By: Nick Gambino

You know all of those AI videos floating around the internet and social media that a bunch of tech flunkies are trying to convince you are high art? Well, those are a product of AI video generation tools like Sora which was designed by OpenAI.

This is similar to the AI image generator DALL-E, but instead of producing an image, you feed it a simple prompt and it generates a video in response. Sora has been in preview for months, but as part of their “12 Days of Ship-mas” where they release new products, OpenAI has launched Sora to the general public. God help us all.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate AI outright. I don’t mind it as a tool for the human artisan to automate certain tasks. AI is great as part of a video editing software where it can speed up some of the more tedious processes.

What I do have a problem with is big tech waltzing into the arts with their flashy mom jeans and turtlenecks (ok, so in my head they all still look like Steve Jobs) and claiming they’ve built machines that are better artists than humans.

This is clearly not true. These avid AI zealots are mistaking speed for quality. Just because they can pump out a video quickly that features vivid colors and sweeping visuals doesn’t mean it’s art or has anything to say about the human experience. Which, at the end of the day, is what art is all about.

I’m not saying what Sora produces isn’t impressive. It is. But do I want to watch more than a few seconds of a closet freak show that approximates the dream world? No. So I believe it’s incredibly limited outside of its use as a low-level tool. Similar to how you might use ChatGPT to draft a memo.

And yes, Sora will continue to improve, but if it doesn’t grow a heart, brain, soul or whatever it is that makes humans so beautifully human, then it will always be a non-sentient hack at best.

Ok, that’s enough ranting from me. Sora is available now at Sora.com for those who are paying $200 a month for ChatGPT.