2025-10-16
7 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editors Pics.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
Scrolling through the feed on Sora,
a new video app from chatbot developer OpenAI, is a hallucinatory experience.
A woman in a judo jacket bows to an elephant before flipping it over her shoulder.
A young figure skater races across the rings of Saturn.
Grainy security camera footage captures Sam Altman,
OpenAI's founder and boss, attempting to shoplift a graphics card.
This TikTok-like service would be an odd project for a firm specializing in AI,
were it not for the fact that the videos on Sora are all AI-generated.
There is no option to upload your own footage, nor even to turn your camera on,
save for activating a feature which inserts your own likeness into the AI video generator.
The Sora feed is all slop, AI-generated pabulum, all of the time.
Video models, like the Sora AI on which the app is built,
are what is exciting the AI industry now that the star is fading for text,
and not only because of their impact on mass media.
Not that that impact is small.