Andrew R. Chow
Earlier this week, a heartwarming post about a girl, a puppy, and a police officer went viral across social media platforms. The post consisted of two dashcam images of a distraught 12-year-old who, desperate to heal her sick puppy, got behind the wheel for the first time and tried to drive to the vet. She was pulled over, but commended by a police officer for being “amazing, strong, compassionate, and smart,” and the puppy was saved. Comments flooded in celebrating the bond between a girl and her furry best friend.
But when social media users took a closer look, they noticed a few strange things: the steering wheel was on the right side of the car, which also lacked a dashboard. And the image hadn’t originated on any news platform or official police page, but rather simply appeared on Facebook on its own.
The image, perhaps predictably, was another example of AI slop: images created via AI, designed for maximum engagement on social media, slipping into user feeds with no signal of whether they’re real or fake. As far as AI slop goes, this instance was relatively harmless. But increasingly more AI slop churned through social media this week thanks to the arrival of Sora 2, OpenAI’s new advanced text-to-video model.
Some videos were clearly fabricated, like Pope John Paul II wrestling Tupac in the ring. Others were harder to discern, like a boy being swept away by a tornado, or homeless men being inserted into people’s homes. Sora became the most downloaded free app in Apple’s App Store in its first week.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, says he hopes these Sora 2 videos will “feel fun and new,” while also helping train his AIs about how the 3D world works. Critics, on the other hand, see them as a potential death knell for social media. What was supposed to be a revolutionary medium for maintaining friendships and relationships has now become a fake content generation machine—where it’s impossible to tell what’s real and what’s not.
“For years, the internet has been a place where people go to feel connected. But if everything online starts to feel fake, and our For You pages are all Sora-generated videos, people will start retreating back into what's physically provable,” says Kashyap Rajesh, a vice president at the youth-led organization Encode. “The irony is that AI might end up saving human connection and human relationships because they're making us so desperate for that real thing.”
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