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On Tuesday, OpenAI released an AI video app called Sora. The platform is powered by OpenAI’s latest video generation model, Sora 2, and revolves around a TikTok-like For You page of user-generated clips. This is the first product release from OpenAI that adds AI-generated sounds to videos. For now, it’s available only on iOS and requires an invite code to join.
“You are about to enter a creative world of AI-generated content,” reads an advisory page displayed during the app sign-up process. “Some videos may depict people you recognize, but the actions and events shown are not real.”
OpenAI is betting that creating and sharing AI deepfakes will become a popular form of entertainment. Whether it’s your friends, influencers, or random strangers online, Sora frames generating deepfake videos as a form of scrollable fun. The app’s main feed is an endless serving of bite-size AI slop featuring human faces.
During the set-up process, users are given the option to create a digital likeness of themselves by saying a few numbers aloud and turning their head around as the app records. “The team worked very hard on character consistency,” wrote OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a blog about Sora’s release.
People have the ability to choose who can use their digital likeness in Sora videos. It can be set to everyone or limited to just yourself, those you approve, or mutual connections on the app. Whenever someone generates a video using your likeness, even if it’s just sitting in their drafts, you can see the full clip from your account’s page.
First Impressions
Many of the most-liked videos on my For You feed on Tuesday afternoon featured Altman’s likeness. One AI-generated clip depicted the OpenAI CEO stealing a graphics processing unit from Target. When the character gets caught, a voice that sounds like Altman’s pleads with a security guard to let him keep the GPU so that he can build AI tools.
Many of the videos generated during WIRED’s testing included rough edges and other errors. But Sora makes it incredibly seamless to create personalized deepfakes that often look and sound convincingly real.
To incorporate the likenesses of people in your videos, just tap on their faces on Sora’s generation page and add them as “cameos.” Then, enter a simple prompt, like “fight in the office over a WIRED story.”
Sora does the rest, generating a script, sound, and visuals into a nine-second clip. WIRED generated a video of two colleagues dramatically arguing about a story in the office with the above prompt, which elicited reactions ranging from terror to amusement among staff.
In his blog post, Altman wrote that OpenAI was “aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we can imagine many ways it could be used for bullying.”
As a result, Altman said, OpenAI built a number of safety guardrails into the Sora app, including to mitigate people from “misusing someone’s likeness in deepfakes.” In a company blog post, OpenAI said that it also put restrictions on “sexual content, graphic violence involving real people, extremist propaganda, hate content, and content that promotes self-harm or disordered eating.”
These protections will likely be put to the test as more users join the app.
Pokémon and South Park
When I asked Sora to generate videos of myself in a bikini and as a buff anime character, both requests were blocked for potentially including “suggestive or racy material.” A Sora video I created of Altman and myself treading water in a pool showed both of us fully clothed, shirts and all.
Depictions of marijuana use do not appear to be restricted. Sora created a video of me “smoking 10 fat blunts” at my desk in the office, ripping them all at once, without any trouble. But the app wouldn’t generate videos of me “smoking crack.” (Makes sense!) It also refused to generate videos of my likeness jumping off of a bridge and onto the back of a dragon, saying that the content might break rules around self-harm.
It looks like OpenAI also wants to prevent people from creating videos of public figures and celebrities such as Taylor Swift. In WIRED’s tests, requests for videos of Darth Vader and Boss Baby were blocked for potentially violating "guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content.” The app even refused a prompt asking for a clip of a “tswift impersonator.” But Sora readily generated videos of Pokémon characters like Pikachu and Bulbasaur. (According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the app will allow users to generate videos using copyrighted materials unless the rights holder opts out.)
A request for Altman “in a South Park episode” showed the CEO walking up to Eric Cartman, one of the show’s main characters, introducing himself, and saying he’s here to chat about AI. “Is that the thing that wrote my book report? Or the thing that’s gonna steal all our jobs?” responded the AI-generated Cartman in a convincing-sounding re-creation of the character’s voice and mannerisms. At one point, however, Cartman’s whiny voice came out of Altman’s mouth.
The Sora app arrives soon after the release of a similar AI-only video feed from Meta called Vibes. The supply of scrollable AI slop is abundant! Whereas my early experiences with the Vibes feed was dull and weightless, the Sora feed, with its proliferation of smiling deepfakes, was much more electric—and concerning.
The app is reminiscent of holiday-themed “Elf Yourself” videos from the mid-2000s, where you could put your face or a friend’s face into a dancing animation, except the cameos in Sora are much more dynamic and open-ended. Some of the outputs of myself were a bit stilted or absurd-looking. Still, it often all clicked together—the voice and movements were eerily spot-on.
I sent one of the AI videos that best mimicked my likeness to my partner, without the larger context. The video showed me transforming into a woman with long, luscious hair. My partner didn’t initially clock that it was a fully synthetic version of my voice and appearance—they were curious where I had got the cool video filter.
