In the Loop

IN OCTOBER, HEART-WRENCHING photos of a 12-year-old girl driving her sick puppy to the vet went viral on social media. But upon closer examination, users noticed strange details: her steering wheel was on the right side of the car, which also lacked a dashboard.

- By Andrew R. Chow, TECH CORRESPONDENT

The image, perhaps predictably, was another example of AI slop: artificial content designed for no reason other than maximum engagement on social media. An increasing amount of AI slop is now churning through social media thanks to the arrival of Sora 2, OpenAI's new text-to-video model. The tool, which quickly shot to the top of the App Store, allows users to describe a scene, and then renders it within seconds.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hopes the videos will “feel fun and new,” critics 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 is and isn’t real. “The irony is that AI might end up saving human connection because they’re making us so desperate for that real thing,” says Kashyap Rajesh, a vice president at the youth-led organization Encode.