Parmy Olson, Columnist

OpenAI’s Sora Makes Brain Rot. It Could Also Be Huge.

October 3, 2025 at 3:30 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Sam Altman gave a characteristically slippery response to accusations of hypocrisy after OpenAI launched its Sora video generator.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

Americans living next to vast artificial intelligence data centers now know what their higher utility bills are paying for: a new social-media time suck.

OpenAI’s Sora is essentially the AI version of TikTok. Scan your face and record a few seconds of your voice and then use text prompts to generate videos of you — or a highly realistic, AI generated avatar of you — jumping out of an airplane with parakeets or dribbling a soccer ball on Mars. If that sounds to you like a step toward dystopia, you’re not alone. The backlash to Sora this week was swift and brutal, calling out OpenAI’s hypocrisy in pledging to cure cancer but launching a trough for AI slop instead.