[muvlon]

> because addicts pay up.

I think it turns out they don't, not really anyway. And that's exactly why Sora is dead. They figured out that addictive AI slop has been so thoroughly commoditized that you can get it on a ton of other platforms for free, so people don't want to pay for it.

[mark_l_watson]

Sometimes they do pay up. Google Gemini estimates that 25% of active daily YouTube users pay for ad free service. I know my wife and I do, and we watch a huge range of YouTube material more hours a month than all the other streaming services we subscribe to. There is no area of human knowledge or human interest that YouTube doesn’t have a ton of material for; and of course, the animal videos… The ironic thing in the subject of Sora service being cancelled is that neither my wife or I watch AI generated material.

[jsharpe]

I think the real answer is that Sora-style AI slop videos just aren't as addictive as we thought they'd be.

I let my kids have access to the app in the hope they would be inoculated against being obsessed with AI video and it actually worked. They got bored in like 2 days.

It simply doesn't compare well with handcrafted short form videos that are already plentiful on TikTok (which I absolutely don't let my kids watch).

[steveBK123]

Yes, fortunately slop is pretty unwatchable after the novelty wears out. Even the lowest common denominator stuff NFLX churns out is in a different league.

I was talking to other people re: difference between code & other domains. Code is, for customer, what it does.. not how it does it. That is - we can get mad about style, idioms, frameworks, language, indentation, linting, verbosity, readability, maintainability but.. it doesn't really matter for the customer if the code does the thing its supposed to do.

Many things like entertainment products don't work that way. For a good book/movie/show, a good plot (the what) is table stakes. All of the how matters - dialogue, writing style, casting, camera/sound/lighting work, directing, pacing, sound track, editing, etc.

For short format low stakes stuff like online ads, then the AI slop actually probably works however.

Same for say making a power point. LLMs can quickly spit out a passable deck I am sure. For a lot of BS job use cases, that's actually probably fine. But if it is the key element of a sales pitch, really it's just advanced auto-formatting/complete, and the human element is still the most important part. For example I doubt all the AI startups are using AI generated sales pitches when they go to VC for funding.

[neutronicus]

IMO slop fits best for "art that isn't the point".

A promotional flyer for an event could work perfectly well in plain text. The art is pure social signal - this event is thrown by the type of people who put art in a certain style on their flyers. Your eye is caught and your brain almost immediately discards the art.

Same with power point - you make a power point so that everyone knows this decision was made by the type of people who make power points. A txt file and a png would have gotten the job done.

Same also with memes - you could just _say_ a lot of these jokes, but they're funnier with a hastily-edited image alongside.

[steveBK123]

Agreed, it's good at placeholder art for which entertainment consumption is not the point. Clip Art for the new generation.

[burningChrome]

>> you can get it on a ton of other platforms for free, so people don't want to pay for it.

What happens when other platforms start trying to get people to pay? I think there's a race to find a revenue stream for this stuff. As soon as one company can find a way to monetize it, they'll all end up doing it. Right now, we're in a place where companies are losing so much money, they have to decide how much they can lose before they pull the plug.

OpenAI just proved you cannot burn money indefinitely.

[asveikau]

The monetization of social media has always been about steering otherwise non paying users into making purchases elsewhere. So if the AI slop can make people spend money on other products that's accomplished the goal.