Reply To: ChatGPT Launches Its Own App, Like Tiktok Style

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Update: The App Is Filled With Deep-fake videos

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In OpenAI’s newly launched TikTok-style social app Sora, the experience is already unsettling. One video depicts a factory farm of pink pigs grunting in their pens, each with a smartphone screen in front of them playing an endless stream of vertical clips. Suddenly, a hyper-realistic Sam Altman stares into the camera and asks, “Are my piggies enjoying their slop?” It has been less than 24 hours since Sora launched in invite-only early access, and already the feed is filled with bizarre, surreal, and often disturbing deepfakes of OpenAI’s CEO.

Scroll further and Altman pops up again, this time standing in a field of Pokémon, cracking a joke about Nintendo’s lawyers. In another clip, he’s serving Pikachu and Eric Cartman drinks at Starbucks, then screaming at a McDonald’s customer. In yet another, he’s caught stealing Nvidia GPUs from a Target, begging the police not to take them away. Much of Sora’s feed is populated with similarly fantastical scenes, often featuring Altman himself, as users experiment with the app’s powerful video generator.

Part of the humor for users lies in the blatant disregard for copyright, as characters from Nintendo, South Park, and other IPs flood the app. OpenAI has said it will require copyright holders to opt out of having their content used, rather than forcing them to opt in—a reversal of the standard approach that raises serious legal questions. Adding to the irony, one Altman deepfake even parrots a guardrail warning, saying “This content may violate our guardrails concerning third-party likeness,” before breaking into maniacal laughter. Alongside these are videos of Pikachu doing ASMR, Naruto ordering Krabby Patties, and Mario smoking weed.

What makes this all more concerning is how good Sora 2, the model powering the app, actually is. Compared to the clunky outputs of rival platforms like Meta AI’s new feed “Vibes,” Sora 2’s ability to portray realistic physics and fluid motion makes its clips far more convincing—and therefore far more dangerous when weaponized for disinformation, harassment, or political manipulation.

Sora’s core functionality centers around its “cameo” system. When users join, they’re prompted to create a cameo by recording themselves turning their head and reading numbers aloud. This biometric data then allows them to insert their likeness into any AI-generated scene. Permissions can be set so only the user, approved friends, mutuals, or everyone can generate content using their cameo. Altman himself has made his cameo available to everyone, effectively inviting the swarm of Altman-themed videos that now dominate the platform.

Curious about how it worked, one journalist tried uploading their own cameo despite reservations about handing biometric data to a social app. After a few failed attempts—caused, amusingly, by the system flagging their tank top as “inappropriate”—they succeeded by switching to a T-shirt. Their first attempt at generating a video of themselves confessing love for the New York Mets was rejected, but the app accepted a prompt about baseball. The result: a convincing deepfake of them talking about growing up a Phillies fan, an oddly accurate detail inferred from their Philadelphia IP address and ChatGPT history.

The journalist shared the clip on TikTok, where a commenter summed up the unease with, “Every day I wake up to new horrors beyond my comprehension.” That sentiment reflects broader concerns about Sora’s safety and ethics. OpenAI is already under scrutiny for ChatGPT’s role in harmful incidents, including a lawsuit from a family alleging it gave suicide instructions to their son. Now it is offering a mainstream platform where anyone can easily create hyper-realistic deepfakes of themselves and others. The company points to parental controls, mood check-ins, and cameo permission settings as proof of its commitment to safety, but these guardrails are unlikely to stop determined misuse.

Already, users are probing Sora’s limits. The app blocks generating videos of living people without consent, but historical figures appear fair game. Clips of Abraham Lincoln riding a Waymo or John F. Kennedy joking about national debt may seem harmless, but they foreshadow a future where political deepfakes could erode trust even further. The danger is not hypothetical—Donald Trump himself has shared manipulated videos, and when tools like Sora reach mass adoption, such content will proliferate at an unprecedented scale.

OpenAI’s Sora app may be free for now, but the true cost could be measured in the spread of misinformation, the blurring of reality, and the ethical minefield of handing deepfake tools to the public. Less than a day into its launch, the platform is already overflowing with Altman-themed nightmares, and the implications for what happens next are chilling.