When you open TikTok, Instagram, or any other social media app, your phone is flooded with an endless stream of short form videos. Users are used to their content being made by humans, but recently more content has become AI-generated, leading to questioning of what content is actually human-made. That is becoming the future after OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, released Sora 2 this past September.
Sora, a text-to-video app that has been improved due to its new model, is only available through a ChatGPT Plus or Pro Subscription, but OpenAI has stated that they will be making it more available in the future. The app allows users to create short form style videos of anything, with few limitations.
Why is the Sora 2 launch so significant? Sora allows users to make any person or character say anything, anywhere. The amount of deepfakes, or digitally created faces of someone, are predicted to skyrocket and misinformation will be even more common. Nothing on the internet can be trusted. To indicate that the video is fake, there is a small bouncing Sora watermark on the video, but its small size and minimalist style leads to concerns about it being removed.
Many social media users are already frustrated with the increase of AI content on the apps, as their feeds are being taken over by what they have coined “AI slop.” In fact, videos of influencer and boxer Jake Paul creating beauty content have already become viral, as well as videos of Martin Luther King Jr. With Sora’s feature of “Cameo”, users can create videos using popular celebrities and historical figures. AI videos are becoming increasingly viral, with notably a woman falling through a bridge, and a baby flying an airplane, which is getting millions of views on Youtube.
It has become a trend on social media to get parents or grandparents to react to AI videos, and while their reactions have been used for comedy, it shows the real risk that realistic AI poses. Additionally, Sora is not the only AI video creator influencing social media. Applications such as Runway and Google’s Veo also contribute to the oversaturation of AI content within these apps, and as AI technology continues to improve, more text-to-video applications will likely emerge.
Social media already has a surplus of misinformation and fake news, but viewers were previously allowed to rely on trusted figures and companies to provide them with accurate news. Sora users can create deepfakes that can weaken the trust of these figures. Skepticism of online news entirely will increase. With the new emergence of Sora and other AI video creators, critical thinking skills are now as important as ever, as users must now be hyper aware of what they choose to believe–as everything they see could be fake.
