6 ms·

Sora, AI Bicycles, and Meta Disruption

76 points by feross 1y ago

jasonsb 1y ago
This might be controversial, but I genuinely love AI-generated “video slop”. Hear me out for a second: I’m utterly exhausted by influencers peddling their endless “buy this crap” content. Honestly, the AI slop often feels more creative, less salesy and refreshingly free of performative perfection. But Meta knows AI slop poses a problem for their business model. When anyone can churn out engaging content without needing perfect lighting, a six-figure ad deal, or even a face or voice, there’s little incentive for users to stay locked into the influencer-driven attention economy that fuels Meta’s ad revenue. They don’t just want your attention, they want it monetized. And right now, AI slop is too democratic to profit from.
- matwood 1y ago
  My friends and I have been having a blast coming up with hilarious situations to put ourselves in. Will it get old, maybe, but new features might keep it fresh.
- pedalpete 1y ago
  I'm not sure I completely understand what you're saying. Are people locked into the influencer economy because of the "polish" of the videos? I feel like people are more locked into consumerism, and this is just the cheapest channel of delivery. Won't much of the AI slop just become, or try to become the influencer itself?
  - ebbi 1y ago
    Agreed. All content eventually optimizes for clicks -> monetization, which is typically dictated by the platforms' algorithms. That's why things end up looking the same over time as that's what people are creating content to optimize for.
  - jasonsb 1y ago
    > Are people locked into the influencer economy because of the "polish" of the videos? Yes. Influencers with big production and marketing budgets will usually create more content that has the "wow" factor. With AI people can add the same "wow" factor in their videos with little to no budget. This should slowly erode the value of a platform like Instagram as AI content gets better.
    - jononor 1y ago
      Why would it devalue the platform? The more time people spend watching, the more attention that can be monetized. More content, or higher quality content, or content produced more cheap does not detract deon that? The algorithms will pick winners anyway, and can shape things into the familiar power law of popularity, if that is the desired mode. People parasocial needs can be exploited by human creators to differentiate from AI generated content. Modern social media is like a casino, the house always wins.
  - lm28469 1y ago
    > Are people locked into the influencer economy because of the "polish" of the videos? > I feel like people are more locked into consumerism, and this is just the cheapest channel of delivery. Don't forget parasocial relationship
- rpcope1 1y ago
  Is your AI writing HN comments for you too now?
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  It just hasn’t been optimized yet because it’s so new
- MattDaEskimo 1y ago
  I'm not sure it's fair to separate "AI Slop" with "Buy my crap" marketing. People will monetize one way or another. It may be more or less explicit with AI slop. Additionally, I would challenge "AI slop posing a problem": AI Agents and automation of content keeps people engaged inside of a platform, inside of a niche. A democratization may lead to more expensive ad space. Meta can certainly assist in creating slop and maintaining conversational salespersons
  - jasonsb 1y ago
    > Meta can certainly assist in creating slop and maintaining conversational salespersons They absolutely can and you could’ve said the same about Stack Overflow or Quora. But in the end those platforms fizzled once AI began to democratize the creation of “good-enough” answers. The same trajectory likely awaits Instagram as AI-generated videos reach parity with user-made ones, the distinction between creator and consumer will blur. The shift is inevitable if the technology doesn't hit a wall. Maybe companies like OpenAI will make even more money by licensing the technology that keeps us entertained, but the influencer economy will eventually collapse. I’m not saying what’s coming is necessarily better, I’m just saying Meta’s platforms are in for a rough ride.
    - jononor 1y ago
      I believe Stack Overflow and Quora were screwed because chatbot interfaces became the new entrypoint. _If_ Instagram/TikTok/YouTube manage to stay the place people go habitually, then I think they will benefit, not be harmed. But there are probably many ways to step wrong here. There is a bit of an innovators dilemma for the platforms that currently relies on human produced content. If I were them, I would fund 2-3 new/separate efforts to be able to experiment while not immediately killing the current golden goose.
- agnosticmantis 1y ago
  Only difference is soon you'll have Mickey Mouse tell you (and your children) to buy same old crap that the influencers were shilling.
- topaz0 1y ago
  AI slop and influencer peddling can both be bad at the same time. The answer is to get off facebook/instagram, not to replace one awful thing with another awful thing that also happens to boil the oceans.
- Ianjit 1y ago
  Big Tech will find a way of ruining it for you.
- krapp 1y ago
  AI is a business. Almost everyone putting it out is trying to exploit the influencer-driven attention economy and monetize their content. AI isn't difficult to profit from because it's too "democratic" - anyone can already participate without perfect lighting and a six figure ad deal most people do - it's difficult to profit from because it isn't compelling or interesting to most people.
s1mon 1y ago
I spend way too much time on short videos on Instagram and TikTok. I've got Sora and I've tried a bunch of times and I'm just baffled by its success so far. First of all I almost never use these video services with the sound on. I know I'm not the only one, because many services have captions on by default. Sora doesn't seem to have a solution for this yet. Second, I have almost no desire to see videos with @Sama cameos. I get served a bunch of them every time. Along with MLK, Lincoln, Kennedy etc. @Sama isn't funny to me, and raping the likenesses of some of those figures doesn't really work for me. Third, there's not enough creativity and range in the videos. I see way too many of the same videos over and over and over. The riffs on the 1980s/90s TV commercial with the kid opening the sucky Christmas present. Ok, maybe there's a small iota of humor once or twice, but not enough to sustain endless remixes of the same thing. I also hate just about all Jim Carrey films (except maybe the Truman Show) but many other people seem to love them. Perhaps Sora just isn't for me.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  > I also hate just about all Jim Carrey films (except maybe the Truman Show) but many other people seem to love them. Perhaps Sora just isn't for me. What do you think about Cable Guy? It is essentially a somewhat social realist movie about the total nightmare of having a typical Jim Carrey character in your life. You might like it.
  - asveikau 1y ago
    Haven't seen that one since it was current. I remember people really disliking it, as Carrey had blown onto the scene with Ace Ventura and set expectations thusly, and it wasn't as successful a role change as Truman Show or even something like Liar Liar.
  - mococa 1y ago
    Cable guy is amazing.
- sigmar 1y ago
  It's an MVP with very little creative diversity. But I like the concept of being able to write "change the background to the inside of a circus tent" or "replace the hat with a fedora" and a minute later my own spin is added as a "remix"
gyomu 1y ago
People love Sora in no small part because it lets them make videos with their favorite public figure/fictional character in them. OpenAI knew that, played fast and loose with IP laws because… they wanted that bit of popularity to impress investors or something… then the lawyers got nervous and now they’re dialing it back down. It’s a trick they can pull once but that’s it. I suspect the more limited it inevitably becomes due to lawyers being lawyers, the more its popularity will wane. Ironically enough, that’s why I think open-source models will still come out ahead in the long term. People really want to make videos with Pikachu in them.
- draw_down 1y ago
  [dead]
- freedomben 1y ago
  I think you're right. I must say though, it pleases me to see them playing it a bit loose with copyright. Copyright law is a very polarizing issue, and I think it's important to remember there are multiple sides (copyright holders v. consumers, etc), but as a mostly consumer and part-time producer who has had the copyright sharks go after me for my own content because some algorithm or something made them think it was theirs, I want to see those assholes die in a fire. Small and medium creators are the ones most hurt I think. The giant companies have absolutely weaponized every ounce of the IP laws against everyone else, and it's disgusting to me.
- dboreham 1y ago
  Who is going to pay to train these "open source models" and why?
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    Based on what goes on at Civitai: Horny people, mostly, and because horny people, mostly
  - cocogoatmain 1y ago
    I don’t know about the “why” but Alibaba is definitely paying to train open weight models (https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI)
romanhn 1y ago
Was excited to see Ben Thompson get on the pelicans-on-bicycles bandwagon, but alas, not quite the AI bicycles he was talking about.
Thrymr 1y ago
"AI Bicycles" is a little ironic for the bike parts manufacturer Shimano, whose Sora model of derailleur has been around for years.
- notatoad 1y ago
  shimano retired the sora name just in time for openAI to take it. Sora was replaced by the CUES groupset.
DoctorOetker 1y ago
For a moment I thought this article would be about AI autopiloting bicycles, so the user only needs to tread the pedals (an idea I once had, and hence why I followed the link).
throwaway106382 1y ago
China will release a video model that has no copyright guardrails and they will eat Sora's lunch.
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  Copyright of Winnie the Pooh may be safe however
- vunderba 1y ago
  That's already been a thing for a while now. Wan [1] released in conjunction with Alibaba, and Hunyuan [2] from Tencent. [1] https://github.com/Wan-Video/Wan2.2 https://github.com/Wan-Video/Wan2.2 [2] https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanVideo https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanVideo
agnosticmantis 1y ago
Business idea: disrupt all these apps by creating an agent that watches all the brainrot for us so we all get our stolen attentions back.
blueblisters 1y ago
Ben’s original take about 1% of users being creators might end up being right eventually Consider the Studio Ghibli phenomenon. It was fun to create and share photos of your loved ones in Ghibli aesthetics until that novelty wore off Video models arguably have a lot more novelty to juice. But they will eventually get boring once you have explored the usually finite latent space of interesting content
talsperre 1y ago
IMO, Ben Thomson has great takes but this one is too over-indexed on the current SORA hype. Sure, a lot of people are downloading it and actively using it for creating videos/memes, but just like the Studio Ghibli phenomenon, interest will die down in a month or two.
- davis 1y ago
  Dude is drinking the koolaid for sure. Did you see his take on Meta's Vibes? It was so embarrassing.
wantering 1y ago
[dead]
camillomiller 1y ago
I am quite disappointed to see even Ben displaying an absolute lack of critical thinking about the disturbing trend of creating new AI algorithmic feeds apps. This piece reads as very detached from actual societal and economic implications. As someone in media, I'm also profoundly disappointed at how giddily some colleagues just have jumped on this disturbing horror bandwagon. It's your craft and livelihood they're playing with, ffs!!!
wantering 1y ago
[dead]
mallowdram 1y ago
Writer fundamentally mistakes the evolution of communication as ascending through bottlenecks when in reality, our communication is bottlenecked at very indirect perception across units and formats, none of which provide good, sensible signal sharing. So Sora simply represents another lossy, calamitous descent into bottleneck upon bottleneck.

76 points by feross 1y ago

This might be controversial, but I genuinely love AI-generated “video slop”. Hear me out for a second: I’m utterly exhausted by influencers peddling their endless “buy this crap” content. Honestly, the AI slop often feels more creative, less salesy and refreshingly free of performative perfection. But Meta knows AI slop poses a problem for their business model. When anyone can churn out engaging content without needing perfect lighting, a six-figure ad deal, or even a face or voice, there’s little incentive for users to stay locked into the influencer-driven attention economy that fuels Meta’s ad revenue. They don’t just want your attention, they want it monetized. And right now, AI slop is too democratic to profit from.

matwood 1y ago
My friends and I have been having a blast coming up with hilarious situations to put ourselves in. Will it get old, maybe, but new features might keep it fresh.
pedalpete 1y ago
I'm not sure I completely understand what you're saying. Are people locked into the influencer economy because of the "polish" of the videos? I feel like people are more locked into consumerism, and this is just the cheapest channel of delivery. Won't much of the AI slop just become, or try to become the influencer itself?
- ebbi 1y ago
  Agreed. All content eventually optimizes for clicks -> monetization, which is typically dictated by the platforms' algorithms. That's why things end up looking the same over time as that's what people are creating content to optimize for.
- jasonsb 1y ago
  > Are people locked into the influencer economy because of the "polish" of the videos? Yes. Influencers with big production and marketing budgets will usually create more content that has the "wow" factor. With AI people can add the same "wow" factor in their videos with little to no budget. This should slowly erode the value of a platform like Instagram as AI content gets better.
  - jononor 1y ago
    Why would it devalue the platform? The more time people spend watching, the more attention that can be monetized. More content, or higher quality content, or content produced more cheap does not detract deon that? The algorithms will pick winners anyway, and can shape things into the familiar power law of popularity, if that is the desired mode. People parasocial needs can be exploited by human creators to differentiate from AI generated content. Modern social media is like a casino, the house always wins.
- lm28469 1y ago
  > Are people locked into the influencer economy because of the "polish" of the videos? > I feel like people are more locked into consumerism, and this is just the cheapest channel of delivery. Don't forget parasocial relationship
rpcope1 1y ago
Is your AI writing HN comments for you too now?
BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
It just hasn’t been optimized yet because it’s so new
MattDaEskimo 1y ago
I'm not sure it's fair to separate "AI Slop" with "Buy my crap" marketing. People will monetize one way or another. It may be more or less explicit with AI slop. Additionally, I would challenge "AI slop posing a problem": AI Agents and automation of content keeps people engaged inside of a platform, inside of a niche. A democratization may lead to more expensive ad space. Meta can certainly assist in creating slop and maintaining conversational salespersons
- jasonsb 1y ago
  > Meta can certainly assist in creating slop and maintaining conversational salespersons They absolutely can and you could’ve said the same about Stack Overflow or Quora. But in the end those platforms fizzled once AI began to democratize the creation of “good-enough” answers. The same trajectory likely awaits Instagram as AI-generated videos reach parity with user-made ones, the distinction between creator and consumer will blur. The shift is inevitable if the technology doesn't hit a wall. Maybe companies like OpenAI will make even more money by licensing the technology that keeps us entertained, but the influencer economy will eventually collapse. I’m not saying what’s coming is necessarily better, I’m just saying Meta’s platforms are in for a rough ride.
  - jononor 1y ago
    I believe Stack Overflow and Quora were screwed because chatbot interfaces became the new entrypoint. _If_ Instagram/TikTok/YouTube manage to stay the place people go habitually, then I think they will benefit, not be harmed. But there are probably many ways to step wrong here. There is a bit of an innovators dilemma for the platforms that currently relies on human produced content. If I were them, I would fund 2-3 new/separate efforts to be able to experiment while not immediately killing the current golden goose.
agnosticmantis 1y ago
Only difference is soon you'll have Mickey Mouse tell you (and your children) to buy same old crap that the influencers were shilling.
topaz0 1y ago
AI slop and influencer peddling can both be bad at the same time. The answer is to get off facebook/instagram, not to replace one awful thing with another awful thing that also happens to boil the oceans.
Ianjit 1y ago
Big Tech will find a way of ruining it for you.
krapp 1y ago
AI is a business. Almost everyone putting it out is trying to exploit the influencer-driven attention economy and monetize their content. AI isn't difficult to profit from because it's too "democratic" - anyone can already participate without perfect lighting and a six figure ad deal most people do - it's difficult to profit from because it isn't compelling or interesting to most people.

s1mon 1y ago

I spend way too much time on short videos on Instagram and TikTok. I've got Sora and I've tried a bunch of times and I'm just baffled by its success so far. First of all I almost never use these video services with the sound on. I know I'm not the only one, because many services have captions on by default. Sora doesn't seem to have a solution for this yet. Second, I have almost no desire to see videos with @Sama cameos. I get served a bunch of them every time. Along with MLK, Lincoln, Kennedy etc. @Sama isn't funny to me, and raping the likenesses of some of those figures doesn't really work for me. Third, there's not enough creativity and range in the videos. I see way too many of the same videos over and over and over. The riffs on the 1980s/90s TV commercial with the kid opening the sucky Christmas present. Ok, maybe there's a small iota of humor once or twice, but not enough to sustain endless remixes of the same thing. I also hate just about all Jim Carrey films (except maybe the Truman Show) but many other people seem to love them. Perhaps Sora just isn't for me.

rightbyte 1y ago
> I also hate just about all Jim Carrey films (except maybe the Truman Show) but many other people seem to love them. Perhaps Sora just isn't for me. What do you think about Cable Guy? It is essentially a somewhat social realist movie about the total nightmare of having a typical Jim Carrey character in your life. You might like it.
- asveikau 1y ago
  Haven't seen that one since it was current. I remember people really disliking it, as Carrey had blown onto the scene with Ace Ventura and set expectations thusly, and it wasn't as successful a role change as Truman Show or even something like Liar Liar.
- mococa 1y ago
  Cable guy is amazing.
sigmar 1y ago
It's an MVP with very little creative diversity. But I like the concept of being able to write "change the background to the inside of a circus tent" or "replace the hat with a fedora" and a minute later my own spin is added as a "remix"

gyomu 1y ago

People love Sora in no small part because it lets them make videos with their favorite public figure/fictional character in them. OpenAI knew that, played fast and loose with IP laws because… they wanted that bit of popularity to impress investors or something… then the lawyers got nervous and now they’re dialing it back down. It’s a trick they can pull once but that’s it. I suspect the more limited it inevitably becomes due to lawyers being lawyers, the more its popularity will wane. Ironically enough, that’s why I think open-source models will still come out ahead in the long term. People really want to make videos with Pikachu in them.

draw_down 1y ago
[dead]
freedomben 1y ago
I think you're right. I must say though, it pleases me to see them playing it a bit loose with copyright. Copyright law is a very polarizing issue, and I think it's important to remember there are multiple sides (copyright holders v. consumers, etc), but as a mostly consumer and part-time producer who has had the copyright sharks go after me for my own content because some algorithm or something made them think it was theirs, I want to see those assholes die in a fire. Small and medium creators are the ones most hurt I think. The giant companies have absolutely weaponized every ounce of the IP laws against everyone else, and it's disgusting to me.
dboreham 1y ago
Who is going to pay to train these "open source models" and why?
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  Based on what goes on at Civitai: Horny people, mostly, and because horny people, mostly
- cocogoatmain 1y ago
  I don’t know about the “why” but Alibaba is definitely paying to train open weight models (https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI)

romanhn 1y ago

Was excited to see Ben Thompson get on the pelicans-on-bicycles bandwagon, but alas, not quite the AI bicycles he was talking about.

Thrymr 1y ago

"AI Bicycles" is a little ironic for the bike parts manufacturer Shimano, whose Sora model of derailleur has been around for years.

notatoad 1y ago
shimano retired the sora name just in time for openAI to take it. Sora was replaced by the CUES groupset.

DoctorOetker 1y ago

For a moment I thought this article would be about AI autopiloting bicycles, so the user only needs to tread the pedals (an idea I once had, and hence why I followed the link).

throwaway106382 1y ago

China will release a video model that has no copyright guardrails and they will eat Sora's lunch.

jazzyjackson 1y ago
Copyright of Winnie the Pooh may be safe however
vunderba 1y ago
That's already been a thing for a while now. Wan [1] released in conjunction with Alibaba, and Hunyuan [2] from Tencent. [1] https://github.com/Wan-Video/Wan2.2 https://github.com/Wan-Video/Wan2.2 [2] https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanVideo https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanVideo

agnosticmantis 1y ago

Business idea: disrupt all these apps by creating an agent that watches all the brainrot for us so we all get our stolen attentions back.

blueblisters 1y ago

Ben’s original take about 1% of users being creators might end up being right eventually Consider the Studio Ghibli phenomenon. It was fun to create and share photos of your loved ones in Ghibli aesthetics until that novelty wore off Video models arguably have a lot more novelty to juice. But they will eventually get boring once you have explored the usually finite latent space of interesting content

talsperre 1y ago

IMO, Ben Thomson has great takes but this one is too over-indexed on the current SORA hype. Sure, a lot of people are downloading it and actively using it for creating videos/memes, but just like the Studio Ghibli phenomenon, interest will die down in a month or two.

davis 1y ago
Dude is drinking the koolaid for sure. Did you see his take on Meta's Vibes? It was so embarrassing.

wantering 1y ago

[dead]

camillomiller 1y ago

I am quite disappointed to see even Ben displaying an absolute lack of critical thinking about the disturbing trend of creating new AI algorithmic feeds apps. This piece reads as very detached from actual societal and economic implications. As someone in media, I'm also profoundly disappointed at how giddily some colleagues just have jumped on this disturbing horror bandwagon. It's your craft and livelihood they're playing with, ffs!!!

wantering 1y ago

[dead]

mallowdram 1y ago

Writer fundamentally mistakes the evolution of communication as ascending through bottlenecks when in reality, our communication is bottlenecked at very indirect perception across units and formats, none of which provide good, sensible signal sharing. So Sora simply represents another lossy, calamitous descent into bottleneck upon bottleneck.