alt Hacker NewsI had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us.
After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.
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Sounds like when we first had smartphones with orientation sensors and we could drink a beer from the phone, so cool... for 2 weeks.
This is consistent with a lot of AI apps. I fell in love with Gamma and haven’t used it in forever. Same with NotebookLM.
This tracks my usage exactly. It was like Mad Libs - in that moment it was THE MOST FUN but after a while it became just a novelty bordering on... creepy. Now I feel kind of guilty for having exposed so many friends to what looks like a data gathering scheme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
24/7 titillation is boring
I thinks its the same reason why chess tournaments, where two AIs play against each other are not as popular, compared to when two humans play each other. Maybe its because humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.
It's the same with e.g. faceapp, fun for a minute but then... then what?
And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.
I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.
I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.
Yep. Impressive toys, but not useful day to day.
There's some market for b2b I'm sure, but as a consumer facing product it's tough to see how it could ever come close to paying for itself.
Reminds me of when photo filters and initial stickers and mirror filters came out on MacBook in like 2007. It was super fun for a couple days then the novelty wore off.
Sounds like me with listening to AI covers. After a couple of weeks I couldn't care less. But I was so stoked in it at the start
A lot of AI hype is parlor tricks
The Cameo feature is really excellent. The likeness of both the person and the voice is exceptional. I really enjoyed making some funny Cameo videos with my friends. I don't know of another simple way to insert your own avatar with your own voice into a video, and I'm pretty deep in this space.
I honestly forgot about Sora until this post, and yeah same behavior played with it for a bit, then moved on with my life.
Humans are very good at pattern recognition, even if you generate different stuff, you still see a pattern, either in the cutting, color, cadence of movements, the color grading, camera lens used, everything, your mind will tag it as slop.
Essentially you are watching the same videos over and over subconsciously
The problem is that due to the ease these can be made there is also really no reason to make this social. “Why would I look at somebody else’s creations when I can do mine.”