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Good morning, Roca Nation. Here are today’s four need-to-know stories:
Silver prices reached a record high of $53 per ounce, surpassing the previous record set in 1980 (free)
US regulators approved the launch of Erebor – a new bank backed by a group of tech billionaires with close ties to President Trump (free)
The State Department revoked the visas of at least six foreign nationals who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk on social media
Hamas began crackdowns in Gaza – executing alleged collaborators and fighting rival armed groups – following the ceasefire with Israel
By Max Frost
A video left me depressed this weekend. So depressed that my fiancée walked in just after I watched it and asked me, “Why do you look so sad?”
It wasn’t a drama or a devastating documentary, though. It was a nine-minute vlog by the ever-upbeat YouTuber Casey Neistat.
Neistat is a pioneering vlogger (and Roca follower) whose video turned him into an early YouTube superstar. He’d crank out fantastic, inspirational, and fun content – content that made me want to make videos and partially inspired the start of Roca’s YouTube channel. Whether it was him training for a marathon, moving, getting married, or just living daily life, he made content that made you want to live.
And such was the reason that I clicked on his newest vlog, “SORA: the all Ai TikTok Clone. will slop end creativity?” Except gone was the excitement, the passion, and the optimism. Instead, it ended with a final line on the screen: “We are so completely f****d.”
If Casey was saying that, it was enough for me to enter a state of despair.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describes artificial intelligence as being an enormous force for good, capable of unleashing human potential and transforming the way we live and work. As he wrote in a blog post earlier this year, “AI will contribute to the world in many ways, but the gains to quality of life from AI driving faster scientific progress and increased productivity will be enormous; the future can be vastly better than the present.”
Like the most effective tech CEOs, he speaks in visionary terms and is able to get investors to believe him, so much so that they’ve handed him billions of dollars and enabled him to build the technology he dreamt up. And like most tech bosses, he speaks of that technology as being a force for good first and a money-machine second. We outside of Silicon Valley can only speculate about his real motive: Money, power, or progress?
Those who selected “money” received a jolt in the arm on September 30.
On that day, OpenAI released the Sora app. Sora is Altman’s own version of TikTok, a scrollable short-form video feed full of exclusively AI-generated content. You sign in, scan your face, connect with others, and then can make AI-generated videos starring you and your friends.
OpenAI launched the app with a two-minute video, entirely generated by Sora. It features an AI version of Altman boasting about the technology: “It’s the most powerful imagination engine ever built,” he declares.
For the next 90 seconds, AI creations ice skate, snowmobile, and dance, then ride dragons and watch ducks race in front of hundreds of thousands of screaming AI fans in a massive stadium. Separate promotional content accompanying the release shows photorealistic footage of people singing, playing volleyball, and backflipping, in addition to more fantastical content.
As I went through this, I kept thinking two contradictory thoughts: 1: Everyone is going to start using this app; 2: No one wants this app.
Sure enough, Sora immediately became the number one app on the App Store (displacing ChatGPT!). And, sure enough, it immediately became synonymous with “AI Slop,” or meaningless AI-generated content. Why would millions of people sign into a platform they know is a waste of time?
Well, humans are innately bad at doing what’s best for us. We smoke, drink, and eat junk food; we don’t sleep enough; we fail to spend enough time with friends and family; the list goes on and on.
Big Tech platforms fit the same pattern: We know social media is addictive and bad for our mental health, yet we use it anyway; we know shopping on Amazon is killing local businesses, yet we let them die anyway. If you talk to people, many would say life would be better if Amazon or X didn’t exist, yet they do, so we have to suffer the consequences.
When Altman announced Sora on September 30, it was like watching the creation of an addictive new drug in real-time: No one would say it’s good for them, yet they signed in and started using it anyway.
Altman’s AI embodiment billed Sora as “the most powerful imagination engine that ever existed.” Skeptics, dare I say, would look through that and see a shallow attempt to take power, eyeballs, and money away from Meta or TikTok. If there’s an argument for why it will improve our lives, I’m yet to hear it.
Unsurprisingly, Sora’s launch prompted a slew of viral criticism.
Robin Williams' daughter skewered it, telling fans, “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad…If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want. To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’, just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”
"And for the love of EVERY THING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume."
And Casey Neistat released his video, in which he worried about his ten-year-old daughter creating videos to see how she would look with Botox, as well as the death of creativity as we know it. This point resonated with us at the Roca office:
“What happens when you remove the entire [creative] process? What happens when all you have to do is type a couple words in from your bed in a dark room, then click a button, and it gives you a piece of video and then you share it, and then you do that a thousand times a day?”
“Then YouTube can’t be far behind, where you just type in the YouTube video you want to see, push the button and boom….How many years away from Netflix?”
“What is the long-term here? When there is so much slop…that slop starts to overwhelm and displace actual creativity.”
Could Sora – the money-grabbing creation of a man seeking to make humans obsolete – actually destroy creativity? As I considered the question, I entered a short-lived depression.
Short-lived.
Short-lived because I then spotted the opportunity – an opportunity for those with principles and passion to more easily rise to the top, leaving the rest and their slop to fall to the bottom.
I’ll try to explain: Media can arguably be divided between those creating in service of a greater mission, and those creating simply to get eyeballs and money. In recent years, the explosion of short-form content has made it difficult to tell the two apart: With algorithms like TikTok’s making it easier to get millions of views on cheap and thoughtless content, the better – that is to say, more thoughtful, honest, real, and impactful – content has often lost the high ground.
Yet those who have gained ground – the people making brain-rotting and often inflammatory content – aren’t in it for the mission or out of principle; they’re just there to crank it out and count the views. And for them, Sora is the tool they’ve been waiting for. They’ve been churning out lowest-common-denominator videos, and the denominator just got lower. They can go to the slop and fully submerge themselves in it.
Yet for any creator, journalist, writer, or videographer who cares about the product, who does what they do out of commitment to a passion and creative mission, nothing changes. Except, perhaps, that it will become easier to stand apart. Quentin Tarantino isn’t about to start generating slop on Sora; but your TikTok-famous former roommate?
The end of my depression came when I read an interview given with David Simon, creator of The Wire. Simon had been speaking to NPR’s Ari Shapiro in 2023 during the Hollywood writers’ strike. The interview recirculated and went viral after Sora’s release.
Shapiro: So you've spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
Simon: What?
Shapiro: ...Or saying...
Simon: You imagine that?
Shapiro: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
Simon: I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
Shapiro: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
Simon: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
Shapiro: You would rather put a gun in your mouth?
Simon: I mean, what you're saying to me, effectively, is there's no original way to do anything and...
Shapiro: No.
Simon: Yes, you are.
Shapiro: That seems like a kind of absolutist take.
Simon: Not only I think is it a fundamental violation of the integrity of writers and also of copyright to – you know, when I sold all the scripts I sold, you know, 150 to HBO and, you know, maybe another 50 to NBC, I didn't sell them so that they could be thrown into a computer with other people's and be used again by a corporation. So...
Shapiro: So would you ever agree to a contract that saw any role for AI at all?
Simon: No. I would not.
Shapiro: Huh.
Simon: If that's where this industry is going, it's going to infantilize itself. We're all going to be watching stuff we've watched before, only worse.
And that’s why the depression proved short-lived: AI produces slop; Simon produced what many consider the greatest series in history. As long as the Simons exist, and people still want them to, the slop won’t rise to the top.
Editor’s Note
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Is anyone here optimistic about Sora? We want to hear from you. And also your takes on AI more broadly: Are we headed for a catastrophe or unparalleled progress? Mass unemployment or unprecedented prosperity? Let us know by replying to this email.
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Thanks for reading.
—Max and Max
