Seriously, What the Fuck, OpenAI

I’m going to preface this post with the note that this ends up being two interconnected rants about somewhat unrelated problems, but it’s all stuff that needs to be said. Let’s get into it.

Okay so we all know what the Sora app is at this point. We don’t live under a rock and this isn’t exactly a breaking news site, but the whole concept here is just plain irresponsible.

Who in their right mind would create an app that is solely for the proliferation of everything people think is wrong with AI as a technology. OpenAI literally made an app that allows people to go “yeah you can totally deepfake me that’s fine and cool” and that’s just plain irresponsible.

There’s been a lot of good analysis out there with thoughts along the lines of “why is a company who claims to be on the brink of AGI trying to build a platform entirely designed to generate ad revenue in the near-term future”. It’s really a great question.

Now, you could argue that it’s just a tech demo and that it’s not meant to actually be a commercial product, but that didn’t work with ChatGPT and it’s certainly not going to work here. Yes, the technology is really interesting, but something like this is not a productive way of using it, and we’ve seen that in the past few weeks of it being out.

Especially by Herr Trump taking a shit on the No Kings protests from a plane (with his mask being worn below his nose in another jab that was too intelligent to be intentional). This display of complete apathy rivals that of that one shithead on the playground we all remember from grade school. This embarrassment of a President was enabled by the same kind of technology that was made accessible by Sora (note that there’s no indication that Trump used the Sora app to generate this video, but really that’s a detail that’s really low on the list of importance in this situation).

I am a proponent of AI development, I use AI all the time in my daily life, but let’s call a spade a spade: this is irresponsible. And let’s call a shithead a shithead: Trump is the lovechild of Emperor Nero and Pennywise the clown and as terrifying as neither. But remember: he’s just trying to goad The People into being exactly what he’s been saying they are. We cannot stoop down to his level, you have to take the high road here.

There’s a whole notion that AI is generally a net negative on the world, but I don’t really think that’s true. AI like this, in the context of the late-stage, semi-capitalist, neo-fascist hellscape that we’re living in is the problem. It’s not about building the technology to be the best it can be. It’s not about making quality software that’s genuinely useful to the human race. It’s about extracting every ounce of profit from every part of our lives and that’s the current problem with, not just the AI landscape, but the state of the First World in general.

Hooray for us.

We can do better.