Sora was a bit like seeing a new weapon being demoed. No matter how much engineering went in to it. The overwhelming feeling was “this is bad for society and the consequences will be massive.”

So far that’s been exactly it. Now AI generated videos are primarily used to scam, deceive, and ragebait.

I think Sora is an excellent way to see how people's beliefs clash with reality. Even in this post, I see people likening Sora to unveiling "a weapon", it filling them with "bland dread", or comparing it to creating "killing robots". But now that Sora is being shut down, what impact did Sora actually have on society, other than getting a couple of people to waste their time making some funny meme videos? Did any of those negative externalities actually play out?

If you are autistic, I feel that it causes you to see reality a more accurately than most here on this thread.

The tech was fine/interesting for what it is. The product itself is awful and something from nightmares. It's not an enjoyable experience for me watching some uncanny valley slop. I'm not impressed with the "creativity" of someone typing in a prompt and having a plagiarismbox spit something out. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of someone actually making something is what I like. The emotion and reasons behind a work of art make it inspiring. The details of their perspective and choices they make when creating it are beautiful and interesting.

The impact of easy AI generated video is a less certain and less secure world. You can't trust your eyes anymore because of how fast and easy it is to fake video and moments. You can't trust communications with someone because how easy it is to impersonate them over video and voice. Scams involving tools like this are already running rampant and it will only get worse. The sheer level of distrust these tools have unleashed into the world makes me wish they never existed. They have burned millions (billions?) of dollars on this when that money would have been better served going to the creators whose work they stole to build it. It's rotten.

> I think the lack of nudity destroyed the adult market

As we've see from Grok, building the system for producing non consensual nude images of other people will get the legal and PR hammer brought down on you fairly quickly. It's just an incredibly unethical thing to do.

I have gladly been paying $20/month for ChatGPT since the day web search was available and I use codex-cli every day instead of Claude and never have to think about limits.

I also use ChatGPT as my default search engine and to help me learn Spanish.

But image generation and video generation were a nice parlor trick. But wasn’t useful for me except for images for icons for diagrams.

But light you said, porn makes money and there are people who pay $300 a month for Grok to generate AI Porn.

Interesting to hear your perspective. There was no shock and awe to me, ChatGPT changed what I thought was possible with computers, and everything else as far as photorealistic generation and then video just seemed inevitable. I decided to abstain from watching any video I know is AI, but of course now it’s mixed in with television and advertisements. I’ve started data hoarding old TV shows thinking it will be nice to have something to watch when the internet goes down.

It's not that, the demo was impressive but when it became wildly available the reality of it never lived up to what was demoed and it later came out some of the shorts they did with directors had a lot of editing to them anyway.

all ai video will be remembered as horrific and a showcase that its creators have no ethical foresight

"I'm autistic and tend to focus on the tech" is not a justification, and I would advise to stop using it as such. Would you apply the same to killing robots? Hey, the Hyperthrasher 2000 mauls people and shreds them to pieces, but it's the most impressive TECH demo I've ever seen!

The tone of a discussion is shaped as much by who doesn't comment as who does. A product comes out and a lot of people are excited by it, they comment accordingly. People who aren't, don't, unless there is something outrageous about it. Maybe there is in this case but the point still stands that when the product fails, it's a very different set of people who feel compelled to comment. And this is totally expected because "that's a shame, I liked it" doesn't seem to contribute to the discussion. Neither does "this product doesn't excite me", even more so because that's kind of the default assumption. So an online community or institution or publication can seem very fickle, especially when the commenters are pseudonymous.

Sure the tech was cool, but people already hated youtube shorts when they were added. I think the "HN crowd" is probably the type to dislike short form content, so that might be where some of the dislike comes from.

The iPhone X's new feature where it approximated you facial expressions on a 3D character using the facial recognition sensors blew my mind as well.

It was a party trick. I can't remember the last time I touched it. That's what SORA is, or was.