I Was Sora 2’s Biggest Fan. Now I’m Over It.

No one — except maybe Sam Altman — loved Sora 2 as much as I did when it first launched.

I spent so much time using it during the first few days that I was easily burning through my phone battery by 5 p.m. (Tim Cook: Let’s talk about that later.) And I was wasting huge chunks of my workday (To my editor: Let’s not talk about that later) making silly videos of myself and my friends.

But now it’s been more than six weeks since Sam Altman launched Sora 2, and I’ve barely opened the app in the last few weeks. My excitement and interest have waned.

I have a few ideas about why I’m bored with it.

What I initially loved about Sora was the way you could make realistic videos of your friends (if they allowed people to use their likenesses, which are called “cameos” on the app), which could lead to hilarious and enjoyable in-jokes.

I made videos of my friends doing embarrassing things, like singing in a ska band, tripping on roller skates, or assorted other inside jokes.

It’s just funny to see your friends in improbable situations. For example, I still find a video I made of my colleague Peter Kafka performing a “Thriller” soundalike song in a red jumpsuit extremely amusing.

Meanwhile, it was clear that a lot of people were finding it funny to make videos of dead celebrities saying or doing improbable things — Stephen Hawking on a skate ramp, or Martin Luther King Jr. saying some memespeak instead of his “I have a dream” speech. This eventually led to the King family speaking out against it, and OpenAI “pausing” the ability to use the civil rights leader’s image.

Related stories

In general, I found these videos of famous people much less interesting than those of my own friends. There’s no shortage of comedic imaginations of Abe Lincoln out there in the world, but there’s none of my friend Matt having diarrhea at a rodeo. Only Sora 2 could make that for me.

To me, the friend graph was the key: videos of my friends were funny; everything else was just slop. If I wanted to create or watch ambient AI videos that just “look cool,” I could go to (shudder) Meta’s Vibes.

But the friend graph never expanded — at least for me — past an initial handful of early adopters. None of my friends who don’t work in tech or media ever joined, and if I’ve tried to explain Sora to them, they are horror-stricken at the idea of letting strangers make videos of their faces.

They’re not wrong for that. One of the less appealing things about Sora is that there’s a lot of what seems to be fetish content being made of me and other women on the app. (The most recent thing I’ve seen is an account that only makes cameos of women wearing tuxedos, and then someone comes along and rips off the white boutonniere from the lapel. I’m thankful that even though I’ve written about internet culture for years, I can still be surprised by stumbling into some new niche fetish.)

Recently, OpenAI announced that it was dropping the invite code requirement that had initially kept Sora limited. But I haven’t heard anyone I know talk about signing up recently. And all my friends who had initially been making videos have also all pretty much stopped, too.

But just because I’m over Sora for now, I don’t think that means the app is a flop or that other people aren’t finding lots of uses for it. There are a huge number of people who want to use a high-quality, easy-to-use, and most importantly, free AI video app. They may be using it for all sorts of things other than “sending jokes to friends.”

The downside for OpenAI here is that all those people using it to make whatever are costing the company a lot of money, apparently. Forbes estimates with some back-of-the-napkin math that all that compute to run Sora could cost OpenAI as much as $15 million per day. (OpenAI declined to comment on this to Forbes, and didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.)

I’m not sure what the near-term or long-term future of Sora looks like.

Ironically, Sora did the “fun with your friends!” thing that Meta AI’s Vibes should have done (Vibes launched only a few days earlier, and still is kind of a wasteland).

Perhaps there’s still a future for a fun, social app that brings more of your friends together. Or maybe Sora just becomes a paid pro tool. I don’t know!

But for now, I’m thankfully back to wasting my time on my phone in more traditional ways.