What we are short of, apparently, is short-form videos. In recent days, both Meta and OpenAI have launched new ways of making them: each now has an app in which you can quickly make and share AI-generated videos of whatever bizarre, meaningless flavour you'd like. Unsatisfied with the fears about TikTok and YouTube Shorts shortening our attention spans, overwhelming our dopamine systems and obliterating a common understanding of truth, both companies have seemingly delayed their mission to cure diseases and get rid of the need for work to instead provide us with more six second videos.
The initial results suggest there's plenty to be worrying about. Soon after Meta launched its new app, 'Vibes', a post taken from Facebook went viral that has to be seen to be believed – its narrative is both bizarre and largely impossible to capture in words – but which many did see and seemingly believe, sharing it joyously on the app. And then when OpenAI launched its new Sora app, which lets people ask for videos and then watch them before sharing them in a TikTok-like feed, the company's chief executive Sam Altman did so with a long post that was largely focused on trying to reassure the world it wouldn't be used only for bad purposes.
The thing that's good about videos is not that they exist. Anyone can produce more video files; my phone regularly does it in my pocket. There is, actually, far more content already in existence than you could ever care to watch. One of the central anxieties of being alive, for me at least, is the constant knowledge that you could never watch everything good.
This was one of the great breakthroughs of the TikTok scroll and the algorithm that powers it: it makes you feel that there is infinite content available to watch, and also that the next one will be the one you've been looking for all this time. Its power is in the way that it gives you no real choice about what you see but the promise that you will see all of the best stuff.
The only way we can cope with the sheer amount of video that is in offer is the belief that we are coming into contact with at least some of the best of it. And those really good videos are not simply content – automatically generated, with however much help from a computer – but that they are a statement about the world, and about the people in it. In that sense the videos we love might be plucked from near-infinity but they never feel arbitrary: they are a record of something that happened, or something that someone imagined might happen, a document of ideas in a person or group of people's brain.
In its (AI-generated) launch video, OpenAI's Sam Altman called Sora "the most powerful imagination engine ever built". (It's arguable whether Sora or the videos it makes actually count as "imagined", but that's mostly philosophical.) But imagination without ideas are just arbitrary pictures; there's a reason that dreams are rarely interesting, and only usually become so if you know the people dreaming and the meanings their visions might carry.
Today's automatically generated short-form videos are a vision of creative industry without creators. (Again, there's another philosophical question about whether this can even be true given that these AI systems must be trained on real and existing video made by humans.) On the release of Sora, that removal of people seemed to some commentators to be the exciting thing: at launch, the video was being shared with semi-gleeful messages such as "RIP Hollywood". Not only do you not filmmakers but you also don't need anyone to choose the videos, when they are being piped to people through an algorithmically sorted swipeable feed. (iJustine, a tech content creator, suggested in a video about the launch of the Sora app that it is "comforting" because you know everything on there is AI; it not only gets rid of filmmakers and programmers, but also the need to think about whether things are real.)
Of course, there's the possibility that what is fun here is that the videos are personalised. The fact that people can add their own faces in – through "cameos" – means that they can be so personalised as to be entirely individual, which might mean that the videos are especially popular in group chats and similar. (They could become a new and more uncanny version of JibJab, the app that let people create videos with their own face stitched in, or Snapchat filters.) They are a kind of instant, elaborate inside joke.
But really important video feels like that which transcends those specific moments, and offers a new way of saying and seeing things. That might be a grandiose way of talking about video in a world where one of the most popular moving pictures are Skibidi Toilet, a series of videos about a singing toilet bowl, and which feels the very definition of meaningless brain rot. But the thrill of these videos – as far as I can tell – is in part the shared joy at watching them as well as the bemused reactions of people who don't get it. Even those older people who gleefully watch the bizarre slop that appears to be taking over Facebook are doing so on a platform built for sharing and communal enjoyment. Among the toilet bowls and the slop, the human keeps creeping through.
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