Sora 2 Serves up More Slop
What we think about OpenAI's new "video-audio generation system," Sora 2
By Decca Muldowney and Alex Hanna
Are you bored of TikTok? Looking for something new? Well, OpenAI’s new Sora 2 video app is offering just that. Except instead of your friend’s funny video of their cute pet, you can watch AI slop offerings like Tupac talking to Michael Jackson, SpongeBob Squarepants cooking meth, an ominous video of Kobe Bryant riding in a helicopter, or the story of ‘Epstein’s Island’ in the form of a ‘90s kid’s toy commercial.
In addition to fake footage of dead celebrities and famous pedophiles, the launch of Sora 2 also saw users creating definitely-not-worrying content of people committing crimes they didn’t do (including Sam Altman himself shoplifting at Target). And rogue apps designed to remove the Sora 2’s watermark are already available, opening the door for deepfakes and misinformation to run rife.
To say we’re not loving it is an understatement. At Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, we’ve addressed the underlying theft that these kinds of apps are based on; the mass stealing of copyrighted art work, writing and, in the case of Sora 2, film and TV content.
As Emily and Alex wrote in The AI Con, apps like Sora 2 are not creative outlets but "probabilistic (aka ‘stochastic’) algorithms trained on piles of work stolen from creative people.” Apps like Sora 2 also hurt the creators they’ve stolen from by disrupting the economic systems that sustain them as working artists.
And what about the bigger picture? The potential for misinformation and the ability to “flood the zone” with videos that throw doubt onto the authenticity of online content is evident. Moreover, shitty video-generation apps like Sora 2 don’t “democratize” art, they degrade human creativity itself.
The move towards an endless fountain of slop is part of an ongoing push from “artist” to “content creator” online, exacerbated by the push for creators to constantly churn out videos on TikTok and Reels. Going from "content" to "slop" is the next step in this evolution, although now, taking the human out of the equation.
“The promotion of AI art betrays a deep misunderstanding of the nature of what ought to be considered art,” Alex and Emily write in The AI Con, “There is an enormous difference between the practice of craft and the practice of writing a successful prompt: when we reference or remix ideas from other artwork, we are drawing on both the form and the meaning of the art. We pull in the form because it was meaningful to us and we want to invoke that meaning in our creation.”
We can’t help but think of Julie Ann Dawson, founder of role-playing game and speculative fiction publisher Bards and Sages. “AI” slop caused her to shutter her business after 22 years. Speaking to 404 Media, Dawson lamented the content and the people behind the slop:
“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through...The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word... These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story. But they never bothered to learn the craft of writing. Most of them don't even read recreationally. They are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer. They think in terms of quantity and not quality.”
If you want to dive further into what we think of art and slop, listen to:
The podcast episode “Is AI Art Actually ‘Art’?” where we spoke to Johnathan Flowers, Jennifer Lena and Negar Rostamzedeh about creatively bankrupt apps like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and about the continued importance of human artistic creation. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
And read:
‘I Hate Wasting Time on Identifying AI Slop’ by Alex, where she writes about the unwanted cognitive effort we spend rooting out the AI-generated content taking over everything
Our book, The AI Con, is now available wherever fine books are sold!
