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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.
For a while I assumed that the big AI companies would permit porn generation eventually. They might want to act high and mighty now, but a time would come when they needed to show revenue, public perception be damned. Unfortunately, I'm naive enough that my conception of pornography did not extend to the type that could be legally problematic. Back in January, a bipartisan group of 35 attorneys general published a letter to Elon Musk asking for assurances that the company was taking steps to protect against NCII and CSAM, though it's unclear if he ever responded. Last week, a class action suit was filed in the Northern District of California, alleging that xAI is responsible for producing nonconsensual nude images of three underage named plaintiffs. Yesterday, the Baltimore city attorney filed a lawsuit alleging violation of various city ordinances involving consumer protection.
It appears to me that these issues could probably be solvable. Disallowing generative editing of user-uploaded images seems like a no-brainer. The CSAM issue is a tougher nut to crack, but it seems like the NCII issue is what was getting everyone's attention, so if that goes away then I doubt that the existing safeguards against the latter would be found deficient. But the cat's out of the bag at this point; Elon fucked up and now he's under the scrutiny of people who have the power to make life miserable for him. I imagine the class action suit will settle, but it will take years, and Elon is hard-headed enough that he might decide to make a statement out of it. The plaintiff's attorney seems to have selected the worst possible place to file, as I don't imagine you're going to find a more tech industry-friendly jury pool anywhere outside of Northern California. The Baltimore case is on less solid ground, and the potential exposure is likely lower (I can't imagine it being more than a few thousand dollars per proven victim), so it may make more sense to fight that one, although all that will accomplish is proving that he didn't violate a specific Baltimore consumer protection ordinance.
There's going to be some very interesting questions here in regards to the interactions of CDA230 and these lawsuits. Roommates says that CDA230 doesn't apply where the service provider actively solicits the content or actively creates it, but does where they merely provide a conduit, but it's not clear if that's good law rather than good-for-this-case law, and whether the AIgen is a 'creator' or a 'conduit' under modern analysis gets even uglier.
(There's another exception for NCII specifically under 8 USC 223(h), but that was only recently signed into law, and I don't think it would apply to xAI in these cases even were it in force.)
But I'd expect that this gets shoveled under the rug, one way or the other, instead.
I'd expect, regardless of the ability of AIgen tools to avoid Legally (or Socially) problematic smut, that the Visa and Mastercard situation means that the revenue argument will long favor not doing it, at least for any of the larger providers. Textgen sites have had similar problems. Itch.io has similar problems.
As others have noted, this would drastically reduce a lot of the underlying use cases for a lot of image generation tools. Even prohibiting uploads containing real-life pictures of people - previously a very hard problem, now 'just' a simple inference run - would still have massive impact.
I'm also not convinced that either would avoid the problem. Is it still NCII if you merely describe a person in significantly precise detail and sufficient attempts that a third party could reasonably confuse a purely text-to-image generation for a 'real' photograph? I wouldn't want to bet a company on it!
First time?
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