The Internet Reacts To OpenAI Killing Its Sora Slop Farm

Yesterday, OpenAI confirmed it would be shutting down Sora, its AI video generation app and social media platform that churned out slop featuring characters from Pokémon, Spongebob, Dragon Ball, and many other copyrighted franchises. The move comes as the company is refocusing on coding and business functions ahead of a potential public offering later this year. Disney was ready to go all in on the tech, having announced back in December that it would invest $1 billion into Sora to let people use its characters. Now, that deal is donezo in what is one of the biggest examples of the AI bubble bursting yet. 

For folks who are entertained by keys jangling in front of their eyes and those who hoped to turn a profit from low-effort slop content featuring iconic characters, this is a huge blow. For the rest of the world, whether that be artists who have been suffering as corporations stop paying folks to make art in favor of the cheap non-labor of genAI or just people who have gotten tired of seeing this garbage on their feeds, this is a win. Despite all that posturing from AI diehards claiming that this technology would be the future of entertainment, animation, art, and everything else, one of the biggest companies in the space is collapsing in on itself.

Unfortunately, it’s not the end of AI as we know it, but OpenAI exiting the video generation side of its business is a glorious start, and the internet is reacting in kind. The fact that the app shares its name with the protagonist of Kingdom Hearts sets up half of the jokes.

One video generation app’s demise isn’t enough to tank the entire genAI ecosystem, but hopefully it is a harbinger of more developments like this as we watch people who swore up and down that this was the future of everything eat crow.