Lately, we’ve been flooded with generated AI videos featuring eerily refreshed-looking teenagers reminiscing about how much better the world was in the ’80s and ’90s. As the young AIs smile and sport period-specific haircuts, the clip cuts to dreamy footage of sun-drenched cul-de-sacs and vintage cars, as well as songs like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” super donkey kong country The soundtrack will play in the background. It’s all very strange — it’s like bragging about peaking in high school.
The video is strange, but there’s a relatively easy-to-understand logic at work here. On one level, this content appeals to people’s fascination with the past. Young viewers in particular don’t have direct experience with these eras and are therefore more likely to overlook the anachronistic details that generative AI models tend to include in their video output. But these videos also evoke an idealized vision of the past, where everyone is beautiful, most people are white, and we have an inexplicable knowledge of how stressful life will be in 2025. This kind of nostalgia is a neoconservative fantasy for people allergic to opening history books.
But the reasons behind the emergence of more absurd generational AI clips of long-deceased celebrities doing things they didn’t actually do are much harder to parse. Michael Jackson stealing fried chicken, Stephen Hawking competing in the X Games, Einstein becoming a UFC champion, Bob Ross being arrested by the police for painting a mural without permission (?), Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana fighting in a promo match for WWE, and there are countless videos of stars doing things that are unrealistic. The rampant racism, ableism, and sexism depicted in the clip makes it all feel like a drain family guy Cutaway gag. But on the Sora app, everyone seems to be hooked on this trashy “comedy.”
For some reason, Fred Rogers is often the focus of these clips, where he can be seen rapping with Tupac, courting women like Marilyn Monroe, or showing off his closet full of guns. None of these deepfakes are particularly convincing, and most still have watermarks indicating they were created with OpenAI’s Sora model. But awful things like this are everywhere, and the viewing numbers show that people can’t stop watching, whether it’s out of love, hate, or ambivalence. At least, that’s probably what the team behind OpenAi’s recently released social video app would like you to think.
It’s clear what OpenAI stands to gain by flooding the internet with Sora-generated videos. This content is another way for the company to promote its technology and normalize the idea of people coming to work in a slop factory for fun. This seems to be the end goal of the Sora app. Generating a video is as simple as typing a few sentences into a prompt box. OpenAI and all of its competitors want to be recognized as the source of a new, revolutionary kind of art, the ability for people to express their creativity in ways that weren’t possible before.
The people making these videos, like Jake Paul, Snoop Dogg, and Shaquille O’Neal, clearly buy into that idea, or at least are paid to pretend to do so in order to convince gullible fans that mainline slop from the trough is cool. But watch this production enough times (not that many) and it becomes clear how unimaginative and uninteresting it is. You can also clearly see that none of these creators have the ability to imagine anything beyond, “What if this dead celebrity did something outrageous like give the agent a heart attack?”
The content of these videos speaks volumes about the current state of generational AI. But there is more to say about how the output of this technology has been affected by the gradual demise of monoculture.
Although some argue that everyone watching the same TV shows and movies increases social cohesion (the mythical water cooler conversation), monocultures are not without their drawbacks. It was a time when pop culture decision-making power was concentrated in the hands of selected — usually — older white men. Monoculture created structural barriers around the business of creating art for the masses, but modern technologies such as the internet and social media have provided people with ways to circumvent those gatekeepers.
It’s no coincidence that many gen AI founders lean heavily into the idea that their products are designed to empower people and “democratize” artistic creation. That was the promise anyway. But as you scroll through the Sora app and see dozens of videos repeating the same basic prompts like “celebrity or animal stopped by police on suspicion of DUI,” it’s hard not to see the platform as a place that encourages users to reinforce familiar archetypes rather than create something truly original or even remotely interesting.
Where exactly is the “good” generational AI content?
Other than the Sam Altmans of the world who directly benefit from this content, it’s hard to know who this kind of video is for and what they find interesting about it. There’s an argument to be made that this nonsense was meant to appeal to Zoomers and Generation Alpha kids who claim their brains are part of their identity. But the humorous elements of these videos aren’t exactly work If you don’t understand who the people generated by AI are. Without that context, the punchline is even uglier. Fred Rogers flirting with Marilyn Monroe now amounts to “old man being a sex pest.” Stephen Hawking now says, “This man has ALS and uses a wheelchair.”
While AI boosters claim that this technology can produce meaningful art, the Sora app really demonstrates the boilerplate derivativeness that makes this type of video easily dismissed as vulgar. All of this feels like content designed with social media virality in mind, as opposed to human creative expression. These clips can rack up impressive numbers of views online, but “increased numbers” is not a reliable indicator of whether they have real staying power.
Claiming that the AI video of Jeffrey Epstein walking out of court is the “future of entertainment” or that it reflects young people’s tastes in media is a vicious insult to their intelligence. This idea suggests that people do not or cannot value quality or view their attention as something worth striving for. We keep being told that this technology is improving every day and that a “better” generation of AI content is just around the corner. So where’s the good stuff? How many more billions of dollars do we need to pump into this AI hype cycle before it produces something even more worth thinking about and remembering?
This all feels like a flashy trend to convince people that artificial intelligence is worth getting excited about. It feels like the novelty of video is destined to wear off pretty quickly since there are so many videos out there. So far, the only promise AI has held is scale. But it also means you get bored of it faster because you’re constantly being flooded with it. And once a new generation of AI catches people’s attention, it’s easy to imagine that everyone will forget that there was ever such a low moment.
