I see dead people on Sora, and I’m conflicted about it

Hello again from Fast Company and thanks for reading Plugged In. Before I go any further, a bit of quick self-serving promotion: This week, we published our fifth annual Next Big Things in Tech list. Featuring 137 projects and people in 31 categories, it’s our guide to technologies that are already reshaping business and life in general, with plenty of headroom to go further in the years to come. None of them are the usual suspects—and many have largely flown under the radar. Take a look, and you’ll come away with some discoveries.

[Update: After I wrote this newsletter, OpenAI disclosed that it had “paused” the ability to depict Martin Luther King Jr. in Sora videos, at the request of his estate.]

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about Sora, OpenAI’s new social network devoted wholly to generating and remixing 10-second synthetic videos. At the time of launch, the company said its guardrails prohibited the inclusion of living celebrities, but also declared that it didn’t plan to police copyright violations unless owners explicitly opted out of granting permission. Consequently, the clips people shared were rife with familiar faces such as Pikachu and SpongeBob.

Not surprisingly, that policy gave Hollywood fits. Quickly changing course, OpenAI tweaked its algorithm to reject prompts that clearly reference copyrighted IP. A handful of high-profile Sora members have used its Cameo feature to create shareable AI versions of themselves, including iJustine, Logan Paul, Mark Cuban, and OpenAI’s own Sam Altman. They’re everywhere on the service. But with other current celebs off the table, the Sora-obsessed turned to one of the few remaining available sources of cultural touchstones: dead people.

That too has proven controversial. Most notably, the daughters of George Carlin, Martin Luther King Jr., Robin Williams, and Malcolm X have all decried the use of Sora to create synthetic videos of their fathers. “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” wrote Zelda Williams on Instagram. “If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop.”

I am sympathetic to their angst. In 2021, a genealogy site called MyHeritage presaged the Sora era by launching a feature called Deep Nostalgia that let you turn old family photographs into brief videos. Out of curiosity, I uploaded a photo of a deceased relative. The moment I saw the results, I regretted having done so. Being constantly exposed to AI simulacrums of your parent created by random strangers must be agonizing.

In response to concerns about bad-taste AI resurrections, OpenAI told The Washington Post’s Tatum Hunter and Drew Harwell that it would allow representatives of the “recently deceased” to block Sora depictions. But the company didn’t specify what it considered to be recent.

Whatever its definition, it’s not going to make everyone happy. The aforementioned famous fathers died anywhere from 1965 (Malcolm X) to 2014 (Williams). They surely won’t fall under a recency exception. Yet the old bit of wisdom “tragedy plus time equals comedy”—which apparently originated with another dead person, comedian Steve Allen—doesn’t always hold true. It depends on the context.

Even more than a decade later, Robin Williams’s death by suicide still feels like an incalculable tragedy. I have not run across any videos of him on Sora, and would prefer I never do. But I don’t feel the same way about Queen Elizabeth II, who made it to 96 and was spry until her 2022 passing. Actually, I thoroughly enjoyed a jag of Sora remixes that began with a clip of her praising the cheese puffs at Costco (“delightfully orange”) and went on to show her relishing other delicacies in various venues around the world.

Some of these clips made me LOL, not figuratively but literally. In fact, the only reason I peruse Sora at all is because an overwhelming percentage of the items in my feed are fanciful and at least aspirationally funny. AI slop of the sort that strives—however clumsily—for realism is scarce on the service. The same is hardly true on other social networks such as Facebook and TikTok, which are infested with machine-generated kindhearted celebrities and cute animals.

I’m not saying that Sora is consistently riotous. I’ve scrolled through a lot of videos of MLK—and Mister Rogers, Bob Ross, and others—in which the only point is that they’re mouthing some anodyne term they wouldn’t have used, or talking about Sora itself. That gets tiresome fast, and makes me at least slightly queasy. It might even be slop. It’s just not the sum total of Sora.

I have not been above making my own Sora videos depicting the departed. Inspired by the fact that Orson Welles once recorded a radio commercial for frozen peas, I prompted for a video depicting him filming such an ad. It came out entertaining, in part because Sora’s version of Welles reminded me of the late John Candy’s wonderful impression of him. Other users remixed the clip into ones showing Welles endorsing everything from twine to camp chairs, starring less and less convincing approximations of the legendary actor-director. Maybe you had to be there. But I found it to be a rewarding if minor act of collaborative creativity, not a regrettable coarsening of the internet.

All in all, encouraging people to channel their AI-video-generating energy into clips that are playful, genuinely social, and cordoned off from reality, as Sora does, seems like a positive development to me. Still, I try to show grace toward the feelings of others and would accept more restrictive policies on the use of deceased celebrities. Maybe the service could permit them only if nobody alive ever met the person in question. Cleopatra and Abraham Lincoln would pass that test; Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein would not. (That’s before you get to the fact that the estates of some celebrities have deals with licensing companies that probably aren’t thrilled with Sora’s unauthorized use, such as CMG Worldwide, which represents the Monroe and Einstein estates.)

If nothing else, building new guardrails around specific categories of famed individuals no longer with us would be an interesting challenge for some engineer at OpenAI. I can’t see the company investing much effort in it. But in a strange way, it’s done the world a favor by forcing us to confront questions like this while the stakes remain relatively low. AI is only going to get better at deepfaking people, famous and otherwise. Better to figure out how we feel about that now, before the synthetic dead folks are truly indistinguishable from the real thing.

You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.

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