A Big, Beautiful Failure

Wow, and I thought this would be the happiest event in the entertainment industry in the first quarter of the year. Nope! I was wrong! I am beyond pleased to report to you all that Sora, the AI slop video generator that tech industry sociopaths and Hollywood washouts were so excited for out of a delusional belief that it would somehow replace artists and storytellers, is shutting down mere months after its launch. In their unusually brief and, frankly, lame announcement:

We’re saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.

First of all, el oh el at the idea that anything generated on that platform was the result of “work.” But hang on, it gets better. So much better. The Walt Disney Corporation is cancelling their $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI as well, which, if you remember, was a deal they struck in exchange for shuttering their copyright infringement lawsuit last year. That deal is dead, now:

As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere. We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.

This is an unqualified triumph for artists, storytellers, film lovers, and anyone who cares even slightly about narrative art in all mediums. It’s a victory for anyone who cares about human beings and maintaining even the slightest hint of community among us. It is arguably the single most devastating blow to the project of universal propagation of AI since the hype cycle started. The only people who had actual enthusiasm for this garbage software are literal psychopaths who genuinely hold humanity in contempt and idiots who resent their failure to break into the entertainment industry and saw ChatGPT as a means to take revenge on the so-called “elites” they were so pathetically desperate to be a part of (including Awards Radar’s Favorite Special Boy!). And now their dream is over. Or… at least, significantly degraded.

As it turns out, an expensive, thirsty, unreliable video generation software that could conjure up a few seconds of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pile-driving Abraham Lincoln in a WWE wrestling ring is a fun little novelty app that amuses you for a while, but has no actual longevity or lasting cultural import. People do not value art because it offers a few seconds of meaningless, diversionary amusement in between slaving away at our 9-to-5 jobs working for Sterility, Incorporated. Art is a means of communication. People make art to say something about the world around them. They want to express something they feel, with their human emotions, to others, and are willing to put in a lot of work to bring those feelings to the rest of us. Paul Thomas Anderson did not just sit in front of a computer and type “Show me a funny video of a middle-aged Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling around a country experiencing political turmoil and struggle” to get a few laughs from people. He wanted to say something about his generation’s failure to overcome the forces of reactionary oppression and celebrate the courage and potential of the next to right the ship. Ryan Coogler was not using video generation software to just plop a bunch of anachronistic musical artists singing and dancing around to make audiences go, “Oh that looks pretty cool,” and then immediately forget about it a few seconds later. He meticulously planned, set up, and executed a single take of a supernatural mosaic of the intersectional connections that music makes between marginalized demographics across generations. There was meaning and intent to this shot:

That is why we watch movies, TV shows, and short films. Because they have a purpose. They are made by human beings who have something to say. Tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel hate this. Because they hate people. They hate the idea of people finding community and solidarity with one another. This is not me speculating, by the way — they openly talk about their dreams of using artificial intelligence to impose a global order that forces everyone to accept the will of a small number of digital elites by default. They see these unreliable plagiarism machines that none of us in the real world actually want as their tool to bypass humanity itself; to transform us into a big collective factory producing wealth and power for those who own the plagiarism machines.

Sora was a small part of this evil project, but make no mistake, it was absolutely a part of this long-term project from the worst people in the world. And it has crashed and burned. The people ultimately rejected it, and its parent company could not sustain it. Which is a cause for celebration for those of us who still believe in a better future for everyone.