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Greetings!
I’m not sure what everyone else’s social media feeds are looking like these days, but over the past 72 hours mine has become unrecognizable to me. On TikTok, I’ve been inundated with short clips of slap-boxing competitions between Fred Rogers and Kurt Cobain, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, and Elvis Presley and Bob Marley. I’ve watched indie rocker Elliott Smith dunking a basketball in a Portland Trail Blazers uniform while someone who sounds like Mike Breen, ESPN’s NBA play-by-play commentator, gushes about Smith’s athletic prowess. And I’ve witnessed Martin Luther King Jr. deejaying a Boiler Room set in a London dance club.
Yes, I’ve fallen deep into an artificial intelligence slop hole this week, and I can’t get out.
All of these videos appear to be generated by Sora 2, the new version of OpenAI’s tool for generating hyperrealistic videos from text prompts. Although Sora 2 just came out last week, the speed with which it has transformed my social media is head-spinning. Previously, I had only half-tuned into the discourse on how people think AI might transform social media. But I hadn’t quite expected it to happen almost overnight, at least for my feed.
Could Sora 2 be a tipping point that irreversibly changes how people create and consume social media? It feels like it could be. “When AI videos are just as good as normal videos, I wonder what that will do to YouTube and how it will impact the millions of creators currently making content for a living…scary times,” Jimmy Donaldson, the creator better known as MrBeast, posted on Sunday.
The use of real people in AI-generated videos promises to be a particularly sticky issue. OpenAI calls these cameos and says it has “guardrails” in place to allow people to control the use of their images and voices in Sora clips. But the company has been more ambiguous about the use of dead celebrities and historical figures, like the ones populating my TikTok feed. It has said that authorized representatives of public figures who are “recently deceased” can opt out of having their likenesses appear in Sora cameos, though it hasn’t clarified what “recent” means. In the meantime, the descendants of actor Robin Williams and Martin Luther King Jr. have expressed their distress at seeing how AI has already turned their famous relatives into digital puppets.
Putting aside for a moment such very valid concerns, I have a somewhat contrarian take on this recent proliferation of Sora videos. While AI-generated content is often derided by the term “slop,” I find it riveting—or at least no dumber than a lot of the social media stuff I waste my time on. There’s incredible creative energy going into experimenting with Sora right now, the result of which ranges from offensive to banal to incredibly funny. I may very well get tired of it before long. In the meantime, it’s hard to look away.
Sunak to Silicon Valley
What is it with the cream of British politics jumping into tech advisory work? Former U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak has been hired by Microsoft and Anthropic as an adviser, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. He follows in the footsteps of former deputy U.K. prime minister Nick Clegg, who worked at Meta Platforms from 2018 to the start of this year, most recently as president of global affairs.
Is this a sign of the times? After all, it’s hard to picture former British prime ministers of the past—such as Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher, if they were still alive—going to work for U.S. tech firms. Nowadays, though, working for big tech can be a path to riches (and a headache). We look forward to tracking Sunak’s adventures in Silicon Valley.—Martin Peers
In Other News
• China has launched an antitrust investigation into Qualcomm over its acquisition of Israeli startup Autotalks, in another salvo aimed at the U.S. weeks ahead of a planned meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
• Tech stocks fell across the board as investors responded to Trump's threat to impose a “massive increase” in tariffs on Chinese imports, in the wake of new Chinese restrictions on the export of rare earths.
• Kalshi, a U.S.-regulated prediction market, said it raised more than $300 million at a $5 billion valuation led by Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which we talk with the CEO of Qualtrics about the company’s $6.75 billion acquisition aimed at expanding the company in healthcare software.
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