By: Thomas Stahura
Well… Sora 2 dropped last week, and the internet collectively lost its mind — again.
In a matter of hours, my X feed turned into a cinematic fever dream: F1 office chair racing, CCTV footage of Sam Altman stealing GPUs, and Rick and Morty explaining gaussian splatting. I scrolled through it with a combination of awe and horror. These videos have got synced audio, consistent characters, and physics that actually make sense.
Obviously, I had to try it myself. Problem was, Sora 2 is invite‑only. So I frantically copy and pasted every invite code that was being sent in the OpenAI discord until boom, access granted. Within minutes I was typing Rick and Morty prompts and 90 seconds after that, I was staring at them.
Then I found out about the cameo feature, which (after a short verification process) lets you make clips of yourself and any other verified Sora user. So naturally, Sam Altman became Sora’s star character. Suddenly he was Skibidi Toilet, stealing art from Hayao Miyazaki, and wandering an empty Walmart at 3am.
Sora 2 is a world model, and I believe, a new type of medium as well. It seems almost inevitable that within two years AI video will be table stakes for every social media platform. Google is adding more Veo3 features to Youtube. And Meta already launched Vibes (though its videos aren’t as impressive since Zuck is using third party models).
Heck, two years ago my friends and I also built an AI social media app (which we called Quasi Fiction). Back then, AI video was bad and the “cameos” required fine tuning. So we leaned into
hallucinations, focussing on short fictional stories and comic books, and built a modest audience of a few hundred users.
But fast forward to today, and Quasi Fiction doesn’t feel like fiction anymore.
With Sora 2 there is no meaningful distinction between fictional media and media that just exists. Especially with cameos in our influencer-addled world. The interface feels like TikTok. And the pace of creation is absurd. So where do we go from here?
I see folks on Sora scrambling to grow their accounts before the masses join the app. Which may not even matter in the long run since the algorithm will pump out personalized content faster and better than people can.
That’s why we’ve entered what I dub the slopapocalypse.
No, not because all of what Sora 2 generates is “slop”, but because some of it is actually good. We're now optimizing for engagement in a world where reality is increasingly optional and trust is already fragile. In that world, the problem is genuine human creativity getting lost in the slop, meaning content curation and verification become increasingly important. Ultimately though, in an endless sea of synthetic content, the real challenge will be getting us to care.
So stay tuned!