I've always suspected video-gen is basically a loss leader for OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. They can't convince the general population that AI is world-changing trillion dollar tech with "vibe coding", but realistic fake videos are impressive at a glance, and might convince many non-technical people that AI/LLMs are something revolutionary.

Most of this “AI” stuff is dead on arrival.

Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences. That’s it.

Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it.

This is what I see, outside the HN bubble. If you work retail or weld pipes together or whatever, AI is of no use to you. On the contrary, if tech thought leaders are to be believed, you'll be out of a job soon, replaced by a lifeless robot. Fuck that.

You do realize that there a lot of people who sit at a desk and use a computer all day, right? Those are the ones whose jobs are vulnerable, not the ones who work with their hands or interact with the public.

we will come for them with real world AI, it takes time. dont worry. they are not safe in a decade, they are %100 safe for few more years. Learning from them at scale and updating is nothing impossible.

I think of them all Gemini has the most viable use case when Veo is paired with their advertising platform. It does genuinely open the door to a lot of cost saving for promo shots of products etc

Agreed. For reference, if sora 2 was able to generate me a Google ugc product video, it would cost me like $10 and I would get it within 30 minutes if including editing. Paying a ugc content creator would cost me $50-200 plus no control over final shots plus I gotta wait for them to respond. I have 30 products in my e-commerce store— these costs add up like crazy

The other one is TV ads/cinamatic ads. For a 30 second clip expect to pay an agency $5-10k. Within a couple of days, I can make a video ad and have like $50 in api costs. Cost of production is so crazy in marketing.

Obv this is under the assumption ai is good to do either of those things. Which it hasn’t so far, best I’ve gotten is doing b-roll shots to stick together for an ad

I'm curious, would you be fine with the AI influencers showcasing your product?

Moltbook was recently acquired by meta. I think it’s the same hypothesis for TikTok for ai agents or similar.

> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?

It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up and we couldn't do anything with the characters and culture we know.

If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc.

> look at US top videos on YouTube any given day

I'd rather eat poison

We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture.

Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.

It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate IP.

I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their characters and music. We'll see cable TV era "blackouts" when a social network has to renegotiate their IP license.

People really wanted to use Sora for about a week. After the app/model debuted, they lost the ability to generate IP within the first week. The interest faded almost immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0.

People want to generate IP.

edit: clarity

Pop culture is a fickle beast. What is pop culture is community made, not corporate made, and it can't be bought and sold like traditional markets. It's one of the few areas of life where nobodies can become somebody, and corporations hate this.

Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you to watch VEVO instead.

> People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP.

Or the novelty wore off in about a week, and then after that it also became harder to generate videos of baby yoda at Westboro Baptist Church protests

Personally I’m glad that big IP came in and smashed the AI companies like this. They been relentlessly ripping off smaller creators for some time now.

It opens the precedent for those creators to now also hold these companies responsible. That’s not a bad thing under the current legal system in this way.

Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me

> Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me

The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget - is all but forgotten. I don't want a video of Pikachu fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able to green screen and use AI to generate everything. I don't want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition.

In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding and using a coding assistant...

> I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition.

As a onetime semi-pro musician, with decades of live performance and sound design experience:

I would rather burn my beloved instruments publicly and pee on the fire.

I think he meant more like a synth. You could take recordings and process them using ai. At least this was my takeaway

I spent years deep in modular synthesis, making my own patches, sounds, and effects processors then using them to perform music.

Taking away the precision, control, and serendipity afforded by modules and cables, or a programming language, and telling me "Just describe what you want and the plagiarism machine will spit out whatever correlates with that description on average" would destroy everything I love about synthesis.

U are arguing against a person who isnt there. I also have done similar and my mind was not thinking specifically prompt the whole output. I think people have this kneejerk to anything that isnt total negativity of ai in the creative space. It is only a tool.

The nuclear bomb is only a tool.

Ditto nerve gas, and the rack.

Tools absolutely _can_ have moral valence.

Beyond that, they can also be more or less effective for a variety of purposes.

I spent decades to achieve solid competence at a few different skills, and my experience of genAI thus far is that it can easily give the user the delusion of mastery, ensuring the user does not develop true skills, trapped in the false belief that they can do everything they want to or ever would want to.

The process of struggling to learn new skills showed me new worlds of possibility I would never have discovered or explored without first developing those skills.

There are very legitimate reasons why so many artists and musicians hate genAI.

The escalation is weird. A comparison to violence and the atomic bomb is silly.

Like i said before, you are talking past me as if i were some other person. I agree there are many legitimate reasons. I never said there werent.

This is that knee jerk reaction. Violence and atom bombs. There is so much ai llm or otherwise that is already deeply embedded in our lives some bad but some of it is actually good. Which is my point. Not even the atomic bomb wasnt without some positive use of the technology.

Edge cases are useful examples. If I had picked less controversial, weaker ones, people would be more prone to dispute that tools can have moral implications of themselves.

You are absolutely right that I have a deep-seated hatred of LLMs being used for any of the manifold purposes I think they are manifestly unfit for.

My reaction is not knee-jerk, however - I have been watching the LLMs evolve since about 2019, letting my opinion form slowly while attending to them and seeing their capabilities improve.

I have concluded they are one of the rare tools whose worst uses are so awful that it is better to develop societal norms against their use and forgo the few benefits rather than risk their worst consequences.

I have very little hope of that happening, humans being what we are, but it is the perspective I have developed after a lot of slow, careful thought.

As far as arguing past you, I don't think I'm arguing at all.

I have shared my opinion, experiences and perspective, and that perspective is certainly very harsh on genAI.

As far as I can see, I have not written anything that disputes anything you've claimed it written, prior to this comment.

It depends how it is used. If it is an assist which generates sounds/samples that a musician can edit themselves, that seems fine. But spewing out a final form track from a prompt would just be slop.

Integrating AI with existing tools to improve productivity is harder and requires effort and investment...

As one whose musicianship involved a great deal of generating sounds and samples myself, via modular synthesis and the occasional use of a programming language for DSP, I assure you I find that idea of using genAI for an assist on that front offensive.

Could you use the bullshit machines to generate sounds that were nuanced, musical, and original, with enough time and effort?

Maybe. I'm not sure original is something they can do, but it's not totally implausible.

I would strongly recommend learning to use other tools for that purpose, instead of feeding the plagiarism monstrosities.

The aversion people like you have for AI is uncomfortable to me.

I understand your entire world model is shaped by your past and that this machine is changing the fundamentals.

As an outsider to music, I'm excited that I have access to something I previously did not through the use of Suno and other tools. I'm excited that I can come in and just try things and not hit a skill wall or quality barrier that would cause me to quit with the limited time and effort a working adult has. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but just never had the time for.

Attempting to learn costs thousands of hours before you can even start to feel good about it, and I don't have that time. Life is short and I'm already thinking about the end.

I used to be sympathetic to folks with your view, but now that programming and engineering are impacted by this - I'm in the crosshairs too. I'm subject to the same forces.

I've decided I love this tech even more. Claude Code is a tool, just like all of these other tools.

This rising tide of capabilities is so awesome. This is the space age stuff I dreamed about as a kid, and it's real and tangible.

So no, I won't restrict myself to your set of pre-approved tools. I'm going to have fun and learn my way.

And it is fun.

You can keep having fun the way you like to. What other people do shouldn't be ruining the fun you have, and if it is, then you should reevaluate why you do it.

Maybe, but the Sora shutdown comes immediately after reaching a deal with Disney to use their IP. Which might have solved that problem.

> Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.

> It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands

The problem is, to create a brand, you need to be able to protect it against rivals either ripping you off, or diluting it.

The same mechanism that protects "big" IP is also protect everyone else, even the small people.

> they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses

They already do that for music. But the issue is this, if we want culture, we need to find a way to pay for it. Is it possible for a bunch of mates to make enough money to live on playing in a local band? not really. They can only really make money if they either have a viable local gigging scene, or large enough online following to sell merch/patreon.

The big IP merchants were quite keen for videogen, because they sense that its possible to cut out the expensive artists. If they can not pay actors, writers, artists, then its way more profitable for them. This is part of the reason why AI hasn't been hit with the napster ban hammer.

I think the other thing to remember is that creating good IP is hard, and you can't really just pull it out of your arse after 5 minutes. The original seed takes a long time to refine, test, evolve. Even the half arsed sequels require work.

Indeed!!

If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind.

Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils.

Weird. No activity or response to an obscure post beyond a couple upvotes. Then, the next day a brigade no-engagement downvotes. IDC, but seems like some corporate image management trying to hide negative takes on Google properties? Sheesh

>If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc.

Where can I get this data?

Hm, turns out they removed these last year:

https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-trending-page-...

Bummer. It used to be at:

https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending

So last year, these were the top videos:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250324155132/https://www.youtu...

There's this, but it's nowhere near as good as seeing the actual videos:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube

Top videos are Mr Beast and other youtube personalities.

Only because they promote it. The default experience for a new user on Youtube is to show you content from creators with 5M+ subscribers. It’s a positive feedback loop.

I find all of it lame and cringe, so I downvote all of that. However stuff still sneaks by…

A theme I have noticed in content oriented towards young children is a very heavy use of probably unlicensed depictions of famous characters from popular franchises. Is Nintendo collecting a royalty from “it’s raining tacos“? Probably not.

> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?

It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of video-based AI slop.

But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing.

Posting the videos to social media wasn't its only use case.

I've no doubt that content creators outside of social media were using it as well, either for their brand or other video work.

Yes we see AI reels all over the place, but that's not only what it was used for

There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation but unfortunately it's fake revenge porn. You'll know the whole thing is about to collapse when the frontier models break that glass (as OpenAI is already preparing to do with sexting).

Why does it need to be revenge porn? Pretty sure regular old porn has a large market there where people can specify what they idealistically want to see vs trying to find it, if it exists.

Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are into these days.

I'm not deeply immersed in the AI porn space but here's what I see from the ads when I surf without a blocker:

1. There's an AI-based virtual girlfriend industry that mixes text and images

2. There's an AI-based virtual boyfriend industry that is essentially all text (and not always distinguishable from the normal chat models)

3. There's a much shadier AI-based "undress this specific woman" industry

People make revenge porn to humiliate people. Regular old porn can't achieve that goal.

And yet, regular porn is highly monetizable, which was the actual question.

Surprisingly no; it's pretty much a money sink where everybody goes bankrupt after a couple of years. It's why it's attractive to money launderers.

I'm not sure that's true for onlyfans, which seems to have been highly profitable until the sudden death of its founder.

Excellent point: I'm talking about pornography 1.0, as it were.

1.0 should be attributed to pornography _before_ online distribution, and I suspect that was pretty profitable

Isn't 1.0 before _photography_ rather?

Drawings then?

Live action

and now we're back to livecams, time is just a flat circle man...

If anyone can fake it, is revenge porn even effective? Doesn't making it easy for anyone to fake also make all of it plausibly deniable?

The answers to those questions have been clear for a while; it approaches concern trolling to keep on pretending to ask them in wide-eyed innocence.

Yes, revenge porn is very effective at causing harm, even though it can be generated.

No, because 'plausibly deniable' has never worked for social consequences and shame.

maybe try to view this topic with a bit more criticality. i just quickly googled some keywords and am pasting the very first search entry so you get an idea:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sextortion-generative-ai-scam-e...

revenge porn or deepfakes in general are hugely harmful to people.

in the german-speaking world there's a scandal right now about a husband creating deepfakes of his wife, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/christia...

> One fake video, which she claims was sent to 21 men, depicted her being gang-raped

i think you're taking this topic lightly because you just assume that it's not a big deal. try to keep in mind that people's mental health and with this their life is at stake.

as with lots of things, the problem is not the tech itself, but the existence of men. it's not all men, but it's usually men. not sure how we'll solve this issue.

Yes. You can go speak to some high school (or even middle school) girls who have had AI generated porn made of their likeness and shared with their classmates. Even though everybody knows that it is fake it is still humiliating, especially for a young person who is likely already self conscious about their body and sex.

I think it can be effective, but it's the wrong term for it if it's fake. It's a mixture of other things, like libel and fabricating indecent images, and the same underlying blackmail.

> There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation

Yeah, marketing. Which is a huge market...

There are others! They're just all horrible and generally revolve around weaponized misinformation - personalized scams, for instance.

Oh right. There's a bunch of panicky news stories in India about that right now. Fake video calls from your nephew in the UK or whatever needing money for an emergency

I for one can't wait for ChatGPT-style sexting to become a thing.

It's not just dirty talk. It's a whole new paradigm in verbal filth.

On the topic of sora, though: current models are astounding. I watched a clip of Leonidas, Aragorn, William Wallace, Gandalf etc. all casually riding into a generic medieval town together, and if you showed that to me a few years ago, it would have seemed like magic. We're not far off from concerts featuring only dead artists, and all video and image testimony becoming unreliable. Maybe Sora was a victim of timing or mismanagement, because I don't see how this isn't still a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.

I mean, you just outlined why it won't be a seismic shift: the only way the videos reliably stay on-model is if that model violates someone's copyright. And then when the movie is made the output itself isn't copyrightable (the ultimate arrangement may be but no individual frame is).

> all video and image testimony becoming unreliable

This is a "seismic shift" in the sense of the Big One hitting California. The knock on effects of trust erosion caused by AI are going to huge and potentially unrecoverable.

It's also used in piles and piles of fake video flooding youtube/tiktok/etc. Driving clicks and engagement.

I never used Sora to watch content, but there was a guy on TikTok that used to post these great Sora generated videos that I really liked. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to hear that they were shutting this app down today.

I always believed that the sora app wasn't a exactly a product but more of a way for openai to bulk create a bunch of videos from the worlds creative minds and then spoon-feed the results back to their video gen models

There was a lot of pseudo porn. I’m not sure exactly what the prompts were to generate them since you couldn hide the original prompts. I’m not sure why they didn’t use grok instead so it leads me to think they were trolling

> who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?

I guess you haven't watched hours of AI cat videos cheating on their husbands with bulls, or Lemons having babies with strawberries and fighting over custody of the child. It's absurd, it's stupid and I know it's a waste of time but I have to admit that it amuses me. I'm quite sure there are millions like me that just want some downtime to relax at the end of the night and end up watching slop like this.