With Sora’s death, AI’s age of frivolity may be ending

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Before we get underway, a little self-promotion: Apple’s 50th anniversary is on April 1. As the big day approached, I realized that many people present at the company’s creation were still very much with us. So I interviewed 23 of them for an oral history, “How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History of its Earliest Years.” It’s chock-full of great tales as told by everyone from cofounder Steve Wozniak to Liza Loop, the first Apple user. Hearing these pioneers reminisce, I felt like I had been there, too—and so will you, I think. Here’s the article. When OpenAI launched its Sora app last September, the video-centric social network arrived on a tide of buzzy goodwill. Its feed of 10-second video clips had a TikTok-esque vibe—except that it was filled with AI-generated stuff instead of anything remotely real. In less than a minute, Sora users could create digital doppelgängers of themselves that were eerily convincing fo