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OpenAI’s New Sora 2 is Insanely Good at Manipulating People

In a car at night, a young woman stares at her phone, tears streaming down her face. On the screen, we see 37 missed calls from “Mom.”

The woman slowly presses a button on the screen to return the calls, hesitating over the Hang Up button for just a second as the call connects, as we see a brief shot of her standing at her graduation, much younger.

We hear her mom pick up, saying, in a relieved tone “Hi Sweetie.”

In a vulnerable but loving whisper — as if they haven’t spoken in a long time — the daughter says “Mom? Dinner?”

Music swells in the background as we see text reading “It’s never the perfect time. It’s just time” and “#family #secondchances” appear on the screen.

And, scene.

Fake Videos, Real Feelings

Before you prepare to nominate me for an Oscar for the highly emotional vignette I just described, let me tell you that the entire scene above is fake.

It was generated — actors, music, moody lighting, text and all — by Sora 2, OpenAI’s new and wildly powerful video generator.

Getting an invite to use Sora 2 has been incredibly difficult. I had to hustle online, beg colleagues, join a Discord channel, and refresh my app every few hours before I finally got in.

But once you’re in, you’ll find that Sora is a wild place — filled with the kinds of gut-wrenching videos I created above, as well as plenty of very, very funny ones.

All the videos are fake — generated by OpenAI’s new technology. And they’re really, really good.

The system succeeds largely because it’s extremely good at playing on human emotion. Here’s a video demo I made breaking that down.

It’s clear that Sora 2 was trained on millions of hours of short-form vertical video — probably cribbed from YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and the like. It’s learned the form very well, and creates the types of grabby, dramatic videos that pull people in.

For the “Second Chances” example, I actually turned first to ChatGPT, asking it to write the script and shot list for a brief, highly emotional vertical video.

I asked it to “Come up with 10 ideas for highly emotional short videos that depict everyday scenarios and would do well on social media.”

The model delivered, with simple scripts outlining multiple emotionally-charged scenarios, complete with shot lists and notes on each video’s premise.

To create “Second Chances”, I pasted the text into Sora and let it work its magic. Sora 2 did a fantastic job of quickly understanding the emotional impact of the scene, and creating what’s essentially a short film capturing the concept.

Ragebait on Demand

“Second Chances” is a fairly complex premise, at least for a 10-second shortform video. But Sora is even better at generating videos with simpler, more immediately emotionally salient themes.

In short, it’s really good at making the kind of “ragebait” videos you might find on TikTok or Reels.

In this one, a cyclist on an E-Bike rides dangerously close to an elderly woman on a walking trail. At the last minute, he shouts out “On your left!” and he nearly hits her.

“Oh goodness gracious, that was too close!” the woman shouts, clearly shaken up.

As a local news publisher, I know that people are already very worried about real-life E-Bikes on hiking trails.

A video like this plays with those emotions and immediately elicits sympathy and anger in the viewer, playing on their existing fears and concerns.

Sora captures all that pent up rage perfectly, and expresses it visually and verbally in a 10 second, anger-inducing clip.

Sora’s emotional creations need not be even as emotionally complex as this. Good old fashioned slapstick works just as well!

In this Sora clip that I created, the best man at a wedding places his drink down on a table next to a beautiful wedding cake, mistakenly knocking the cake over.

He apologizes profusely as the bride looks on in horror and the other guests yell their disapproval.

I put it on YouTube Shorts to see how it would do. It’s covered in Sora watermarks, and I disclosed its AI origins when I uploaded it, using YouTube’s Altered Content flags.

It still racked up over 12,000 views in its first five days online.

Watcher Beware

Sora’s incredible power to generate emotionally manipulative videos has several lessons for consumers.

Firstly, if you see a video that angers you or plays with your emotions — even on a service like YouTube or TikTok that doesn’t explicitly have an AI video generator built in — don’t assume that it’s real.

I fully disclosed my use of AI when I moved them from Sora to YouTube, and left Sora’s prominent watermarks in my videos. But there are plenty of tools that use AI to remove watermarks, and many people aren’t too picky about disclosures.

It’s very likely that you’ll see social media flooded with these kinds of hyper-realistic, hyper-emotional videos in a shockingly short time. They simply perform too well — and are too cheap to make — for creators not to create and post them.

That will almost certainly accelerate when OpenAI inevitably releases Sora 2 via an API, allowing developers to create these kinds of videos at scale. It will also accelerate as other companies — in an effort to take market share from Sora — roll out their own video generation clones, probably with fewer guard rails.

The power of these short clips is also a reminder of how much of our emotional life we’ve outsourced to social media.

Traditional movies also play on emotions. But they’re hours long, leaving plenty of time for nuance and the subtle development of storylines.

Now that the average user spends 55 minutes per day on TikTok, we’ve grown accustomed to reacting quickly to extremely short, emotionally simple videos.

That gives video generators like Sora and “in” to our emotional lives. The video generator doesn’t need to craft a complex, long narrative in order to affect us emotionally. All it needs are simple tropes and ten seconds of our time.

In the short term, services like Sora will succeed in playing with our emotions and tricking us into believing rage-inducing scenarios.

There’s a more positive long-term possibility here, though. As social media inevitably becomes flooded with these hyper-emotional, extremely real-looking AI videos, perhaps we will grow increasingly immune to their impact.

That AI fatigue might then spill over into non-AI-generated short videos. Perhaps those videos will lose their power to sway us.

Perhaps — wading through a dense forest of AL video slop — people will turn back to content that’s longer, more nuanced, and more intelligently produced.

By distilling shortform video to its rawest, most emotional, most extreme form, Sora may paradoxically save us from its negative impacts.