OpenAI Sora: You Can’t Believe Your Eyes Anymore

From chaos we came and to chaos we shall return

This article is a selection from The Algorithmic Bridge, an educational project to bridge the gap between AI and people.

I promised my analysis of Sora would be divided into two parts. One, that I published last week, about Sora, the AI model — what it is and what it can do — and a second one about the broader second-order cultural and social implications of the technology.

As I deep-dived into this second part I realized it should be further divided into two. Both of them deal with how video-generation AI (not just Sora but in general) affects our culture. But I approach them from opposite perspectives: the part you’re reading now is concerned with what we’ll lose as AI-generated videos become indistinguishable from human-made ones. The next, which I’ve yet to write, is about what we’ll gain.

Although this distinction appears to obey a negative-positive dichotomy, that’s not my intention. We can gain something we don’t want or need, which doesn’t make it better than losing something we held dear to us — or at least, something we took for granted whose loss we’ll have to grudgingly deal with.

Alternatively, out of fairness with a position I can’t support at this time but that I…