf in favor of whoever's currently at the top of the airport bookstore list.
It's not "defamatory" to point out that your argument, which began with a dismissive generalization about an entire country, was based on profound ignorance (the kind that wouldn't have taken anything more than a basic google search to remedy). You were corrected with facts. Instead of going, 'I stand corrected, sorry', you're doubling down. It just makes you look worse, and stupid.
This is the most basic racist playbook happening in real time, and you're the star. If you genuinely think you aren't then you need to take a long, good look at yourself.
People need to be exposed to what is real. Not more artificial stuff.
I think this is the point at which humanity will finally puke and reject this crap.
Just because a small segment of people like it doesnt mean the mass majority will.
[0] https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-ton-of-ai-images-ive-mad...
Yes, but at the same time the value of video production will quickly drop to 0. Or to whatever it costs to generate that video in terms of tokens.
What are the benefits of what you do? Does anyone know?
Whether said fun is "worth" the social and economic costs is a separate issue.
It's not that I disagree with the criticism; it's rather that when you live on the moving edge it's easy to lose track of the fact that things like this are miraculous and I know not a single person who thought we would get results "even" like this, this quickly.
This is a forum frequented by people making a living on the edge—get it. But still, remember to enjoy a little that you are living in a time of miracles. I hope we have leave to enjoy that.
Now we have photorealistic video with sound and, oh yeah, the model can generate an entire script and mini-plot on its own based on the most basic prompt.
I think this is not nearly as important as most people think it is.
In hollywood movies, everyone already knows about "continuity errors" - like when the water level of a glass goes up over time due to shots being spliced together. Sometimes shots with continuity errors are explicitly chosen by the editor because it had the most emotional resonance for the scene.
These types of things rarely affect our human subjective enjoyment of a video.
In terms of physics errors - current human CGI has physics errors. People just accept it and move on.
We know that superman can't lift an airplane because all of that weight on a single point of the fuselage doesn't hold, but like whatever.
There are lots of tools being built to address this, but they're still immature.
https://x.com/get_artcraft/status/1972723816087392450 (This is something we built and are open sourcing - still has a ways to go.)
ComfyUI has a lot of tools for this, they're just hard to use for most people.
This release is clearly capable of generating mind-blowingly realistic short clips, but I don't see any evidence that longer, multi-shot videos can be automated yet. With a professional's time and existing editing techniques, however...
But clearly we also see some major downsides. We already have an epidemic of social media rotting people's minds, and everything about this capability is set to supercharge these trends. OpenAI addresses some of these concerns, but there's absolutely no reason to think that OpenAI will do anything other than what they perceive as whatever makes them the most money.
An analogy would be a company coming up with a way to synthesize and distribute infinite high-fructose corn syrup. There are positive aspects to cheaply making sweet tasting food, but we can also expect some very adverse effects on nutritional health. Sora looks like the equivalent for the mind.
There's an optimistic take on this fantastic new technology making the world a better place for all of us in the long run, after society and culture have adapted to it. It's going to be a bumpy ride before we get there.
Unless there some fundamental, technical way to distinguish the two, I wonder who would win?
The very fact that I (or billions of others) waste time on shorts is an issue. I don't even play games anymore, it's just shorts. That is a concerning rewiring of the brain :/
Guess what I`m trying to say is that, there is a market out there. It's not pretty, but there certainly is.
Will keep trying to not watch these damn shorts...
Maybe this will result in something similar, but it can affect more people who aren’t as wary.
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/ai-homeless-people-in-my-hou...
Of course, the ones focusing on the content can always editorialize the spam out. And in real social networks you ask your friends to stop making that much slop. But this can be finally the end of Facebook-like stuff.
Please enlighten me. What are they? If my elderly grandma is on her deathbed and I have no way to get to see her before she passes, will she get more warmth and fond memories of me with a clip of my figure riding an AI generated dragon saying goodbye, or a handwritten letter?
My original question was asking for examples of this. Try to keep up, c'mon man
Are there? “A lot” of them? Please name a few that will be more beneficial than the very obvious detrimental uses like “making up life-destroying lies about your political opponents or groups of people you want to vilify” or “getting away with wrongdoing by convincing the judge a real video of yourself is a deepfake”.
That last one has already ben tried, by the way.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/27/elon-musk...
edit: as per usual it's not yet...
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