Earlier this year, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos bragged that generative AI is going to open the way for a paradigm shift in the way humans create art.
“We’re confident that AI is going to help us and help our creative partners tell stories better, faster and in new ways — we’re all in on that,” he told CNBC in an interview.
That might sound well and good in the board room. But here in the real world, AI’s most immediate impact seems to be the way it’s democratized the production of torrents of hateful slop, making it easier than ever to degrade others online.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the reels generated by Sora 2, OpenAI’s alarmingly realistic video generation software.
Examples abound. In one of the most prominent, fat people — who have often served as punching bags for online bullies — now have to suffer a deluge of insulting videos as Sora makes it remarkably easy to pump out cruel slop.
One clip with 56,000 likes on Instagram combines fatphobia and racism, showing a black woman falling through the floor of a KFC. Another shows a man eat the “world’s largest chicken burger,” which causes him to swell up and float into the sky.
A reel with almost 900,000 likes on Instagram shows a woman bungee jumping off a bridge over a river gorge. As she nears the bottom, the bottom of the bridge gives out, and a comically explosive splash erupts over the water.
In another Instagram video with over 350,000 likes, a heavyset Doordash driver is seen walking up to a house, where he falls through the wood porch before he’s able to deliver the food.
Though some in the comments understand these videos are AI, others seem oblivious. “Serious question: who’s at fault? delivery guy? or home owner?” one asked. “Home owner,” another user replied. “They [sic] supposed to make sure everything is in work order.”
One video with 233,000 views on YouTube even ranks the top six “Sora AI fat videos,” only four of which depict human beings. The other two show a “fat squirrel” and a “fat kitty,” further dehumanizing fat people by lumping them in with overweight animals.
A quick jaunt through any social media site shows the variety of mocking content is truly endless. There are fat olympics, fat chiropractics, fat food thieves, fat trampoline jumps, and fat guys riding on dolphins.
Mocking depictions of fat people are nothing new in media. But the new ease with which this stuff can be created — not to mention the impossible situations it can depict — means that the internet is now awash in yet another wave of stigmatizing content.
More on Sora: Racist Influencers Using OpenAI’s Sora to Make it Look Like Poor People Are Selling Food Stamps for Cash