alt Hacker News> because addicts pay up.
I think it turns out they don't, not really anyway. And that's exactly why Sora is dead. They figured out that addictive AI slop has been so thoroughly commoditized that you can get it on a ton of other platforms for free, so people don't want to pay for it.
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I think the real answer is that Sora-style AI slop videos just aren't as addictive as we thought they'd be.
I let my kids have access to the app in the hope they would be inoculated against being obsessed with AI video and it actually worked. They got bored in like 2 days.
It simply doesn't compare well with handcrafted short form videos that are already plentiful on TikTok (which I absolutely don't let my kids watch).
>> you can get it on a ton of other platforms for free, so people don't want to pay for it.
What happens when other platforms start trying to get people to pay? I think there's a race to find a revenue stream for this stuff. As soon as one company can find a way to monetize it, they'll all end up doing it. Right now, we're in a place where companies are losing so much money, they have to decide how much they can lose before they pull the plug.
OpenAI just proved you cannot burn money indefinitely.
The monetization of social media has always been about steering otherwise non paying users into making purchases elsewhere. So if the AI slop can make people spend money on other products that's accomplished the goal.
Sometimes they do pay up. Google Gemini estimates that 25% of active daily YouTube users pay for ad free service. I know my wife and I do, and we watch a huge range of YouTube material more hours a month than all the other streaming services we subscribe to. There is no area of human knowledge or human interest that YouTube doesn’t have a ton of material for; and of course, the animal videos… The ironic thing in the subject of Sora service being cancelled is that neither my wife or I watch AI generated material.