Sora involves far more work than what is required to spread misinfo.
Finally, people don't really care about the truth. They care about things that confirm their world view, or comfortable things. Or they dismiss things that are inconvenient for their tribe and focus on things that are inconvenient for other tribes.
> Finally, people don't really care about the truth.
That same link has two “reader notes” about truth.
The lie is half way around the world etc, but that can also be explained by people’s short term instincts and reaction to outrage. It’s not mutually exclusive with caring about truth.
Maybe I’m being uncharitable — did you mean something like “people don’t care about truth enough to let it stop them from giving into outrage”? Or..?
> Finally, people don't really care about the truth. They care about things that confirm their world view. Or they dismiss things that are inconvenient for their tribe and focus on things that are inconvenient for other tribes.
People have always been this way though. The tribes are just organized differently in the internet age.
I strongly suspect future generations are going to look back on the age of trying to cram the entire world into one of several shared social spaces and say "What were those idiots thinking?"
In our defense (slightly), it was never really possible before, so we didn't previously have an opportunity to learn what a civilization-shatteringly bad idea it was.
Really? Everything about religion is fantasy and unprovable. Unless you believe that the earth is only 6500 years old, created in 7 days then a few centuries later someone built a boat that took two of each animal in the entire world to save them.
Then fast forward to a man being born from a virgin that rose from the dead three days after being crucified.
We're probably post-narrative and post-lexical (words) but haven't become aware of what to possibly update these tools with. Post-truth is an abstraction rooted in the arbitrary.
Reality is specific. Actions, materials. Words and language are arbitrary, they're processes, and they're simulations. They don't reference things, they represent them in metaphors, so sure they have "meaning" but the meanings reduce the specifics in reality which have many times the meaning possibility to linearity, cause and effect. That's not conforming to the reality that exists, that's severely reducing, even dumbing down reality.
There is a reality which exists. Words have meaning. Words are more or less true as the meaning they convey conforms more or less well to the reality that exists. So no, truth is not rooted in the arbitrary. Quite the opposite.
Or at least, words had meaning. As we become post-lexical, it becomes harder to tell how well any sequence of words corresponds to reality. This is post truth - not that there is no reality, but that we no longer can judge the truth content of a statement. And that's a huge problem, both for our own thought life, and for society.
Words are merely wax fruit metaphors for meaning, they aren't meaningful in and of themselves. That's how dictionaries exist. Any reality understood from words is mere simulation.
As adults already, we grew up with things that are either not relevant or give us the wrong responses to our heuristics.
But the kids who grow up with this stuff will just integrate into their life and proceed. The society which results from that will be something we cannot predict as it will be alien to us. Whether it will be better or not -- probably not.
Humans evolved to spend most of their time with a small group of trusted people. By removing ourselves from that we have created all sorts of problems that we just aren't really that equipped to deal with. If this is solvable or not has yet to be seen.
I don't disagree with any points you made, but I do find it interesting you refused a prompt to imagine a better future, articulate your wants, and practice optimism. That's your choice, but a telling one.
It's really hard to imagine how "truth is harder to find, more people lie with impunity, and convince others that their lies are true" could have a positive outcome.
Moreover, I think it's really hard overall to imagine a better future as long as all of this technology and power is in the hands of massively wealthy people who have shown their willingness to abuse it to maintain that wealth at our expense.
The optimistic future effectively requires some means of reclaiming some of that power and wealth for the rest of us.
Yes, but, overwhelmingly we go where we look. Usually what is meaningful and worthwhile is hard. Also we get better at hard things when we practice doing them.
There is a concept in racing when taking a corner to "keep your eyes off the wall", and instead look where you want the car to go.
Imo the most scary part of the problems we face isn't what you or GP are talking about, it's everyone else's reactions to them. The staring at the wall while screaming or giving up, and refusing to look where you want to go.
It's harder to satisfy our wants if we cant articulate them.
Well, sure—and I am, in general, a very positive person.
But there's a huge difference between (a) "given that this thing exists that seems very bad, can you imagine a way to a better future?" and (b) "can you imagine ways that this thing that seems very bad could actually be very good?"
The ways to a better future are in spite of these developments, not because of them, and I don't think it's at all helpful to act like that's not the case or be all disappointed (and, frankly, a bit condescending) at people who refuse to play along with attempts to do so.
And it's possible that (a) above is what you meant, but your wording very much sounded like (b).
When I read your comment the first time I felt uneasy about your (a) vs (b) framing, but didn't know how to address it head on. A while later I remembered this story told by Alan Watts. It seems relevant...
The Chinese Farmer Story
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
— Alan Watts
On a personal level, I have experienced some pretty catastrophic failures that taught me important lessons which I was able to leverage into even greater future success.
So honestly, I am fine with (a) or (b) and I think either are reasonable questions. Really all I am trying to do is encourage you to aim up and articulate that aim. I am not doing a great job, but I am trying.
I asked three questions. Two were about the kind of future we want. One was about how we might get there. I know the “how” question can feel overwhelming. It often does for me too, and I think about it a lot.
What I find curious is that no one has really engaged with any of these questions yet. Not even to reflect personally on why. That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation. I think it’s worth asking what makes this kind of conversation so difficult.
When I said that declining to imagine a better future was telling, I didn’t mean it as a put-down. I meant it as a challenge. Because when we stop trying to define what better looks like, we give up our power to those who will define it for us. History shows where that leads. That’s how authoritarianism takes root; not only through force, but through the quiet surrender of imagination and personal responsibility.
If my earlier tone came across as condescending, that wasn’t my intent. My intention is tough love. I believe that acknowledging problems matters, but it’s not enough. If we stop there, we trade agency for frustration. I’d rather see us wrestle with what we want, even if it’s hard, than resign ourselves to cynicism.
So I’ll ask again: what kind of future would you actually want?
EDIT: I just realized that I missed part of an answer in your earlier comment, which I commend you for now. I apologize for not recognizing it before.
You said:
The optimistic future effectively requires some means of reclaiming some of that power and wealth for the rest of us.
The way I phrased that was patronizing. It wasn't my intention, but I see now how it comes across.
It seems to me like the attention economy's bias towards threatening novel news is pushing everyone into a negative, cynical, feedback loop, and I am trying clumsily to resist that. There are many real problems and many things seem to be going in the wrong direction, but I don't see how we all get ourselves out of this mess if we can't start talking about what the other side (of the despair) looks like.
I suspect that another mistake I made was the timing/context. For some reason, in the moment, I thought redirecting the cynicism at it's source (a Sora thread) was a good idea. It probably wasn't. I guess there is a time and place to try and inspire hope, and this wasn't it. And judging you for not engaging in it deserves a facepalm in hindsight.
Please accept my apology, and if you think my stance itself is misguided (not just my tone and timing), I would like to understand why.
I don't think you need to apologize, but I will graciously accept it.
I feel your response was misguided because by framing it as my responsibility to see a future with some benefit and casting the refusal to do so under the current terms as a failure of character, you are doing the equivalent of saying to an bottom rung MLM seller that they just aren't trying hard enough.
If the system is skewed in such as way as to prevent the person from being able to gain in it, then making it their fault for not seeing a way through that makes you appear manipulative and tends to make your motives suspect.
Not to mention that the president posts AI slop frequently[0]. He even posted, and took down, a video promising people a "med bay". A fictional device that just cures everything.
I'm surprised this isn't a bigger concern given that:
For over a year now we've been at the point whereby a video of anyone saying or doing anything can be generated by anyone and put on the Internet, and it's only becoming more convincing (and rapidly)
We've been living in a post-truth world for almost ten years, so it's now become normalized
Almost half of the population has been conditioned to believe anything that supports their political alignment
People will actually believe incredibly far-fetched things, and when the original video has been debunked, will still hold the belief because by that point the Internet has filled up with more garbage to support something they really want to believe
Absolutely! And don’t kid yourself into thinking you are immune from this either. You can find support of basically anything you want to believe. And your friendly LLM will be more than happy to confirm it too!
Honestly it goes right back to philosophy and what truth even means. Is there even such a thing?
People forget that critical thinking means thinking critically about everything, even things you already think are true because they fit into your worldview.
> Honestly it goes right back to philosophy and what truth even means. Is there even such a thing?
Truth absolutely is a thing. But sometimes, it's nuanced, and people don't like nuance. They want something they can say in a 280-character tweet that they can use to "destroy" someone online.
We will adjust. And guess what, before photography, people managed somehow. People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread malicious runors and you had to guess what's a lie and what's not. The way people dealt with it was witness testimony and physical evidence.
We'll have to adjust, certainly. But that doesn't mean nothing bad will happen.
> People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread malicious runors and you had to guess what's a lie and what's not.
And there were things like witch trials where people were burnt at the stake!
The resolution was a shared faith in central authority. Witness testimony and physical evidence don't scale to populations of millions, you have to trust in the person getting that evidence. And that trust is what's rapidly eroding these days. In politics, in police, in the courts.
The media's been lying to us for as long as it has existed.
Prior to the Internet the range of opinions which you could gain access to was far more limited. If the media were all in agreement on something it was really hard to find a counter-argument.
We're so far down the rabbit hole already of bots and astroturfing online, I doubt that AI deepfake videos are going to be the nail in the coffin for democracy.
The majority of the bot, deepfake and AI lies are going to be created by the people who have the most capital.
Just like they owned the traditional media and created the lies there.
Right, by which standard truth has never been a shared grounds of discussion. I think that there's a big difference between "some people lie" and "there's no agreement on shared truth."
Marconi demonstrated radio in 1895 and the first broadcast radio station started in 1920. By the 1930s Adolf Hitler was routinely using the medium to broadcast vile propaganda about Jews and others which lead to the holocaust in the 1940s.
About 40 years later the Rwandan genocide took place and many scholars attribute a preceding radio-based propaganda campaign as playing a key role in increasing ethnic violence in the aware.
Since then the link between radio and genocide seems to have decreased over time but it's likely that this isn't so much because humans have a better understanding of the medium but more so because propaganda has moved to more effective mediums like the internet.
Given that we didn't actually solve the problems with radio before moving onto the next medium it isn't likely that we'll figure out the problems with these new mediums before millions die.
It was easy to spread lies through print and through good old fashioned word of mouth too. No radio needed.
And apropos radio, the War of the Worlds radio drama in 1938 is know to have made quite some afraid that it's real. And plenty of people collected money in communist Hungary for the sake of the enslaved Isaura (protagonist of a Brazilian soap opera). But most people adjusted and understand that radio dramas are a thing, movies are a thing, and will adjust to the fact that pixels on a screen are just that.
You seem to be suggesting that there's no noteworthy difference in the speed and effectiveness of different communication mediums like spoken, written, or radio and as such there's no noteworthy difference in the outcome of their deployment.
Is that a fair assessment of your comment? Is there a way to test your assertion?
No I'm saying that people adapt, society adapts. Most people today don't shit themselves in the cinema thinking that the monster will appear among them, they understand that characters in TV series are not real and only the mentally ill will berate the actor in the street for yesterday's episode.
It will take some time but it's in fact quite easy to explain it to older relatives if you make a few custom examples.
The bigger point is that realism is a red herring. You can spread propaganda with hand drawn caricatures just as well or even better. It's a panic over nothing. The real lever of control is what news to report on and how to frame it, what quotes to use, which experts to ask and which ones not to. The bottleneck never was at HD realism.
> they understand that characters in TV series are not real
They do not which is why a reality TV star who is 'good at business' is the current US President.
Reality TV is the old media and people are still falling for it and the consequences of them falling for it will be felt for decades. It will be the same with newer technologies but worse.
The novel threat that something like Sora poses isn't just from realism, it's also from the fast turn around and customized messaging. It will enable the exact things you caution about but at an unprecedented scale.
This idea that it all new media is going to be just another case of 'meet the new boss same as the old boss' is ahistorical and shortsighted.
If that's how you view the majority, you simply can't simultaneously be for democracy. It takes some impressive mental gymnastics to redefine democracy as one where somehow people can vote but all truth-production is centralized to the Expert Consensus narrative. I mean, maybe that's right. In fact basically no society till the 20th century has absolute full 1 person 1 vote election based democracy. It's an odd development. In most historic societies they restricted political affairs to certain "intellectually qualified" classes. Of course we see that as deeply unjust and exclusionary. But I'm not sure how else to interpret your type of complaint than as a wish for some kind of restriction on who can have decision power in political matters. But at the se time this is also called defending democracy. It's weird.
> It's finally now dawning on the majority of Britons that Brexit was a mistake
As of June 2025, 56 percent of people in Great Britain thought that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 31 percent who thought it was the right decision.
When the Remainer Establishment refuse to use new freedoms and possibilities, and spend the intervening nine years telling people it was a bad idea, then I’d be surprised if it didn’t have an impact on public opinion.
> the final pour that cements us into our post-truth world.
I find it a bit more concerning that anyone would not already understand how deeply we exist in a "post-truth" world. Every piece of information we've consumed for the last few decades has increasingly been shaped by algorithms optimizing someone else's target.
But the real danger of post-truth is when there is a still enough of a veneer of truth that you can use distortions to effectively manipulate the public. Losing that veneer is essentially a collapse of the whole system, which will have consequences I don't think we can really understand.
The pre and early days of social media were riddled with various "leaks" of private photos and video. But what does it mean to leak a nude photo of a celebrity when you can just as easily generate a photo that is indistinguishable? The entire reason leaks like that were so popular is precisely because people wanted a glimpse into something real about the private life of these screen personalities (otherwise 'leaks' and 'nude scenes' would have the same value). As image generation reaches the limit, it will be impossible to ever really distinguish between voyeurism and imagination.
Similarly we live in an age of mass surveillance, but what does surveillance footage mean when it can be trivially faked. Think of how radicalizing surveillance footage has been over the past few decades. Consider for example the video of the Rodney King beating. Increasingly such a video could not be trusted.
> I'm kinda terrified of the future of politics.
If you aren't already terrified enough of the present of politics, then I wouldn't be worried about what Sora brings us tomorrow. I honestly think what we'll see soon is not increasingly more powerful authoritarian systems, but the break down of systems of control everywhere. As these systems over-extend themselves they will collapse. The peak of social media power was to not let it go further than it was a few years ago, Sora represents a larger breakdown of these systems of control.
Agreed, but this is mostly coming from people who would normally discredit you bashing MSM as a kook/conspiracy theorist.
People forget, or didn’t see, all the staged catastrophes in the 90s that were shortly afterwards pulled off the channel once someone pointed out something obvious (f.e. dolls instead of human victims, wrong location footage, and so on).
But if you were there, and if you saw that, and then saw them pull it off and pretend like it didn’t happen for rest of the day, then this AI thing is a nothing burger.
This is a non-concern. You can see videos where a specific thing happens where people will describe a different thing happening. Not some eyewitness off memory. You can look at a video and there will be people on Reddit saying stuff that didn’t happen.
Then you can see any conversation about the video will be even more divorced from reality.
None of this requires video manipulation.
The majority of people are idiots on a grand scale. Just search any social media for PEMDAS and you will find hordes of people debating the value of 2 + 3 / 5 on all sorts of grounds. “It’s definitely 1. 2+3 =5 then by 5 is 1” stuff like that.
> Maybe they'll have to tour and meet people in person
That doesn't scale.
During campaign season, they're already running as many rallies as they can. Outside the campaign train, smaller Town Hall events only reach what, a couple hundred people, tops? And at best, they might change the minds of a couple dozen people.
EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that people generally don't seek to have their mind changed. Someone who is planning on voting for one candidate is extremely unlikely to go to a rally for the opposition.
Most members of the US congress and the current presidential administration, are already devoid of trust. I can't speak for other countries governments, but it seems to be a fairly common situation.
Yeah I'm just as annoyed with the AI slop that's coming out as anyone, but the next generation of voters won't believe a thing and so they will be pushed towards believing what they see in real life like campaigners who go door to door etc. It could be a great thing and would give meaning to he electoral system again ironically!
Honestly I can't see a solution beyond concentrating power to highly localized regions. Lots more mayors, city councils, etc. so there is a real chance you can meet someone who represents you.
I don't fully believe anything I see on the internet that isn't backed up by at least two independent sources. Even then, I've probably been tricked at least once.
It may come to that, where the federal power is less influential and there to mainly manage overall services of the nation etc, and then the local states let's say manage themselves, if I'm not wrong that was kind of the original idea of the great experiment. It doesn't sound inherently wrong untill you add tribalism into the mix where people are not working with eachother, but that seems to be the major push these days, at least that's the sentiment I get.
Would that change, maybe not, but maybe it would lessen the power grabs that some small few seem to gravitate towards.
I know if I wanted to influence the major elections, OpenAI, Google and Meta would be the first places I would go. That's a very small group of points of failure. Elections recently seem to be quite narrow, maybe they were before too though, but that kind of power is a silent soft power that really goes unchecked.
If people are more in tune with being mislead, that power can slowly degrade.
Well, maybe it's less about Sora, but how they push the world towards making their next product essential: WorldCoin [0], Altman's blockchain token system (the one with the alien orb) to scan everybody's biometric fingerprint and serve as the only Source of Truth for the World - controlled by one private company.
It's like the old saying: They create their own ecosystem. Circular stock market deals being the most obvious, but the WorldCoin has been for years in the making and Altman often described it as the only alternative in a post-truth world (the one he himself is making of course).
I think their game theoretic aim was to completely discredit video online. Just as we don't accept text in general as truth or image when we see it, we are being flooded with completely fake vids so people can shake the idea that videos are truth.
It smells of e/acc, effective altruist ethics which are not my favorite, but I don't work at OpenAI so I don't have a say I can only interpret.
I agree, but we will likely continue down this road...
It just makes trusted/verified sources more important, and more people to care about it. I wouldn't be terrified for politics so much as the raised barrier to entry (and concentration) of the press - people will pay attention to the BBC, Guardian, Times, but not (even less so) independentjourno.com; those sources will be more sceptical of whistleblowers and freelance investigative contributions, etc.
Most people's minds are already made up. All this does is add some confirmation bias so they can feel better about what they were already certain of. I don't think it fundamentally changes anyone's opinions.
I consider myself pretty on the ball when it comes to following this stuff, and even I've been caught off guard by some videos, I've seen videos on Reddit I thought were real until I realised what subreddit I was on
If you don’t like any thing digital (image/video/text) then it’s definitely AI generated. I guess AI has kind of killed the “democratization of news” introduced by social media.
Every breakthrough in information technology caused disruption in the historical sense (i.e. millions of deaths).
From the writing, through organized religion, printing press, radio and tv, internet and now ai.
Printing press and reformation wars is obvious, radio and totalitarianism is less known, internet and new populism is just starting to be recognized for what it is.
Eventually we'll get it regulated and adjust to it. But in the meantime it's going to be a wild ride.
People have been tricked by counterfeits ever since the invention of writing (or even drawing) first made it possible for a person to communicate without being physically present.
At that moment, it simultaneously became possible to create "deep fakes" by simply forging a signature and tricking readers as to who authored the information.
And even before that, just with speaking, it was already possible to spread lies and misinformation, and such things happened frequently, often with disastrous consequences. Just think of all the witch hunts, false religions, and false rumors that have been spread through the history of mankind.
All of this is to say that mankind is quite used to dealing with information that has questionable authorship, authenticity, or accuracy. And mankind is quite used to suffering as a result of these challenges. It's nothing particularly new that it's moving into a new media format (video), especially considering that this is a relatively new format in the history of mankind to begin with.
(FWIW, the best defense against deep fakes has always been to pay attention to the source of information rather than just the content. A video about XYZ coming from XYZ's social media account is more likely to be accurate than if it comes from elsewhere. An article in the NYTimes that you read in the NYTimes is more likely to be authentic than a screenshot of an article you read from some social media account. Etc. It's not a perfect measure -- nothing is -- but I'd say it's the main reason we can have trust despite thousands of years of deep fakes.)
IMO the fact that social media -- and the internet in general -- have decentralized media while also decoupling it from geography is less precedented and more worrisome.
Just yesterday I saw a Sora-generated video that purported to be someone filming a failed HIMARS missile failing and falling on stopped traffic and exploding on the 5 in Camp Pendleton on Saturday. (IRL they were doing some kind of live-fire drill and it did actually involve projectiles flying over the freeway.)
While there were some debris instances IRL the freeway was completely shut down per the governors orders and nobody was harmed. (Had he not done this, that same debris may have hit motorists, so this was a good call on his part)
You could see the "Sora" watermark in the video, but it was still popular enough to make it in my reels feed that is normally always a different kind of content.
In this case whoever made that was sloppy enough to use a turnkey service like Sora. I can easily generate videos suitable for reels using my GPU and those programs don't (visibly) watermark.
We are in for dark times. Who knows how many AI-generated propaganda videos are slipping under the radar because the operator is actually half-skilled.
> I can easily generate videos suitable for reels using my GPU and those programs don't (visibly) watermark.
Curious what you used. I have an RTX 5090 and I've tried using some local video generators and the results are absolute garbage unless I'm asking for something extremely simple and uncreative like "woman dancing in a field".
I am pretty sure what you want is doable on a 5090 with some effort but it will not be just a text prompt to video. More like input key frames as images and interpolate video between them.
We are having a huge amount of technological change (we haven't even learned how to handle social media as a society yet...). We're experiencing a global loss in trust, and things may fall apart for a bit until our society develops a better immune system to such ills. It is scary.
I think we may revert back to trusting only smaller groups of people, being skeptical of anything outside that group, becoming a bit more tribal. I hope without too many deleterious effects, but a lot could happen.
But humans, as a species, are survivors. And we, with our thinking machines will figure out ultimately how to deal with it all. I just hope the pain of this transition is not catastrophic.
Other people have said this, but I don’t think it’s going to be any different than living in a world where people can spread rumors orally or print lies with a printing press. We’ve been dealing with those challenges for a long time.
Our ways of thinking and our courts understand that you can’t trust what people say and you can’t trust what you read. We’ve internalized that as a society.
Looking back, there seems to have been a brief period of time when you could actually trust photographs and videos. I think in the long run, this period of time will be seen as a historical anomaly, and video will be no more trusted than the printed or spoken word is today.
The willingness of people to believe misinformation today is astounding. They are already choosing to surround themselves with voices of hate and anger. I don't want to see what's next for them.
People will be swayed by AI-generated videos while also being convinced real videos are AI.
I'm kinda terrified of the future of politics.