Just six months after being released as a standalone app, the Sora AI video generator app is heading into the sunset. The move comes as quite a surprise as while Google is ramping up its AI video efforts with Veo, the Chinese AI label continues to see impressive results with products such as the viral Seedance AI video engine.
Instant death of viral AI tools
“What you create with Sora matters, and we know this news is disappointing. We’ll be sharing more details soon, including timelines for our apps and APIs, and details about preserving your work,” OpenAI shared in a post. Interestingly, it was recently reported that OpenAI may eventually integrate Sora video generation capabilities within ChatGPT, similar to how Google has baked video generation within products such as Gemini and NotebookLM.
Immediately after their debut, they were embroiled in a controversy over copyright infringement. Soon after, the company made a course correction, with rights holders such as Disney gaining more control and other companies with well-known franchises often being duplicated or copied by Sola. It seems like there were too many problems and no money was coming in.
What’s next for Sora?
It makes sense to retire the Sora app and keep it alive elsewhere. However, Sora seems to be forever on cold ice. According to the Wall Street Journal, AI video generators will be permanently phased out. “In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI will also discontinue the developer version of Sora and will no longer support video features within ChatGPT,” the outlet reported.
Sora was one of the first wave of mainstream AI products to populate the internet with meaningless “AI slop” videos. Apart from obvious copyright infringement, it was also exploited for its pathologically disturbing tendencies. For example, it was used to create eerily realistic videos of deceased celebrities such as Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, John Lennon, and Amy Winehouse.
These videos caused a lot of uproar online. However, this is not the first example of this kind. AI has created a whole trend of companies charging money to make videos of dead soldiers to say goodbye to their families.
