| ▲ | ex-aws-dude 10 hours ago |
| The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? In practice people would just generate the videos with the app then post them on regular social media in which case OAI would not get the ad revenue for that Its the age-old "your product is just a subset of another product" |
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| ▲ | danso 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I've always suspected video-gen is basically a loss leader for OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. They can't convince the general population that AI is world-changing trillion dollar tech with "vibe coding", but realistic fake videos are impressive at a glance, and might convince many non-technical people that AI/LLMs are something revolutionary. |
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| ▲ | makingstuffs 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think of them all Gemini has the most viable use case when Veo is paired with their advertising platform. It does genuinely open the door to a lot of cost saving for promo shots of products etc | | |
| ▲ | umich2025 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Agreed. For reference, if sora 2 was able to generate me a Google ugc product video, it would cost me like $10 and I would get it within 30 minutes if including editing. Paying a ugc content creator would cost me $50-200 plus no control over final shots plus I gotta wait for them to respond. I have 30 products in my e-commerce store— these costs add up like crazy The other one is TV ads/cinamatic ads. For a 30 second clip expect to pay an agency $5-10k. Within a couple of days, I can make a video ad and have like $50 in api costs. Cost of production is so crazy in marketing. Obv this is under the assumption ai is good to do either of those things. Which it hasn’t so far, best I’ve gotten is doing b-roll shots to stick together for an ad |
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| ▲ | oro44 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most of this “AI” stuff is dead on arrival. Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences. That’s it. Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it. | | |
| ▲ | sethops1 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is what I see, outside the HN bubble. If you work retail or weld pipes together or whatever, AI is of no use to you. On the contrary, if tech thought leaders are to be believed, you'll be out of a job soon, replaced by a lifeless robot. Fuck that. | |
| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | topherPedersen 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I never used Sora to watch content, but there was a guy on TikTok that used to post these great Sora generated videos that I really liked. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to hear that they were shutting this app down today. |
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| ▲ | NoPicklez 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Posting the videos to social media wasn't its only use case. I've no doubt that content creators outside of social media were using it as well, either for their brand or other video work. Yes we see AI reels all over the place, but that's not only what it was used for |
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| ▲ | bandrami 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation but unfortunately it's fake revenge porn. You'll know the whole thing is about to collapse when the frontier models break that glass (as OpenAI is already preparing to do with sexting). |
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| ▲ | Frost1x 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why does it need to be revenge porn? Pretty sure regular old porn has a large market there where people can specify what they idealistically want to see vs trying to find it, if it exists. Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are into these days. | | |
| ▲ | bandrami 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not deeply immersed in the AI porn space but here's what I see from the ads when I surf without a blocker: 1. There's an AI-based virtual girlfriend industry that mixes text and images 2. There's an AI-based virtual boyfriend industry that is essentially all text (and not always distinguishable from the normal chat models) 3. There's a much shadier AI-based "undress this specific woman" industry | |
| ▲ | UncleMeat 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People make revenge porn to humiliate people. Regular old porn can't achieve that goal. | | |
| ▲ | andrewflnr 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | And yet, regular porn is highly monetizable, which was the actual question. | | |
| ▲ | bandrami 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Surprisingly no; it's pretty much a money sink where everybody goes bankrupt after a couple of years. It's why it's attractive to money launderers. | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm not sure that's true for onlyfans, which seems to have been highly profitable until the sudden death of its founder. |
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| ▲ | AlexCoventry 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation Yeah, marketing. Which is a huge market... | |
| ▲ | coderenegade 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I for one can't wait for ChatGPT-style sexting to become a thing. It's not just dirty talk. It's a whole new paradigm in verbal filth. On the topic of sora, though: current models are astounding. I watched a clip of Leonidas, Aragorn, William Wallace, Gandalf etc. all casually riding into a generic medieval town together, and if you showed that to me a few years ago, it would have seemed like magic. We're not far off from concerts featuring only dead artists, and all video and image testimony becoming unreliable. Maybe Sora was a victim of timing or mismanagement, because I don't see how this isn't still a seismic shift in the entertainment industry. | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > all video and image testimony becoming unreliable This is a "seismic shift" in the sense of the Big One hitting California. The knock on effects of trust erosion caused by AI are going to huge and potentially unrecoverable. | |
| ▲ | bandrami 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, you just outlined why it won't be a seismic shift: the only way the videos reliably stay on-model is if that model violates someone's copyright. And then when the movie is made the output itself isn't copyrightable (the ultimate arrangement may be but no individual frame is). |
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| ▲ | duskwuff 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are others! They're just all horrible and generally revolve around weaponized misinformation - personalized scams, for instance. | | |
| ▲ | bandrami 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh right. There's a bunch of panicky news stories in India about that right now. Fake video calls from your nephew in the UK or whatever needing money for an emergency |
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| ▲ | anukin 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Moltbook was recently acquired by meta. I think it’s the same hypothesis for TikTok for ai agents or similar. |
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| ▲ | echelon 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up and we couldn't do anything with the characters and culture we know. If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc. |
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| ▲ | tantalor 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > look at US top videos on YouTube any given day I'd rather eat poison | | |
| ▲ | echelon 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture. Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest. It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate IP. I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their characters and music. We'll see cable TV era "blackouts" when a social network has to renegotiate their IP license. People really wanted to use Sora for about a week. After the app/model debuted, they lost the ability to generate IP within the first week. The interest faded almost immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0. People want to generate IP. edit: clarity | | |
| ▲ | no_wizard 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Personally I’m glad that big IP came in and smashed the AI companies like this. They been relentlessly ripping off smaller creators for some time now. It opens the precedent for those creators to now also hold these companies responsible. That’s not a bad thing under the current legal system in this way. Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me | | |
| ▲ | oorza 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget - is all but forgotten. I don't want a video of Pikachu fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able to green screen and use AI to generate everything. I don't want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition. In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding and using a coding assistant... | | |
| ▲ | NateEag 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition. As a onetime semi-pro musician, with decades of live performance and sound design experience: I would rather burn my beloved instruments publicly and pee on the fire. | | |
| ▲ | rustystump an hour ago | parent [-] | | I think he meant more like a synth. You could take recordings and process them using ai. At least this was my takeaway |
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| ▲ | pjc50 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe, but the Sora shutdown comes immediately after reaching a deal with Disney to use their IP. Which might have solved that problem. | |
| ▲ | array_key_first 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Pop culture is a fickle beast. What is pop culture is community made, not corporate made, and it can't be bought and sold like traditional markets. It's one of the few areas of life where nobodies can become somebody, and corporations hate this. Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you to watch VEVO instead. | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP. Or the novelty wore off in about a week, and then after that it also became harder to generate videos of baby yoda at Westboro Baptist Church protests |
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| ▲ | toss1 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Indeed!! If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind. Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils. |
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| ▲ | praisewhitey 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc. Where can I get this data? | | |
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| ▲ | chromacity 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed? It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of video-based AI slop. But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing. |
