this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44699253

This is clearly a sign that the product failed to draw in enough customers and its viability was overhyped.

Hopefully, it is the start of the AI bubble bursting.

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[–] Fit_Series_573@lemmy.world 37 points 1 week ago

GOOD. Bubble grew a bigger hole letting the air out. Disney removed their $1B investment so let's hope more do too in the near future to keep ripping that hole wider, yes.

[–] Gork@sopuli.xyz 31 points 1 week ago

But muh slop

[–] sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 30 points 1 week ago

you mean giving away billions of dollars of computer with no monetisation strategy was bad? man who would have thought. not sam, apparently. if only there were like, some way to have realised that the goal of business is to earn money

[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago

In the dotcom era, the push was to create lots of free services. Once you had enough users, you wanted to see how many would be willing to pay for it. There was a formula that justified getting more investment (it varied by domain). Back then, almost nobody other than Amazon survived the hard shaking of the tree.

We may be coming up to the point where customer acquisition through free service ends. Whatsever is left standing will move to the next round.

Everybody else gets dropped on the floor.

[–] BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Let me get this straight: Disney was supposed to give Openai license for their characters, and on top of that invest billion dollars in the Openai? The money literally went the wrong way

[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 13 points 1 week ago

Not really. Disney management has drunken the same Koolaid as any other management right now: they believe they can fire large parts of their staff and replace them with "AI", allowing them to achieve similar or even greater productivity at a fraction of the cost (i.e. whatever fee "open"AI charges). To achieve that, they need to give Sora access to their characters (so it can be trained to produce Disney movies) and invest in the company (as a down payment; money that would be recuperated by eliminating workers from the equation).

[–] redsand 23 points 1 week ago
[–] RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

All people ever did with sora was make doorbell cam footage of dogs watergunning old ladies and gorillas getting sucked into tornados. AI image and video generation is just a tool to make a funny joke, it's incapable of doing anything serious in its current state, and with the amount of processing power it needs just to be a digital circus clown it's unlikely to become anything more.

[–] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

AI image generation is amazing for replacing stock photos, and not bad at replacing clipart and porn images.

AI video generation is ok at replacing very simple videos without continuity or physics, but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation or mindless scrolling, there's just no real way to get anyone to pay for them.

That's aside from the fact that sora could've been great for generating generic stock footage/b-roll, but the way they implemented it was to generate a script, then audio, then video, which meant that it really struggled to generate anything without a focal point, ie what it would actually be useful for.

[–] Bongles@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago

... but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation ...

There's a ton of that going around with sora, but for all I know it could be a smalll group of people. According to their pricing page, 140 bucks a month normally (50% off right now lol) will get you almost 5000 videos a year. Seems plenty to spread a bunch of shit.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

There’s also 100 YouTube channels of “real life Pokémon”. What will we ever do without those???

[–] db2@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

So youtube will be worth watching again right?

Right?

[–] helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It still is for the creators there. Instead of browsing the algorithm I start on the subscriptions page, to only see uploads from people I actually want to.

There's sometimes complaints about "I thought you were dead" when the channel has been uploading regularly the entire time. People just never got recommended the videos despite hitting all the buttons.

For example, did you know both Physics Girl and Tom Scott have returned this month - hopefully a sign that the world can still heal.


Some unsolicited add-on recommendations -

Ublock origin - beyond the addblocking, I use the picker tool to filter all the extra sections like "news", "trending" "you might like" etc.

Unhook - toggles to disable a bunch of features like comments, home screen, end screen etc.

Enhancer for Youtube - Themeing and a bunch of extra settings like setting defaults for each video. speed, volume, resolution, fill screen (which is different than full screen), PIP while you scroll comments. (The author just did a rework, so it can be a little bugged sometimes - reinstalling it fixed it for me last time it went wonky.

[–] JayGray91@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Edit 2: I checked the contact page for the dev and went through an archive site to check, and yep, I did recall correctly. it is the same extension. glad that the dev is back maintaining the firefox extension again! best youtube debullshittificator extension IMO

Edit: I've checked the version history for the firefox extension and now I'm doubting myself. am I crazy? (yes, I am) was it another extension I'm thinking of?

Wait, hold on. Enhancer for Youtube is back on Firefox? Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC the dev didn't update the extension for firefox for a long time due to some policies mozilla have with extensions, and IIRC it has been stuck at 2.5 something whereas the chromium version gotten the 3.0.

I've had to make do with another youtube extension since it keep bugging out.

this is great news!

I'm pretty certain, but could be remembering wrong, they paused development when YouTube/Google was going nuts breaking adblock, which broke the extension. The dev eventually removed their adblock and made everything else work.

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[–] knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 week ago

Since Tom Scott is coming back soon, that's a clear yes.

[–] deathbird@mander.xyz 14 points 1 week ago

Don't worry, I'm sure we'll have other tools for quickly and cheaply creating falsified videos and the like. Faith in the veracity of video evidence probably won't be coming back.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

my guess is that ai video is not going away, and that sora was largely a marketing project which cost a lot of money

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'd bet money that the Disney deal falling through was because OpenAI couldn't guarantee that Sora couldn't be used to generate porn of their characters, since attackers will almost certainly always find new prompt injections.

Surprise surprise, it's a giant fucking black box that you can never have complete control over.

[–] unphazed@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

But my Ariel on Vaporean porn is a dream yet to become a reality... (I'm getting old, that is the Pokemon with the weird fetish, right?)

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[–] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 week ago

Bye Felicia

[–] sirico@feddit.uk 9 points 1 week ago

Openai is the canary

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It was used almost exclusively for slop and slop-based ads or videos that shouldn't be slop. I was on there yesterday and some account had 2 videos of a woman in front of a plain wall talking for 15 seconds about tax implications for investments. A real human could have filed it with an iphone in 3 minutes.

But now that's Google and Grok's problems, I guess.

[–] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

If the audio and video is AI-generated I'm going to assume that the script is, too.

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[–] Zoldyck@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago
[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Maybe time to move retirement accounts into cash.

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[–] Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Oh no.....stop....don't go..../s

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

Sora 2 was massive lost leader for OpenAI, and a massive basis for its compute demand. Images and video use expensive compute time, and its ambition level was high before Seadance 2, and small open models. With its falling behind in coding/office LLMs as well, only Skynet/Government can pay for its roadmap.

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