Ep. 375: Did OpenAI Just Kill Social Media?

If you've spent enough time online this past month, you've probably noticed a sudden uptick in unsettling, realistic AI generated videos. Maybe it's body cam footage of Super Mario in his cart being pulled over by police and then yelling, I can't get another ticket, before peeling out, or a horse on skis competing in a freestyle skiing competition, or Bob Ross wrestling Abraham Lincoln. These were all generated by OpenAI's blockbuster video generation model, Sora two, which allows you to create videos simply by describing them in words. Open I OpenAI, however, has gone one step further and bundled up access to this model in a new app that they call simply Thora that operates like TikTok. You can easily create videos and share them. You can view other people's creations, and there's a an algorithmically curated feed just like you would see on TikTok. You can have a steady incoming feed of grade a high octane LOP. The online world is usually pretty excited about new AI products, but the reaction to Sora has been more interesting. People online seem, to put it simply, unsettled. I'll play a clip here. Here's Casey Neistat, reacting to the new Sora app. My analysis, we are so completely fucked. And now here is vlogger Hank Green venting some of his own frustrations. For humanity, if you're the kind of mother who will create slop talk, you are not the kind of mother who should be in charge of OpenAI. Alright. The New York Times for its part was really worried about what this means for even just truth. They quoted a founder of a tech nonprofit saying the following, nobody will be willing to accept videos as proof of anything anymore. Alright. But for all of these particular fears we're hearing now about Sora, there is one fear in particular that I think is really interesting but is not getting discussed that much yet. And that is the question of what will the impact be of apps like Sora on the existing major social media platforms. Think about it. It's an app on your phone in which anyone can basically create any visual content they can think of. Why would I watch a TikTok dance routine when using Sora? I can create a video of Michael Jackson dancing on Mount Everest with Martin Luther King Junior. That's actually a real video I found, Jesse. So by introducing Sora, has OpenAI just radically changed the entire social media landscape? This is the question we're gonna get into today. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, did open AI just kill social media? Alright. So we gotta be careful in our approach here. We're gonna go very systematically to investigate this question and what we think the answer is. So if we really wanna understand the danger that the existing social media platforms currently face, I wanna take you back in time to roughly the 2022. Back then, …