Sora 2 Is Overrun With Teenage Boys. That Could Be OpenAI’s Nightmare.

Having spent a week on Sora 2, I’ve been closely watching its main public feed. I’m sorry to report that I’m seeing some very bad signs on OpenAI’s new social video app.

It’s not just the potential copyright violations or the misinformation, but something even more corrosive to a burgeoning social platform: Sora 2 seems to be overrun with teenage boys.

One of the earliest things I noticed looking at the “Latest” feed of all new posts is that there were very, very few women. This is not good news for OpenAI. Generally speaking, if a social platform is a scary place for women … buddy, you’re in trouble.

Let’s start where things start to get icky: Sora doesn’t allow you to make videos of other living people unless those people give you permission. (I had lots of fun doing that with my friends last week.) But it’ll let you use dead celebrities — and some of those videos are not-so-fun for their living relatives.

Mr. Rogers, Tupac Shakur, and even Martin Luther King Jr. are featured frequently, saying out-of-character or silly things. (King’s daughter, as well as Robin Williams’ daughter, has asked people to stop doing this.) There have been a lot of videos of Stephen Hawking doing tricks on a skate ramp in his wheelchair.

As individual posts, these are juvenile — but when you see these over and over and over, a vibe starts to form: This is a place for edgelord humor, which enjoys taking cheap shots at people’s likenesses, often in offensive ways.

But that’s not even really where the big headaches could come for ChatGPT maker OpenAI. There are also just tons and tons of potential trust-and-safety and content-moderation nightmares. And if the tenor of the platform is already largely “making fun of people,” well … that’s not great.

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An OpenAI rep declined to comment for this story, but pointed to Sora2’s website, which says: “We’re taking an iterative approach to safety, focusing on areas where context is especially important or where risks are still emerging and are not fully understood.”

As more and more people join the app, I’m starting to see them making cameos of what appear to be their real-life friends. (There are lots of teenage boys, it appears.) On one hand, teenage boys and young men are a great demographic for your nascent AI social app because they like to spend a lot of time online. On the other hand, let’s think about platforms that were popular with teenage boys: 4chan, early Reddit, Twitch streaming …. these are not necessarily role models for Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

And then there’s the Jake Paul of it all. Jake Paul is pretty much the only recognizable celebrity who lets anyone create cameos on Sora with his face — and people have gone wild.

The problem with having your new video app full of teenage Jake Paul fans is that they might not necessarily be creating the kind of wonderous, magical, creative content you were hoping for — it might be kind of bad, in fact.

Right now, a big meme on Sora is making Jake Paul say he’s gay — with him wearing a pride flag or dressed in drag. Har har har. (I’ve started to see this bleed out into non-celebrity users, too: teen boys making cameos of their friends saying they’re gay.) Paul has responded with a TikTok video about the meme, acknowledging it and laughing about it.

Now, other YouTubers and gaming streamers (mostly all also young men) have followed Paul’s lead by allowing their likenesses to be used — including at least one who’s been previously banned from YouTube and Twitch.

That opens up a question of how OpenAI might handle figures who have been banned from other platforms. Do you allow Alex Jones to make cameos showing the moon landing was “fake?” Can Richard Spencer join? Now, you’re dealing with the same thorny content-moderation and free-speech issues that Twitter and Facebook dealt with for the last decade. Yikes. Enjoy the content-moderation speedrun! Have fun!!!

It’s slightly dispiriting to see humanity act on its worst behavior when given a new toy. Sam Altman wrote in a blog post announcing Sora 2 that he was aware of the potential downsides:

We also feel some trepidation. Social media has had some good effects on the world, but it’s also had some bad ones. We are aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we can imagine many ways it could be used for bullying.

Later in the post, he also floated the possibility that if the majority of users didn’t feel that Sora 2 improved their lives, OpenAI might shut down the app completely. Sure! I wish more social networks offered to simply shut down if they didn’t make people happy!

Will that actually happen? I’d be surprised. I am not sure what Sora will look like in a month or a year — it’s still early. But I also don’t think OpenAI really knows, either.

And while OpenAI may have prepared for obvious moderation issues like avoiding serious deepfakes of living people and forbidding sexual or violent videos, I think there’s also a whole world of potential misery out there for a social platform, especially one that does what Sora does.

Especially one that, from the jump, seems to repel women and attract teenage boys. As someone who has reported on social media and internet culture for a long, long time, I must say: This doesn’t bode well. Trust me.