Lately there has been a flood of generic AI videos featuring extremely fresh-faced teenagers reminiscing about how much better the world was during the 80s and 90s. As the AI youths smile and show off their period-specific haircuts, the clip cuts to dream-like footage of sun-drenched cul-de-sacs and vintage cars, while inspired by songs and tracks like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. donkey kong country The soundtrack is playing in the background. It’s all very strange – it’s like bragging that you came out on top in high school.
As strange as the videos are, the logic here is relatively easy to understand. On one level, this content appeals to people’s fascination with the past – especially younger viewers, who lack direct experience with these eras, finding it easier to overlook the chronological details that generative AI models seek to include in their video output. But these videos are also conjuring up an idealized vision of the past where everyone is beautiful, most people are white, and they all have an inexplicable knowledge of how stressful life is going to be in 2025. This type of nostalgia is an innovative fantasy for those who are allergic to reading history books.
But it’s much harder to understand the logic behind some of the more absurd Gen AI clips that have surfaced, featuring long-dead celebrities doing things they never actually did. There are countless videos of stars behaving in ways that don’t correspond to reality: Michael Jackson stealing fried chicken, Stephen Hawking competing in the The pervasive racism, ableism and sexism depicted in the clip make them all feel like gutter-grade family Guy Cutaway gags. But on the Sora app, this brand of silly “comedy” seems to be something everyone loves.
For some reason, Fred Rogers is often the focus of these clips where you can see him rapping with Tupac, satirizing women like Marilyn Monroe, and showing off a closet full of guns. None of these deepfakes are particularly reliable and most of them still have watermarks indicating that they were created with OpenAI’s Sora model. But as terrifying as this sloppiness is, it’s everywhere, and the number of scenes shows that — whether it’s out of love or hate or dilemma — people can’t stop themselves from watching. At least, that’s probably what the team behind OpenAi’s recently launched social video app wants you to think.
It’s pretty clear how OpenAI would benefit from flooding the Internet with Sora-generated videos. The content is another way for the company to promote their technology and normalize the idea of working in a slop factory as a way to entertain people. This appears to be the end game for the Sora app, where creating a video is as easy as typing a few sentences in the prompt box. OpenAI and its competitors all want to be seen as the source from which a new, revolutionary kind of art has emerged – one that gives people the ability to express their creativity in ways that were not possible before.
The guys making these videos, like Jake Paul, Snoop Dogg, and Shaquille O’Neal, have clearly bought into that idea, or at least been paid to pretend to, in order to convince their gullible fans that mainlining slop from the trough is actually cool. But when you look at this thing long enough (which isn’t very much), it becomes clear how deeply unimaginative and unfounded it is. You also get a clear sense that any of these creators had a “What if this dead celebrity did some bullshit that would give their agents a heart attack?” There is no ability to imagine things beyond.
The gist of these videos tells a lot about the current state of General AI. But it says even more about how the production of this technology has been affected by the gradual death of monoculture.
Although some have argued that society feels more united when everyone watches the same TV shows and movies—the legendary act of watercooler conversation—monoculture was not without its drawbacks. It was a time when pop cultural decision-making power was concentrated within a select group of typically old, white men. Monoculture created structural barriers around the business of making art for the masses, and modern technologies like the Internet and social media give people a way to work around those gatekeepers.
It’s no coincidence that many Gen AI founders have emphasized the idea that their products are designed to empower people and “democratize” the creation of art. Anyway, it was a promise. But when you scroll through the Sora app and see dozens of videos based on the same basic prompts like “celebrity or animal is pulled over by police on suspicion of drunk driving,” it’s hard not to see this platform as a place where users are encouraged to double down on familiar archetypes rather than create something truly original, or even remotely interesting.
Where is the really “good” generational AI stuff?
Apart from the Sam Altmans of the world who directly benefit from this content, it’s hard to tell who these types of videos are for and what they find so funny about them. There’s an argument to be made that all this nonsense is meant to attract the Zoomers and Gen Alpha kids who have seen brainroot as a part of their identity. But there is no element of humor in these videos at all Work If you don’t understand who these AI-generated people are. Without that context, the punchlines become more awkward. Fred Rogers flirting with Marilyn Monroe now “There’s an old man turned sex pest”; Stephen Hawking is now “This guy has ALS and uses a wheelchair.”
Although AI boosters insist that this technology can produce meaningful art, the Sora app actually exudes formulaic derivativeness that makes it easy to dismiss these types of videos as careless. It all feels like content designed with social media virality in mind as opposed to creative human expression. These clips can garner very high views online, but “numbers grow” is not a reliable metric to determine whether they will have any real staying power.
To insist that Jeffrey Epstein’s General AI video being taken out of the courthouse is “the future of entertainment” or that it reflects young people’s preferences when it comes to media is a gross insult to their intelligence. This idea suggests that people do not or cannot appreciate quality or do not see their attention as something that must be worked for. We’re constantly being told that this technology is getting better every day, and that the “good” generation of AI stuff is just around the corner. So where are the good things? How many more billions of dollars do we need to spend in this AI hype cycle before it produces anything worth thinking about or remembering for more than a moment?
This all sounds like a fascinating trend aimed at convincing people that General AI is worth getting excited about. It seems like the novelty of videos will soon wear off because there are so many of them. So far, the only promise that AI has fulfilled is its scale. But this also means that we get tired of it quickly because we are constantly immersed in water. And once a new, shiny generation of AI fads arrives to capture people’s attention, it’s easy to imagine that everyone will forget that this moment of sloppiness ever happened.