Sora 2 and the Brainrot Rebellion

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, we are talking about the new Sora 2 model and the Sora app that goes with it and whether it represents a potential Cambria Cambria and a potential Cambria and a potential for the AI daily daily daily.

0:30bots and pencils in Notion. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief. And to learn about sponsorship options, send us a note at sponsors at aidailybrief.ai. Now, one quick additional note, this episode is a big, ponderous, big thing. We are getting into not only the new model that was released in the first reactions, but what it means for society, which means, of course, that we absolutely do not have time for headlines. We'll be back with our normal format of headlines and main episode tomorrow. But for now, let's just dive into this incredibly important conversation.

1:00This is an emergency bulletin from the National Radio Network. Reports from across the country tell of an alarming condition the doctors are calling AI brain rot. Across the nation, a generation has surrendered its thoughts to the artificial mind. Young and old sit in trance, their brains reduced to humming circuits, a condition our doctors call AI brain rot. A new digital menace is sweeping the suburbs. It's called AI brain rot, and experts say it can hijack a teenager's imagination. Teachers report students muttering machine slang and staying up all night chatting with programs. The machine wants my head, man.

1:27It can have it. I'm just along for the ride. Why fight it? let it plug in, tune us up, whatever. Feels cosmic. They say it's brain rot. I think it's more like brain blossom, you dig? Every single post. Another blurry dog with 16 teeth, a senator who looks like a wax figure, and whatever this is supposed to be. I didn't ask for an all-you-can-eat buffet of robot nonsense, so I'm going to need to speak to whoever's in charge of this game. We're joined this morning by the host of the AI Daily Brief, here to help us unpack the buzz around Sora and something the internet's calling brain rot. Thanks for waking up early with us.

1:52Glad to be here. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today's episode is about Sora. Yesterday, OpenAI made good on all the rumors and released the latest generation of their video generation model Sora, Sora 2. Interestingly, however, it wasn't just a model release. Instead, OpenAI released not only Sora 2, but also a new social app called Sora that is in some ways a TikTok or Instagram Reel style short form app for sharing, collaborating on, and remixing AI videos. And if you thought the conversation around Meta's vibes feed from last week was contentious, it has absolutely nothing on this. In fact, I'm convinced that part of what's happening now is not just a reaction to AI, but is part of a broader reckoning of social media and the midst of an attempted societal reclamation away from digital media that we are firmly in the middle of right now.

2:42Let's talk first, though, about what was actually released. In their blog post, OpenAI sums up, our latest video generation model is more physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable than prior systems. It also features synchronized dialogue and sound effects. There have been a couple of important moments in the history of AI-generated video. One was the original announcement of Sora, which pretty fundamentally changed people's expectations and understanding of what was possible with AI video. Although interestingly, the total lack of access that people had to the model in the subsequent months took a lot of the sheen off of it.

3:14In fact, in some ways, it seemed like OpenAI had just comfortably surrendered that whole side of AI generation to other people. The other people in question, of course, most notably was Google, whose VO3 was in many ways the seminal chat CPT style moment when it came to AI video. The difference with VO3, as opposed to every other previous model, was that it integrated sound. Whereas previously you would have had to wire together some complicated workflow to generate your video in one place and your audio in another and then mash them together, now all of that could be done in a single prompt. It turns out that that was the type of change that fundamentally unlocks massive amounts of new usage.

3:51And subsequent to that release, VO3 videos started showing up all over social media. We got Harry Potter Vlogwarts videos, tons and tons of Bigfoot and Yeti vlogs, which back in June, HowToGeek actually said, prove AI's worth as a creative tool, and in general just saw for the first time, AI video really become a key part of the short-form video landscape. Fast forward to this announcement, Sora 2 has those VO3-style audio capabilities, but also what OpenAI says is hugely upgraded reality when it comes to things like physics. Indeed, if the original Sora model from back in February 24 was akin to the GPT-1 moment, OpenAI writes with Sora 2, we're jumping straight to what we think may be the GPT-3.5 moment for video.

4:34They continue, Sora 2 can do things that are exceptionally difficult and in some cases outright impossible for prior video generation models. Olympic gymnastics routines, backflips on a paddleboard that accurately model the dynamics of buoyancy and rigidity, and triple axles while a cat holds on for dear life. Continuing, they write, prior video models are over-optimistic. They will morph objects and deform reality to successfully execute upon a text prompt. For example, if a basketball player misses a shot, the ball may spontaneously teleport to the hoop. They also say that the model is a quote, big leap forward in controllability, able to follow intricate instructions spanning multiple shots while accurately persisting world state.

5:11And they pointed out it has multiple styles available to it, including realistic, cinematic, and even anime. One of the big things, though, is that Sora is explicitly trying to interact the real world in which we live and ourselves with this AI-generated video world. In short, you can put yourself, your friends, or objects from the real world into different environments using Sora. And that, in many ways, is the main thesis of the new Sora app that comes alongside the model. OpenAI writes that when they first started playing with the Upload Yourself feature internally amongst the Sora team, they had so much fun with it that they decided to embed it in a new social app, which they are calling Sora.

5:50Not only can you drop your creations into the app, you can create and remix the videos from other people that you're following, and you can also drop yourself and your friends into videos via what they're calling cameos. Basically, you take a short video of yourself saying a set of numbers and tilting your head in a couple different directions, and then you and anyone you've authorized can use your likeness for whatever generation they want. You have the control to say whether it's just you who can use your likeness, whether it's just people you follow, whether it's an extended network of people you follow and the people they follow, or whether it's anyone.

6:21Sam Altman's announcement of this was appropriately highfalutin. He wrote, this feels to many of us like the chat GPT for creativity moment, and it feels fun and new. There's something great about making it really easy and fast to go idea to result, and the new social dynamics that emerge. In other words, what he's implicitly saying here is that part of the value of having the app alongside the model is the instantaneous feedback loop you get by sharing the thing rather than just cutting it off at the moment of creation. Sam continues, creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase.

6:55Even in the very early days of playing with Sora, it's been striking to many of us how open the playing field suddenly feels. In particular, he writes, the ability to put yourself and your friends into a video, the team he said worked very hard on character consistency, with the cameo feature is something we have really enjoyed during testing and is to many of us a surprisingly compelling new way to connect. Now, in the first 24 hours after launch, a huge part of the feed has just been people experimenting and showing off what they can do. Rory Flynn wrote, Sora 2, not what I expected. Five dumb slash awesome examples.

7:26One was a recreation of Love Island, where a woman watches CCTV-style footage of a real-life Ronald McDonald making out with a real-life Wendy, a documentary about famous memes, and a guy on a skateboard on a treadmill holding a leaf blower generated from the prompt the dumbest thing you could possibly imagine. Others were looking to more business uses. Rio Lu, the head of design at Cursor, shared a vintage-style ad for the company and said, Sora 2 one-shotted a Cursor ad. Mind-blown emoji. Where are we heading into? Others were more focused on testing out the capabilities. Chase Bauer showed a video of a ball rolling down a set of planks, and said absolutely baffled by how good Sora 2 is at physical consistency.

8:03I'm basically watching my SIM code execute. Others pointed out that Sora passes the glass refraction test, where the reflection of an arrow drawn on the wall behind the glass changes direction when you pour water in the glass. Some explored whether it could generate old classic video games, which it did, while others had dreams of a better ending of Game of Thrones Season 8. Vresser X writes, the realism in Sora 2 is on another level. The physics, the motion, the way everything interacts dynamically, it doesn't just look real, it feels real. This is no longer text to video, it's reality to video.

8:34Absolutely mind-blowing. Peter Levels writes, you really have to give it to OpenAI because Sora 2 is very impressive on a lot of fronts. High quality video model with great physics, high quality audio in each video, high character consistency, multiple characters in one scene, accurate character's voice, social platform attached to it. Before today, the best AI video models were dominated by Chinese companies like ByteDance and Google with VO3. But none of these models had great character consistency, if it was a feature at all, let alone multiple characters in one scene. Generally, you'd make a video and the face would slowly change into someone else, just not good.

9:06On top of that, Google was struggling with allowing people to upload characters, scared that it would get abused for deepfakes and just generally nerfing their model so you can't really use it for anything. OpenAI solved that by rethinking ownership over your character smartly with Cameo, which is essentially train yourself as an AI model, which we've all been doing in our apps for years, but in a more smart way where you can control if only you can make content with your appearance or others too. Others were having similar experience. Andrew Curran wrote, I underestimated Sora 2. After using it for a while, I honestly think it's being undersold.

9:34I went in comparing it one-to-one to Veo, but they are not really aiming for the same thing anymore. This is a meme machine. It's specialized, a TikTok generator. It's also very fun. And interestingly, while previously most of the discussion we've had around these models is their implication for things like advertising and for Hollywood and the entertainment industry, which certainly there was some discussion of. For example, Javi Lopez writes, there's no way Hollywood won't be affected by this while showing off the creation from a prompt fight of Megamex diesel punk war machines in 1920s Europe inside of a palace banquet hall scared running people, aka DSLR hyper real.

10:09But mostly the discussion is about what this means for regular people, a real democratization of creativity conversation. 0.005 seconds writes, Comparisons to VO3 are hollow. Sora 2 cameo feature is going to hit normies like crack in the 80s. You will have grandmas DMing videos of themselves skydiving at weddings and teens sending their mom videos of daddy hitting the gritty. It's going to win so hard. And that was certainly one side of the takes. Alvaro Sintas writes, Sora 2 is absurdly fun and incredible. One sentence and I've got a whole ad. Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson wrote, I think OpenAI just killed TikTok.

10:43I'm already laughing my head off and hooked on my Sora feed. And now the number one barrier to posting, the ability to sing, dance, perform, edit, is gone. Just 100 % imagination. Others aren't so sure. They see the possibility, but aren't quite clear yet if it's going to actually work. Continuing from that earlier post, Peter Levels wrote, We don't know if Sora 2's social platform features will actually be used or take off, but it's a real cool experiment in trying to find a way to build a community in a more Instagram-like way. Being able to tag your friends and then add them as multiple characters is innovative in both the social and technical aspect.

11:14Signal writes,

11:44Adopter Robert Scoble writes, I'm playing with Sora just like everyone else. I'm already bored. Fed it about a dozen of my photos. Some are fun, but hardly blew me away. And a few refuse to run due to its lockdown nature. Can't use people. Even refuse to use a photo in a museum of a suit of armor. The Flower Slop account writes, It won't be AI TikTok. Kids 10 to 16 don't even like AI content that much and are good at identifying slop. The entertainment factor won't last too long. Everyone will try it. It'll spawn some viral memes elsewhere, but that's about it. It won't hit TikTok-level brain rot or replicate the brain rot quality.

12:15That distinct brain rot-type humor is pretty messy in a deeply human way and hard to replicate for AI. So one, TikTok, Reels, Shorts stay the real threat. Two, Zora will attract AI enthusiasts, but no one's spending more than 30 minutes a day on it. Now, if you look historically, the new social apps that succeed have almost never been just a new approach to making an old form of content. They need something that actually, in retrospect, was clearly a new form of content. When Instagram came out, yes, we had had photos before, but there had never been a feed of photos that you could filter and shape to create a particular vibe that told the story of your life.

12:49Snapchat was expiring. And it turns out there were a whole new set of use cases and interactions that required that expiring nature. TikTok, remember, wasn't just short-form videos. It was also this idea of video as meme. And it had more than a little dose of using music as a key part of it. Remember, TikTok was formed as a combination of two different apps, the original version of TikTok plus an app called Musical.ly, which was all about music memes. So the question will be, does AI video, where you can generate your friends and yourself in these sort of settings, actually jump to that threshold of being a fundamentally new experience, or is it just a new way to make an old type of content, i.e.

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15:55Partner with Robots and Pencils at robotsandpencils.com slash AI Daily Brief. Chatbots are great, but they can only take you so far. I've recently been testing Notion's new AI agents, and they are a very different type of experience. These are agents that actually complete entire workflows for you in your style. And best of all, they work in a channel that you already know and love because they are purpose-built Notion super users. Notion's new AI agents completely expands the range of what Notion can do. It can now build documents from your entire company's knowledge base, organize scattered information into organized reports, basically do tasks that used to take days, and get them complete in minutes.

16:34These agents don't just help with work, they finish it. Getting started with building on Notion is easier than ever. Notion agents are now your very own super user to help you onboard in minutes. Your AI teammates are ready to work. Try Notion AI for free at the link in our show notes. For others, of course, the question was not about whether the app will succeed or fail. was whether it should exist in the first place. Some people had specific complaints. Astro Joe B went viral when he shared a Sora 2 video that was CCTV footage of Sam Altman stealing GPUs at Target and added the comment, wow, it's really cool that we can use AI to make fake CCTV footage of people committing crimes.

17:10Surely this has no downsides whatsoever. For others, the conversation is about copyright. In our previous coverage, we talked about the Wall Street Journal reporting that OpenAI was taking this very interesting approach of asking copyright holders to opt out rather than assuming their copyright by default. Smokeaway published a Sora video where a speaker plays Sweater Weather by the Neighborhood on Spotify in perfect reality, adding music industry is gonna love this. This one is notable because I can't even actually have this playing with audio in the background or else it would be demonetized on YouTube and taken down in other places.

17:40But even if some people were worried about the harmful uses and the copyright issues, for many, it was the very existence of the thing in the first place that was offensive. Ed Newton-Rex writes, the Sora app is the worst of social media and AI. Short video app designed for addiction, literally only slop, nothing else. Train on other people's videos without permission. Fin Twitter account Liquidity writes, OpenAI is building technology that will displace millions of workers while simultaneously creating the AI slop trough humans will consume to fill the void. Yuchen Jin writes, We were promised AGI, ASI, personal superintelligence.

18:13Instead, we get infinite slop machines that turn us into dopamine-addicted zombies. Sasha Gusev reposted that and said, what? Tech companies using vague promises of world-changing innovation to lure talented young people into working on optimizing internet addiction and ad delivery? Really? Colin Frazier simply writes, I do not believe that the ability to put yourself and your friends into a video is going to bring about a Cambrian explosion for creativity. Chris Bakke had maybe the simplest version of this omnipresent tweet, Open AI in 2021. We want to cure brain cancer. Open AI in 2025. We're becoming brain cancer.

18:47Even many people in the AI industry weren't thrilled about this. Demi Nicolaou from Wondercraft responded to one OpenAI staffer talking about their excitement around the new Sora app and said, Sorry, but how exactly are you making the world a better place? Your post is nice and eloquent, but the core message is slop is fun. We made it easy to build on each other's slop, so more slop. Sora 2 is an incredible innovation and props to you for being in the team that releases something like this to the world. Productizing it as short-form brain rot slop is basically you guys weaponizing this innovation to leverage the attention towards growing OpenAI.

19:19Now, as you might imagine, the company had a sense that this was going to be part of the conversation. In their announcement post, they have a section called Launching Responsibly. In it, they write, concerns about doom scrolling, addiction, isolation, and RL-sloptimized feeds are top of mind. Here's what we're doing about it. First, they say they're giving users tools and optionality to be in control of what they see. They write, using OpenAI's LLMs, we've developed a new class of recommender algorithms that can be instructed through natural language. They also say that they've built in mechanisms to periodically poll users on their well-being, and this is already something that people are memeing about.

19:52As you're scrolling the feed every 5 or 10 videos, it asks you a question of how it's making you feel, thumbs up or thumbs down, leading to about 1 ,000 videos so far of Sam Altman forcing his face into a ring video asking, how do you feel? How do you feel? They also write, by default, we show you content heavily biased towards people you follow or interact with and prioritize videos that the model thinks you're most likely to use as inspiration for your own creations. They say we are not optimizing for time spent in feed, and we explicitly designed the app to maximize creation, not consumption.

20:22Indeed, they even released an entire blog post called the Sora Feed Philosophy. The principles including optimize for creativity, put users in control, prioritize connection, and balance safety and freedom. The app, they say, is made to be used with friends. Overwhelming feedback from testers, they write, is that cameos are what made this feel different and fun to use. You have to try it to really get it, but it is new and a unique way to communicate with people. Sam Altman also talked about this in his blog post. In the second half, he writes, We also feel some trepidation. Social media has had some good effects on the world, but it's also had some bad ones.

20:54We are aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we imagine many ways it could be used for bullying. It's easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed. The team has put great care and thought into trying to figure out how to make a delightful product that doesn't fall into that trap, and has come up with a number of promising ideas. We will experiment in the early days of the product with different approaches. Four of the principles he outlines are optimizing for long-term user satisfaction. Basically, when you look back over six months, users should say that their life is better for using Sora than if they hadn't.

21:24The other principles he articulates including encouraging users to control their feed, prioritizing creation, and helping users achieve their long-term goals. It's clear from Twitter slash X that a lot of OpenAI employees had to go through a whole decision set around this. Liam writes, This was initially a tough decision. As a skeptic of short-form video and entertainment at scale more generally, I held many reservations about working on this product for fear that consumer gen AI inevitably leads to engagement baiting attention slop, the entertainment, etc. However, after trying out the Sora app and getting to know the folks building it, I have faith, more than I thought possible, that AI video can create a truly pro-social experience, something that encourages co-creation and human connection, as opposed to vacant consumption.

22:05This is no small endeavor. It requires resisting the modus operandi and perverse incentive structure of social media today. But I believe it is possible and I consider it a great honor to be a part of the team that is dedicated to avoiding a present or future where AI content mines attention, nurtures addiction, and wastes time. This is a first try and nowhere close to perfect. It'll take time to do this right, but the mission is worth working towards. Writes John Hallman from OpenAI, AI-based feeds are scary. I won't deny that I felt some concern when I first learned we were releasing Sora 2.