Sora 2 launch was the talk of the town last week. But unlike many other fleeting AI “crazy moments”, Sora is here to stay. Ultra realistic videos, with lip synced audio has reduced the barrier to create short form content to almost zero. When anyone can create videos at scale without putting much thought to it, internet will be inevitably flooded with low effort garbage videos engaging enough to hook you for a few seconds.

Attention is the only real currency of social media. Content consumption has transformed from text —> image —> long form videos and finally to short form 10s Tik-toks, reels. Now imagine you are bombarded daily with 1000s of videos, so realistic that it’s difficult to distinguish between real or AI made content. Your brain will be fried with sub par content further eroding your already fragile attention span.

In the early days of social media, an interesting pattern emerged, the 90-9-1 rule.
It states that in any large online community:

Depending on the platform this number can slightly vary, but you get the idea. There was a huge imbalance between creators, contributors and lurkers.

Why ? Well it was far easier to consume than to create.

But AI is poised to flip this triangle altogether. With content creation so easy 90% of the people will become '‘creators”, it will become easier to create massive amount of low effort. shitty videos, with no material or value leaving the content consumer mentally drained and exhausted.

As someone who rarely consumes short form content, I was on Sora the entire day to see what type of content people create. But at the end of it, my head was so mushy that I could barely think.

All of this is not just speculation, as you can see in the thumbnail. Big creators like Mr Beast, Kurzgesagt are now vocally expressing their concerns. Every second of attention given to the AI slop is a second stolen from actual human creators.

Dead Internet Theory was correct in predicting that most of the future internet traffic would be bots and AI generated content. Research says we are halfway there, more than half of the text on the web is either written/ translated by AI.

So… what next ?

Like every technology, AI has it’s pros and cons. The progress made in AI in the last few years has been game changing. Leaving aside the bubble we are in, the world actually got introduced to AI products at scale for the first time. We now have image, video, audio gen, editing, coding, research apps that actually help you create things at a much faster rate. Over the past few months AI hallucination rates have decreased and generation quality has seen an exponential improvement.

AI has also made it easier to do things that were previously un-imaginable without proper degrees, credentials. Like AI can create insane high quality animations. We now have AI film festivals, Netflix is creating it’s first AI generated documentary and so much more.

I have personally been using tools like Midjourney, Hailuo, ElevenLabs to create anime adaptation for my fantasy universe “The Hexagon”, and it is nothing short of amazing to be able to materialise my imagination in front of my eyes.

Sora 2 is a great in the sense that you can now imagine yourself and your friends in countless scenarios blurring the line between thoughts and creation.

Example Prompt - Imagine me in Game of Thrones world, sword fighting Daenerys Targaryen on Dragon Stone.

Every change requires adaptation, and fortunately humans are great at adapting.

Photography didn’t kill paintings, it took a different form.
Digital texts didn’t kill books, it evolved them.

But…

Social media might be on the verge of wiping out traditional media (if it refuses to adapt)

Creator economy won’t die out overnight, if we adapt to the changing landscape we can get 10x output using the same tools to create new type of content.

Creators who survive this wave will be the ones who share -

Copied ideas, low effort slop, redundant ideas will be punished for not adapting and such content will be reduced to a niche, rather than completely dying off. This change will push creators to do more further raising the bar for authentic, creative content.

See you in the next one.

P.S - We will see emergence of new social media platforms working on entirely different algorithm than the current ones, these algorithms will be based on content satisfaction instead of views, likes and other metrics. To stay relevant and to avoid user exhaustion, Youtube and Instagram will have to adapt too.