Is Sora the beginning of the end for social media?

Most product lifecycles have four main parts to them.

There’s the launch – a time of excitement and fragility, followed by a period of growth as reputations are forged and existing customers are augmented with new ones.

Next comes the maturity stage of the product lifecycle when things tend to stagnate. And finally there’s the decline phase, when consumers migrate elsewhere and profits fall.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that social media is in the decline stage of its own product lifecycle, given the extent to which it has addicted entire swathes of the world population.

However, it’s unquestionably in the maturity stage, and the recent launch of an AI-powered video platform might herald the beginning of the end of social media’s omnipotence.

I don’t believe it

In the past, social media platforms have played fast and loose with concepts of truth.

Uploaded content has often been an airbrushed version of reality, but it’s always had some real-world grounding.

Until now, that is, following the widespread public adoption of a text-to-video AI generator known as Sora – an OpenAI offshoot currently only available in North America.

Other content generating video platforms have existed for longer, but Sora has become a standard bearer in this sector.

In essence, Sora creates fake videos based on typed user instructions.

Ask it to make a video of a cat skiing, Elvis dancing on the moon or a car turning inside out, and it’ll generate something in response.

The results are often startling, occasionally hilarious, sometimes memorable, but mostly dispiriting.

Nothing you see is real, even though everything is based on real elements intended to add authenticity to a ten-second video of the Pope riding a rocket through a glacier in pyjamas.

What about copyright laws?

Like most content-generating AI engines, Sora has learned to create artificial videos by ‘studying’ (‘plagiarising’ may be a better word) vast quantities of real footage.

Individual copyright holders are expected to actively opt out of granting permission for their material to be reused, which they may not realise they need to do.

Meanwhile, Sora stores your uploaded images and (unless told otherwise) allows other people to use them. Dead celebrities are fair game, though living ones are not.

In other words, your pet, partner or favourite pop star could all find themselves unwittingly incorporated into a video created for a complete stranger halfway around the world.

Sora is already being widely used to create non-nudity fetish videos, and it’s surely only a matter of time before rival AI video platforms remove these X-rated shackles altogether.

The consequences of that would be too awful to contemplate, from revenge porn and reputation-damaging deepfakes through to content targeting the very worst human desires.

Ever decreasing circles

For now, the biggest issue with Sora is the inherent artificiality of its output.

Once you’ve registered the absurdity of whatever you’re watching, there’s no reason to persevere, other than thinking up ever-more outlandish concepts to request.

Users will quickly drift onto the next video, and the one after that, until everything blurs together and the entire concept begins to lose its appeal.

And this, in essence, is the problem with social media as a whole.

It has contributed hugely to dumbing us down, diminishing our attention spans and deprecating our real-world communication skills.

The appalling consequences of this growing attention deficit are being felt everywhere from live sport and entertainment to the dwindling arts of socialising, dating and office working.

Moreover, it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell fact from fiction, with even reputable media outlets being routinely duped by made-up experts and AI-generated fake news.

Sora doesn’t seem likely to diminish any of the ills social media has brought upon us, though it’s likely to exacerbate a few of them.

As such, we are surely entering the endgame in terms of what social media can bring to the world, as its drawbacks begin to outweigh its benefits.