OpenAI's new video app is jaw-dropping

Sora, OpenAI's new video-generating app, is really a social network in disguise that can bring creative AI to the masses — and its problems, too, write Mike Isaac and Eli Tan from San Francisco

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Last week, we — the two authors of this article — spent hours scrolling through a feed of short-form videos that featured ourselves in different scenarios.

In one hyper-realistic nine-second video, we were shown skydiving (and grinning) with pizzas as parachutes.

In another, Eli hit a game-winning home run in a baseball stadium full of robots.

In yet another, Mike was caught in a “Matrix”-style duel against Ronald McDonald, using cheeseburgers as weapons.

“I’m genuinely blown away,” Eli messaged Mike about the cheeseburger video, before liking the content. Mike kept sending videos — which included him ballroom dancing with his dog and sitting on a throne of rats — to other New York Times colleagues (all of whom found the clips slightly disturbing).

The app we used was not TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, the current leaders of short-form video. It was Sora, a smartphone app made by OpenAI that lets people create such videos entirely from artificial intelligence. Sora's underlying technology debuted last year, but its latest version — which is faster and more powerful and can incorporate your likeness if you upload images of your face — was released on an invitation-only basis last week.

After we spent less than a day with the app, what became clear to us was that Sora had gone beyond being an AI-video generation app. Instead, it is, in effect, a social network in disguise; a clone of TikTok down to its user interface, algorithmic video suggestions and ability to follow and interact with friends. The powerful AI model that Sora is built on makes it simpler to produce clips, giving people an almost unlimited ability to generate as many AI videos as they want.

It was also disconcerting.