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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Sora is dead

It turns out that spending hundreds of millions for users to make useless slop videos was having a meaningfully negative financial impact. The bizarre thing is that Disney signed a $1b deal with OpenAI just a few months ago - who fucked up here? Of course, there are many more video AI tools out there, with fewer considerations for copyright law. But for now, Hollywood doesn't have much to worry about, at least on this front.

I tried using Sora for about a month at the end of last year, but I had to stop due to getting banned. Grok Imagine wouldn't ban me, so I've been using that instead. My wild guess is that a social media platform based entirely around AI generated videos like Sora can only exist in a sustainable way if it's explicitly for erotic/pornographic material - there's simply not enough demand for creating or viewing AI generated videos that aren't in that category to get enough users and views to pay for the generations.

I've mixed feelings, since Sora was clearly much better and more flexible than Grok imagine, and so I would've loved to see that develop further, but, at the same time, the lower censorship in Grok and XAI's general attitude towards censorship versus OpenAI's makes me think improvements in Grok is more likely to bear fruit. Of course, without Sora around, XAI has less reason to improve Grok... And Grok Imagine is also still censored, which isn't great, but it's the least worst, at least. In the long run, I'd hope that local video generation will be "good enough," but that'll probably require a world where dual 5090s with 64gb VRAM is considered a quaint little living room computer for sending emails and running old games at a tolerable 25fps, which I'm guessing is within 2 decades.

… but I had to stop due to getting banned…

Lol. What were you doing on the platform?

Thats why consumer AI will almost certainly never have broad based appeal. I mean let’s just be honest about what the real use cases are… 4Chan is similar to what most people would be using it for.

If you ask it questions related to mental health, they’ll refuse to answer and tell you to seek professional help. If you ask it for advice about interpersonal relationships they’ll say they won’t aid you in manipulating other people(???). If you ask them questions about fixing a car, it’ll give you straight up misinformation.

I’ve noticed it so many times. If you try testing the models by asking anything that involves an edge case, it’s either the case that the consequences are too large where it concerns returning a firm answer so it’ll refuse to do it, or it refuses to participate in supplying any information that has the potential to be abused. So what does that really leave you with? A cool plugin for some things that also has neat alternative functionalities as a toy that can generate images. Trillion dollar industry? Call me skeptical.

I think a good litmus test for these systems is to administer it with online IQ tests. If it can’t get a perfect score with low reaction times, consider it baloney. Cheap metric but viable place to start, and that’s still an ‘extremely’ far cry from getting some AI system to actually innovate or do something creative.

If you ask it questions related to mental health, they’ll refuse to answer and tell you to seek professional help. If you ask it for advice about interpersonal relationships they’ll say they won’t aid you in manipulating other people(???). If you ask them questions about fixing a car, it’ll give you straight up misinformation.

None of this is true? I've literally used it for all 3 of those things recently.

If you have any prompts for me, I will run them through any model of ChatGPT you like (I have pro).

None of this is true? I've literally used it for all 3 of those things recently.

Depends on how you ask it I suppose. I've ran into all 3 on multiple occasions. I'm also not using ChatGPT.