The addictive toxic content will go the way of tobacco and explore new markets.

Back in 2010 around 11% of the population of Indonesia was connected to the internet. Currently it's closer to 80% - largely via mobile phones. That's approximately 200mln new users.

Nigeria and Pakistan are going through the same change, just started later.

Since 2016 India alone added more users than the mentioned countries combined.

That's a lot of first generation users. More than the entire western population.

Is it?

I have the impression GenAI deteriorates the internet both from a content and tech perspective.

Bots that waste your time because they don't work well or because they are pushing an agenda, and low quality content that floods social media from people who want to make a quick buck.

GitHub and AWS became increasingly unstable. X, Instagram, and WhatsApp are suddenly sprinkled with subtle bugs.

Everything just got faster and we got more of it, but nothing of it is good anymore because everyone tries to replace 90% of their work with GenAI instead ofmaybe starting at 10-20% and then add more when you're sure it works.

I am not convinced. Nobody is making money, every player is losing money hand over fist.

In this case, maybe not enough to offset the costs; or maybe it just wasn't addictive enough. But it's still early days.

You will have an agent like your seo expert, this agent will be able to use common tools like google seo, facebook seo etc. and you will teach how you want it to do its 'job'.

You will have a way of delivering your requirements to it, it will run in the background, might ask for feedback but will otherwise do stuff similiar to whatever person was doing it before.

There might be some transition phase like verifing the data of the real person vs. the agentic ai then moving over to only validation until the agentic agent is in avg as good as a human. Then the human will be gone.

Agentic will take basic support tasks (its actually already doing this) first, then more complicated things etc.

For this we need an ecosystem aka the agentic ai platform, interconnect between agent and tools and this stuff is currently getting build by someone one way or the other.

On scale we need more capacity and these agents will also cost more money than a 20$ subscription.

But if you have a, lets say SAP agent, it will be build once, trained once and than used by everyone. Instead of a person using a HR system or billing system, the agent will bridge the gap between data and system.

I like the framing of trying explosive things to escape the pull of gravity. When applied to rockets, it means a lot of stuff blowing up, which again seems apt.

They're not, they just already have the habit formed with the place they go to do that. Ultimately anything worth seeing on sora will be reposted to Tiktok.

Having Disney on their side was def quite a smart/interesting move.

At least from one interview, they def had resource issues last year and teams had to fight for it. Can easily be that sora was always priortized down and they realized it doesn't make sense to spend that much capacity while then not being able to push their main model.

Obviously caveat emperor but there are a lot of real world scenarios like this.

I think Anthropic and OpenAi are trying to all cool and apple-y with their branding but these use cases are just tools getting work done. Most normal people don’t need or want AGI, or even AI slop videos. They just want their invoicing system to just f-ing work for a change.

Ironically, starting your response with this guarantees a lot of people won't read it. It's the same as going on reddit and starting a reply with, "Nobody will see this but", and hoping that people try to prove you wrong by reading and commenting on it. I stopped after the first sentence. People really have to stop with the clickbait vomit way of writing.

Considering the large million plus view counts I see AI slop getting on FB and YouTube I'm not seeing this behaviour play out.

    [...] do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.

    For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's
    shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their
    fingers.

    But all their works they do for to be seen of men [...]

    [...] they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

Nothing is new under the sun.

Those 100 videos probably cost $100+ for them to create. Did you pay them $100+? (not a critisism, just a re-framing)

24/7 titillation is boring

And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.

I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.

I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.

There's some market for b2b I'm sure, but as a consumer facing product it's tough to see how it could ever come close to paying for itself.

I think this is starting to play out.

When I personally see a blog post which didn't need an image, but still does have an AI-slop image banner, I mentally check out. I might have Claude summarize it, or (more likely) just skip it altogether.

Essentially you are watching the same videos over and over subconsciously

i recently used gpt for the first time in several months (i'm a daily claude user) and didn't find this at all. it is most certainly trying to pull you into engagement with how it ends each response. "if you want, i could tell you about this thing that's relevant to what you are discussing and tease just enough so that you addictively answer yes"

Not about Sora, but about ChatGPT. I felt the same way for quite a while until I noticed that its response pattern has changed, apparently aiming for higher engagement. Someone aggressively pursued a metric.

At some point, ChatGPT started leaving annoying cliffhangers in its every response, like "Do you want me to share a little-known secret of X that professionals often use?" Like, come on!

I really thought he wasn't like the previous generations of tech leaders - as you mentioned OpenAI (with him in charge) seemed to be genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives.

He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even contribute to helping disease too.

Then they drop this and it just doesn't gel. So much of what they've done since has just doubled down on the Zuck-esque scumminess and greed too.

Part of me still sees Dario as genuine in the way that Sama seemed back in 2024, but I'm sure once he has enough investor pressure he'll cave the same way too.

I think if you had to foot the bill for generating a bajillion gigabytes of slop with no real utility, you wouldn't be too mystified.

They showed off their technology and proved it was impressive. That's all it had to do.

I'm curious if you still feel this way about current iterations of ChatGPT? It seems like it's now primed to engagement bait the user, especially when used through the web UI. You can ask it a simple question with a straight forward answer and it will still try to get you to follow up with more.

> What is the minimum thickness for Shimano M8100 disc brake rotors?

> For Shimano XT M8100-series rotors (like RT-MT800 / RT-MT900 commonly used with M8100 brakes), the minimum thickness is 1.5 mm. If the rotor measures 1.5 mm or thinner, Shimano says it should be replaced.

> (a bunch of pointless details in bullet points)

> If you want, tell me the exact rotor model (e.g., RT-MT800, RT-MT900, size), and I can confirm the spec for that specific one and what typical wear looks like.

The entire query could have been answered with "1.5mm". The "if you want" follow ups are so annoying.

I suspect they promised synthetic movies but it quickly became clear that they were never going to be able to deliver on this.

Slick fifteen second lulz-clips, sure, but I don't think they can make several of them consistent enough to fit into a larger video narrative without the audience finding it jarring and incoherent.

Perhaps legal at Disney also concluded that the output wouldn't be possible to copyright, which is their core business.

My guess is they over committed server/energy resources, since they were generating ~30 images per frame of 1 second of video for results that may be discarded and then tried again.

Now that energy costs are increasingly less predictable because of the war, they're prioritizing what is sustainable. Willing to blow up the $1 billion Disney deal for Sora, because that's a popular IP that would have increased discarded server time.

I've no doubt that content creators outside of social media were using it as well, either for their brand or other video work.

Yes we see AI reels all over the place, but that's not only what it was used for

I guess you haven't watched hours of AI cat videos cheating on their husbands with bulls, or Lemons having babies with strawberries and fighting over custody of the child. It's absurd, it's stupid and I know it's a waste of time but I have to admit that it amuses me. I'm quite sure there are millions like me that just want some downtime to relax at the end of the night and end up watching slop like this.

It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up and we couldn't do anything with the characters and culture we know.

If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc.

It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of video-based AI slop.

But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing.

So far that’s been exactly it. Now AI generated videos are primarily used to scam, deceive, and ragebait.

If you are autistic, I feel that it causes you to see reality a more accurately than most here on this thread.

The impact of easy AI generated video is a less certain and less secure world. You can't trust your eyes anymore because of how fast and easy it is to fake video and moments. You can't trust communications with someone because how easy it is to impersonate them over video and voice. Scams involving tools like this are already running rampant and it will only get worse. The sheer level of distrust these tools have unleashed into the world makes me wish they never existed. They have burned millions (billions?) of dollars on this when that money would have been better served going to the creators whose work they stole to build it. It's rotten.

As we've see from Grok, building the system for producing non consensual nude images of other people will get the legal and PR hammer brought down on you fairly quickly. It's just an incredibly unethical thing to do.

I also use ChatGPT as my default search engine and to help me learn Spanish.

But image generation and video generation were a nice parlor trick. But wasn’t useful for me except for images for icons for diagrams.

But light you said, porn makes money and there are people who pay $300 a month for Grok to generate AI Porn.

It was a party trick. I can't remember the last time I touched it. That's what SORA is, or was.

That narrative will implode like Sora later this year.

I don't know where they got September from; Sora launched in Feb 2024[0] which was a bit before people had become tired of awful AI-generated content. There was real belief that people would be willing to spend all day scrolling a social network with infinite AI-generated content. See the similar hype with Suno AI, which started a whole "musicians are obsolete" movement before becoming mostly irrelevant.

I think Sora 2 produced quite good videos, at least of a certain type. It was very good at producing convincing low-resolution cellphone footage. Unfortunately you had to have a very creative mind to get anything interesting out of it, as the copyright and content restrictions were a big "no fun allowed" clause, which contributed to its demise. Everything on the main Sora page was the same "cute animals doing something wholesome and unexpected" video.

My "favorite" part was how the post-generation checks would self-report. e.g. It was impossible to make a video of an angry chef with a British accent because Sora would always overfit it to Gordon Ramsey, and flag its own generated video after it was created!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39386156 - only one mention of "AI slop" in the entire thread, though partial credit goes to "movieslop".

For example, early TikTok had the Boss Walk.

Sora had no big content trends split into many micro trends in some established ~universe.

I think they are in serious trouble, especially with the size of their cash burn. Their planned IPO could easily turn out to be their WeWork moment where the bottom suddenly falls out on the valuation if they cannot make their operation look more like a real business before investors lose confidence.

ChatGPT is an interesting product - I like it for certain things - but after last year's PR scramble almost all the news out of OpenAI is a disappointment, with hovering hints of retrenchment.

Kind of insulting to lump google in with XAI? Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?

I feel like they are sailing into a red ocean with what look more like copycat tactics than innovation (e.g., Codex v Claude Code; Astral v Bun)

I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like what I have in mind.

In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the first try.

My experience with AI image generation is similar, although with a higher success rate (depending on how accurate you want the result to be); but indeed, filtering is a major part of the process.

A lot of YouTube content is really talk, so it was easy to create Sora videos as video content while you talked over them.

However, its failure was that it watermarked everything. WTF? Leonardo didn't do that. Neither did other models. So while video gen was excellent, you always had these ridiculous floating watermarks.

Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...

  A source familiar with the matter tells The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year, in which it pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora.

  “As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokesperson said. “We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”

I used to think they were pretty clever but with this news and other recent ones (Jony Ive project cancelled, Stargate scaled down significantly, their models inflating token use on purpose) they just seem schizo.

Weil's now heading "AI for Science": https://www.pymnts.com/personnel/2025/openais-chief-product-...

The issue is that Sora ended up getting the short end of the stick: by generating the footage, it became the primary target of complaints. Meanwhile, they were forced to remove the videos, but people simply took those videos and uploaded them to random social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube, which ended up hosting the content while being much less of a target, since the content wasn’t generated there.

Honestly, I think the only way forward will be to wait for local models to become good enough so that you can run something like Sora locally and generate whatever you want.

I actually thought the Sora app was promising at launch, at least on paper, but it seems like they failed to keep people's attention long term. With the failure of Sora i don't think they have good options left.

If it cost too much and others can do it cheaper, that looks bad from both fronts.

Offerings like Kling and ByteDance are considered much better.

So whatever reason they say to shut this down, it was more important than 1B investment.

It says a lot about the current economy that consumers have no money. Will companies just stop making consumer products?

Let’s be real: OpenAI is circling the drain.

The company with the fraudster serial liar CEO who said he was gonna spend a trillion dollars can’t keep a video service alive right after signing a $1 billion dollar with Disney?

What kind of a joke is that?

This is a company that has blown its opportunity twiddling around with zero product. They still just run a plain chatbot interface with zero moat and zero stickiness.

There’s no “pivot” for a company that is in this deep.

But now that the deal is off, I'm sure their legal team will attempt to once again change copyright law in their favor.

And two at Meta[2]: "A rogue AI agent at Meta took action without approval and exposed sensitive company and user data to employees who were not authorized to access it"

"director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, described a different but related failure in a viral post on X last month. She asked an OpenClaw agent to review her email inbox with clear instructions to confirm before acting. The agent began deleting emails on its own."

Even Elon Musk has shared the wisdom to proceed with caution! [3]

1. https://dev.to/tyson_cung/amazon-lost-63m-orders-after-ai-co... 2. https://venturebeat.com/security/meta-rogue-ai-agent-confuse... 3. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031352859846148366

Any platform which focusses on AI generated videos is doomed.

May be. OpenAI shuttering Sora is line with them shifting focus towards b2b sales, instead of b2b2c or b2c.

Interestingly, Aditya Ramesh, who iirc was the Sora 1 lead, is now "VP of Robotics" at OpenAI per his Twitter bio: https://x.com/model_mechanic

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...

Hustle just to barely stay afloat water or drown, means no time to compete with our own output.

America is a financially engineered joke regurgitating its own recent history, collapsing like an LLM trained on its own output. The rich are not even pretending it's "a free country" as they have enough wealth for how many years left most of them have to live, and have seen the apathy to their own plight keeping the average person in theit lane they don't fear the public.

It’ll all collapse as they generationally churn out of life and the Millennials on down with zero skills but "data entry into a computer" will be holding an empty bag, taking orders from foreign nations that bought up all the American businesses we built.

From the article: "OpenAI […] is not getting out of the AI video business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will be a casualty of its evolving ambitions."

1) the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes, the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a self-defeating framework.

2) google and specialized video-only startups are simply doing a much better job than they were.

This may well be a needed reprioritization in the face of resource constraints, but it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.

So I agree with you, but also it makes me wonder what they're even selling when the IPO happens (supposedly as early as late summer 2026)? Data centers? Partnerships with the goverment?

After placing my hand on the red-hot stove, aren't I super smart for now removing my hand?

For a litmus test of your perspective, try using sora. Try to make a video that makes someone genuinely laugh. Sora doesn't prompt itself. Human creativity and humor is still required.

Sure, it was moderated to heck, like all models attempting to avoid PR disasters (see Grok), but, just as with Youtube and broadcast TV, there's still a corporate friendly surface area that excludes porn, gore, etc, that people can enjoy. And yes, people like different things.

The percentage of AI videos over the internet will certainly not decrease after Sora is gone.

The question is when will Chinese coding models have their Seedance moment and squeeze Opus/Codex out of market. It weirdly feels impossible and inevitable at the same time.

Then it became synonymous with slop, lowest common denominator content made without care, instead of a tool for enabling people willing to put in a varying level of skill, kinds of expertise and effort, like coding models did.

https://klingai.com/global/

https://aistudio.google.com/models/veo-3

https://runwayml.com

Which makes me wonder whether these companies actually dogfood their own tools with this sort of stuff? Was this announcement written by ChatGPT? Honestly, I would find either answer to be a little concerning in its own way. It's either vaguely insulting to their customers or showing a lack of faith in their own product.

it reads as "we want to tell you that what you made with sora mattered, but we all know it didn't".

I find myself increasingly nostalgic for the Clinton era. I am not at all sure I will enjoy the version of fuckedcompany that gets vibe coded when this bubble pops.

If you end up with nothing in aggregate for the chances you pay for, you're a loser. Not in a pejorative sense, just as a fact, you lost.

If you come out with more than nothing, in aggregate, you're a winner, in the same objective sense.

Probably controversial. Eh.

That story can’t be true

What happens if you turn a "human-level" intelligence off? Did you kill someone?

AGI is a pipe dream - and moreover it's not even something that anyone actually wants.