If the future of the internet looks like a constant stream of amusing videos generated by artificial intelligence, then OpenAI just placed its stake in an emerging market.
The company behind ChatGPT released its new Sora social media app on Tuesday, an attempt to draw the attention of eyeballs currently staring at short-form videos on TikTok, YouTube or Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook.
The new iPhone app taps into the appeal of being able to make a video of yourself doing just about anything that can be imagined, in styles ranging from anime to highly realistic.
But a scrolling flood of such videos taking over social media has some worried about “AI slop” that crowds out more authentic human creativity and degrades the information ecosystem.
“These things are so compelling,” said Jose Marichal, a professor of political science at California Lutheran University who studies how AI is restructuring society. “I think what sucks you in is that they’re kind of implausible, but they’re realistic looking.”
The Sora app’s official launch video features an AI-generated version of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaking from a psychedelic forest, and later, the moon and a stadium crowded with cheering fans watching rubber duck races. He introduces the new tool before handing it off to colleagues placed in other outlandish scenarios. The app is available only on Apple devices for now, starting in the U.S. and Canada.
Meta launched its own feed of AI short-form videos within its Meta AI app last week. In an Instagram post announcing the new Vibes product, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a carousel of AI videos, including a cartoon version of himself, an army of fuzzy, beady-eyed beings jumping around and a kitten kneading a ball of dough. Both Sora and Vibes are designed to be highly personalized, recommending new videos based on what people have already engaged with.
Marichal’s own social media feeds on TikTok and other sites are already full of such videos, from a “housecat riding a wild animal from the perspective of a doorbell camera” to fake natural disaster reports that are engaging but easily debunked. He said you can’t blame people for being hard-wired to “want to know if something extraordinary is happening in the world.”
What’s dangerous, he said, is when they dominate what we see online.
“We need an information environment that is mostly true or that we can trust because we need to use it to make rational decisions about how to collectively govern,” he said.
If not, “we either become super, super skeptical of everything or we become super certain,” Marichal said. “We’re either the manipulated or the manipulators. And that leads us toward things that are something other than liberal democracy, other than representative democracy.”
OpenAI made some efforts to address those concerns in its announcement on Tuesday.
“Concerns about doomscrolling, addiction, isolation, and (reinforcement learning)-sloptimized feeds are top of mind,” it said in a blog post. It said it would “periodically poll users on their wellbeing” and give them options to adjust their feed, with a built-in bias to recommend posts from friends rather than strangers.
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AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.