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The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? In practice people would just gene

The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? In practice people would just generate the videos with the app then post them on regular social media in which case OAI would not get the ad revenue for that Its the age-old "your product is just a subset of another product"

echelon 7mo ago
> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? 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.
- tantalor 7mo ago
  > look at US top videos on YouTube any given day I'd rather eat poison
  - echelon 7mo ago
    We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture. Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest. It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate IP. I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their characters and music. We'll see cable TV era "blackouts" when a social network has to renegotiate their IP license. People really wanted to use Sora for about a week. After the app/model debuted, they lost the ability to generate IP within the first week. The interest faded almost immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0. People want to generate IP. edit: clarity
    - jrflowers 7mo ago
      > People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP. Or the novelty wore off in about a week, and then after that it also became harder to generate videos of baby yoda at Westboro Baptist Church protests
    - array_key_first 7mo ago
      Pop culture is a fickle beast. What is pop culture is community made, not corporate made, and it can't be bought and sold like traditional markets. It's one of the few areas of life where nobodies can become somebody, and corporations hate this. Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you to watch VEVO instead.
    - no_wizard 7mo ago
      Personally I’m glad that big IP came in and smashed the AI companies like this. They been relentlessly ripping off smaller creators for some time now. It opens the precedent for those creators to now also hold these companies responsible. That’s not a bad thing under the current legal system in this way. Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me
      - oorza 7mo ago
        > Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget - is all but forgotten. I don't want a video of Pikachu fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able to green screen and use AI to generate everything. I don't want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition. In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding and using a coding assistant...
        NateEag 7mo ago
  - toss1 7mo ago
    Indeed!! If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind. Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils.
    - toss1 7mo ago
      Weird. No activity or response to an obscure post beyond a couple upvotes. Then, the next day a brigade no-engagement downvotes. IDC, but seems like some corporate image management trying to hide negative takes on Google properties? Sheesh
- praisewhitey 7mo ago
  >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. Where can I get this data?
  - echelon 7mo ago
    Hm, turns out they removed these last year: https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-trending-page-shutting-down-1236452150/ https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-trending-page-... Bummer. It used to be at: https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending So last year, these were the top videos: https://web.archive.org/web/20250324155132/https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending https://web.archive.org/web/20250324155132/https://www.youtu... There's this, but it's nowhere near as good as seeing the actual videos: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube
  - ipaddr 7mo ago
    Top videos are Mr Beast and other youtube personalities.
    - jinushaun 7mo ago
      Only because they promote it. The default experience for a new user on Youtube is to show you content from creators with 5M+ subscribers. It’s a positive feedback loop. I find all of it lame and cringe, so I downvote all of that. However stuff still sneaks by…
  - GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
    A theme I have noticed in content oriented towards young children is a very heavy use of probably unlicensed depictions of famous characters from popular franchises. Is Nintendo collecting a royalty from “it’s raining tacos“? Probably not.
chromacity 7mo ago
> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? 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.
danso 7mo ago
I've always suspected video-gen is basically a loss leader for OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. They can't convince the general population that AI is world-changing trillion dollar tech with "vibe coding", but realistic fake videos are impressive at a glance, and might convince many non-technical people that AI/LLMs are something revolutionary.
- oro44 7mo ago
  Most of this “AI” stuff is dead on arrival. Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences. That’s it. Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - sethops1 7mo ago
    This is what I see, outside the HN bubble. If you work retail or weld pipes together or whatever, AI is of no use to you. On the contrary, if tech thought leaders are to be believed, you'll be out of a job soon, replaced by a lifeless robot. Fuck that.
    - munchler 7mo ago
      You do realize that there a lot of people who sit at a desk and use a computer all day, right? Those are the ones whose jobs are vulnerable, not the ones who work with their hands or interact with the public.
    - kingleopold 7mo ago
      we will come for them with real world AI, it takes time. dont worry. they are not safe in a decade, they are %100 safe for few more years. Learning from them at scale and updating is nothing impossible.
- makingstuffs 7mo ago
  I think of them all Gemini has the most viable use case when Veo is paired with their advertising platform. It does genuinely open the door to a lot of cost saving for promo shots of products etc
anukin 7mo ago
Moltbook was recently acquired by meta. I think it’s the same hypothesis for TikTok for ai agents or similar.
NoPicklez 7mo ago
Posting the videos to social media wasn't its only use case. 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
bandrami 7mo ago
There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation but unfortunately it's fake revenge porn. You'll know the whole thing is about to collapse when the frontier models break that glass (as OpenAI is already preparing to do with sexting).
- coderenegade 7mo ago
  I for one can't wait for ChatGPT-style sexting to become a thing. It's not just dirty talk. It's a whole new paradigm in verbal filth. On the topic of sora, though: current models are astounding. I watched a clip of Leonidas, Aragorn, William Wallace, Gandalf etc. all casually riding into a generic medieval town together, and if you showed that to me a few years ago, it would have seemed like magic. We're not far off from concerts featuring only dead artists, and all video and image testimony becoming unreliable. Maybe Sora was a victim of timing or mismanagement, because I don't see how this isn't still a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    I mean, you just outlined why it won't be a seismic shift: the only way the videos reliably stay on-model is if that model violates someone's copyright. And then when the movie is made the output itself isn't copyrightable (the ultimate arrangement may be but no individual frame is).
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    > all video and image testimony becoming unreliable This is a "seismic shift" in the sense of the Big One hitting California. The knock on effects of trust erosion caused by AI are going to huge and potentially unrecoverable.
- Frost1x 7mo ago
  Why does it need to be revenge porn? Pretty sure regular old porn has a large market there where people can specify what they idealistically want to see vs trying to find it, if it exists. Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are into these days.
topherPedersen 7mo ago
I never used Sora to watch content, but there was a guy on TikTok that used to post these great Sora generated videos that I really liked. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to hear that they were shutting this app down today.
onepunchmob 7mo ago
I always believed that the sora app wasn't a exactly a product but more of a way for openai to bulk create a bunch of videos from the worlds creative minds and then spoon-feed the results back to their video gen models
chaostheory 7mo ago
There was a lot of pseudo porn. I’m not sure exactly what the prompts were to generate them since you couldn hide the original prompts. I’m not sure why they didn’t use grok instead so it leads me to think they were trolling
freediddy 7mo ago
> who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? 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.

echelon 7mo ago

> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? 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.

tantalor 7mo ago
> look at US top videos on YouTube any given day I'd rather eat poison
- echelon 7mo ago
  We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture. Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest. It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate IP. I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their characters and music. We'll see cable TV era "blackouts" when a social network has to renegotiate their IP license. People really wanted to use Sora for about a week. After the app/model debuted, they lost the ability to generate IP within the first week. The interest faded almost immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0. People want to generate IP. edit: clarity
  - jrflowers 7mo ago
    > People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP. Or the novelty wore off in about a week, and then after that it also became harder to generate videos of baby yoda at Westboro Baptist Church protests
  - array_key_first 7mo ago
    Pop culture is a fickle beast. What is pop culture is community made, not corporate made, and it can't be bought and sold like traditional markets. It's one of the few areas of life where nobodies can become somebody, and corporations hate this. Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you to watch VEVO instead.
  - no_wizard 7mo ago
    Personally I’m glad that big IP came in and smashed the AI companies like this. They been relentlessly ripping off smaller creators for some time now. It opens the precedent for those creators to now also hold these companies responsible. That’s not a bad thing under the current legal system in this way. Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me
    - oorza 7mo ago
      > Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget - is all but forgotten. I don't want a video of Pikachu fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able to green screen and use AI to generate everything. I don't want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition. In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding and using a coding assistant...
      - NateEag 7mo ago
- toss1 7mo ago
  Indeed!! If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind. Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils.
  - toss1 7mo ago
    Weird. No activity or response to an obscure post beyond a couple upvotes. Then, the next day a brigade no-engagement downvotes. IDC, but seems like some corporate image management trying to hide negative takes on Google properties? Sheesh
praisewhitey 7mo ago
>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. Where can I get this data?
- echelon 7mo ago
  Hm, turns out they removed these last year: https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-trending-page-shutting-down-1236452150/ https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-trending-page-... Bummer. It used to be at: https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending So last year, these were the top videos: https://web.archive.org/web/20250324155132/https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending https://web.archive.org/web/20250324155132/https://www.youtu... There's this, but it's nowhere near as good as seeing the actual videos: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube
- ipaddr 7mo ago
  Top videos are Mr Beast and other youtube personalities.
  - jinushaun 7mo ago
    Only because they promote it. The default experience for a new user on Youtube is to show you content from creators with 5M+ subscribers. It’s a positive feedback loop. I find all of it lame and cringe, so I downvote all of that. However stuff still sneaks by…
- GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
  A theme I have noticed in content oriented towards young children is a very heavy use of probably unlicensed depictions of famous characters from popular franchises. Is Nintendo collecting a royalty from “it’s raining tacos“? Probably not.

chromacity 7mo ago

> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? 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.

danso 7mo ago

I've always suspected video-gen is basically a loss leader for OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. They can't convince the general population that AI is world-changing trillion dollar tech with "vibe coding", but realistic fake videos are impressive at a glance, and might convince many non-technical people that AI/LLMs are something revolutionary.

oro44 7mo ago
Most of this “AI” stuff is dead on arrival. Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences. That’s it. Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- sethops1 7mo ago
  This is what I see, outside the HN bubble. If you work retail or weld pipes together or whatever, AI is of no use to you. On the contrary, if tech thought leaders are to be believed, you'll be out of a job soon, replaced by a lifeless robot. Fuck that.
  - munchler 7mo ago
    You do realize that there a lot of people who sit at a desk and use a computer all day, right? Those are the ones whose jobs are vulnerable, not the ones who work with their hands or interact with the public.
  - kingleopold 7mo ago
    we will come for them with real world AI, it takes time. dont worry. they are not safe in a decade, they are %100 safe for few more years. Learning from them at scale and updating is nothing impossible.
makingstuffs 7mo ago
I think of them all Gemini has the most viable use case when Veo is paired with their advertising platform. It does genuinely open the door to a lot of cost saving for promo shots of products etc

anukin 7mo ago

Moltbook was recently acquired by meta. I think it’s the same hypothesis for TikTok for ai agents or similar.

NoPicklez 7mo ago

Posting the videos to social media wasn't its only use case. 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

bandrami 7mo ago

There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation but unfortunately it's fake revenge porn. You'll know the whole thing is about to collapse when the frontier models break that glass (as OpenAI is already preparing to do with sexting).

coderenegade 7mo ago
I for one can't wait for ChatGPT-style sexting to become a thing. It's not just dirty talk. It's a whole new paradigm in verbal filth. On the topic of sora, though: current models are astounding. I watched a clip of Leonidas, Aragorn, William Wallace, Gandalf etc. all casually riding into a generic medieval town together, and if you showed that to me a few years ago, it would have seemed like magic. We're not far off from concerts featuring only dead artists, and all video and image testimony becoming unreliable. Maybe Sora was a victim of timing or mismanagement, because I don't see how this isn't still a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  I mean, you just outlined why it won't be a seismic shift: the only way the videos reliably stay on-model is if that model violates someone's copyright. And then when the movie is made the output itself isn't copyrightable (the ultimate arrangement may be but no individual frame is).
- pjc50 7mo ago
  > all video and image testimony becoming unreliable This is a "seismic shift" in the sense of the Big One hitting California. The knock on effects of trust erosion caused by AI are going to huge and potentially unrecoverable.
Frost1x 7mo ago
Why does it need to be revenge porn? Pretty sure regular old porn has a large market there where people can specify what they idealistically want to see vs trying to find it, if it exists. Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are into these days.

topherPedersen 7mo ago

I never used Sora to watch content, but there was a guy on TikTok that used to post these great Sora generated videos that I really liked. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to hear that they were shutting this app down today.

onepunchmob 7mo ago

I always believed that the sora app wasn't a exactly a product but more of a way for openai to bulk create a bunch of videos from the worlds creative minds and then spoon-feed the results back to their video gen models

chaostheory 7mo ago

There was a lot of pseudo porn. I’m not sure exactly what the prompts were to generate them since you couldn hide the original prompts. I’m not sure why they didn’t use grok instead so it leads me to think they were trolling

freediddy 7mo ago

> who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? 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.