alt Hacker NewsThe 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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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).
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.
I always believed that the sora app wasn't a exactly a product but more of a way for openai to bulk create a bunch of videos from the worlds creative minds and then spoon-feed the results back to their video gen models
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
Moltbook was recently acquired by meta. I think it’s the same hypothesis for TikTok for ai agents or similar.
There was a lot of pseudo porn. I’m not sure exactly what the prompts were to generate them since you couldn hide the original prompts. I’m not sure why they didn’t use grok instead so it leads me to think they were trolling
> 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.
> 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.
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.