New influencers are turning Artificial Intelligence prompts into paydays.
When OpenAI launched its Sora 2 text-to-video service on September 30, the public wasn’t ready for the unhinged world it unleashed.
Martin Luther King Jr. was resurrected to DJ, SpongeBob SquarePants was dressed as Adolf Hitler and Jesus appeared to be taking selfies in a wave of what can largely be dismissed as AI slop.
Ariadna Jacob (wearing the Creator Genius tee shirt) poses with her crew of creators (from left) Shane Atklins and Erin Parrish. Hovering on the sign above is Will Cruttenden. The silver surfer is a creation of Keigo Matsumaru. This image was prompted with Creator Genius on Sora. Courtesy of Sora
Now, after barely a month of full-scale operation, some of the app’s reality-blurring users are finding ways to make more engaging content.
Plausible videos show implausible scenarios such as a woman making a wedding dress out of bacon, a man flying through the air with a cat on his back and a dude getting stuck in a pool filled with purple Jell-O.
All of it is AI generated, including the people, who simply scan themselves into the app and it does the rest. The technology is growing faster and getting better than the average citizen can keep pace with.
Most internet and social media users are already being exposed to AI generated content, by Sora or other programs such as Google Gemini and Midjourney, which spread to X, Instagram and TikTok the moment they are published.
The actual and artificial merge in ways that become difficult to discern. The pool of Jell-O the man falls into is clearly not real, but it’s harder to notice that the entire luxury mansion around it is also completely generated by AI.
That mansion would be the Sora House – although easily mistaken for a brick-and-mortar digs in Beverly Hills, it is actually completely digital and does not exist in the physical world.
Shane Atkins landed his first Sora brand sponsorship deal and designed the Sora House. Courtesy of shane atkins
Shane Atkins rides the roller coaster outside of the luxe Sora House. It’s cool, but none of it is real.
One of its ‘inhabitants’ is Shane Atkins, who created it with prompts written into Sora 2.
“My friends and I – some of them are from college and others I know from LA – always talked about living in a house together and creating content,” Atkins, who recently graduated from college with an advertising degree and first made a name for himself as a gaming influencer on TikTok, told The Post.
As would be anticipated in the world of Sora, Atkins’ house features furniture made of cake and a bedroom that leads into an apparent coal mine. He can be seen showing off a ferocious tiger on a chain as a pet – don’t mind the big-cat’s claw marks on the wall (the tech can fix those back in the blink of an eye).
Back in the physical world, Atkins still lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, but he has a shot at his AI skills helping him to strike it big.
Shane Atkins and the Koby pooch in their first brand-sponsored video.
“Two months ago, nobody even knew about Sora. Now I’m representing creators who are thinking about making Sora videos for a living. It moves so quickly,” said Ariadna Jacob, who helped break TikTok stars such as super-influencer Charli D’Amelio, who has 156 million followers on TikTok and 42 million on Instagram.
She’s already helped Atkins, who posts as shanesnipez, land a deal for pet content – for him and his AI dog, of course.
Ariadna Jacob used Sora to help raise investment money for her tech start-up, Creator Genius. In this video, she is depicted winning the US Open and announcing that her company is raising $1.2 million in investor funding. Five days later, she closed her first investor check.
Jacob – whose TikTok career took a hit after a New York Times article printed what she described as “false and disparaging statements” in a lawsuit, which she eventually dropped – sees Sora 2 as the future of advertising. Why? Partly because its cheap; partly because it’s flexible.
Compelling TikTok material requires input from real people and is usually set in the real world, so it can be expensive to produce, she explains. In the AI generated world, companies see exactly what they are getting before a penny is spent.
“The possibilities are endless,” Jacob, who posts as littlemissjacob, told The Post “We’re able to draft a prompt, make the video and share it with the client before it goes live.” Any aspect they don’t like, from the color of a pair of curtains to a character’s hairstyle, can instantly be changed.
A giant cat busting through a home is the most viewed video put up by software developer Will “Fancyson” Cruttenden. He succeeds by keeping the prompts simple.
While that may be music to the ears of anyone controlling a corporate ad budget, it leaves those who made the art, wrote the articles and books or produced the media which AI is trained on feeling just a little cold.
“The ultimate goal is never to be as good as the art — the goal is to be good enough to get on the page, get the consumer to use it, and get rid of the worker,” artist Molly Crabapple, who claims her work has been co-opted by AI companies, told Hyperallergic.com.
Outside of the ad realm — and outside of the Sora realm — AI is already being misused to spread videos of fake attacks and bomb scares, crypto scams, propaganda and generally to mislead and deceive viewers.
For Erin Parrish, placing work on Sora can be a financial lifeline and a way for “her children to see [her] and be proud.” Courtesy of Erin Oarrusg
Pimped out in her goldfish-loaded platform shoes, Erin Parrish launched a load of remixes.
The world is on a tricky precipice, but, as the last 25 years have shown us, technology companies, with their “move fast and break things” mentality, don’t wait around.
Already Sora is rewriting the rules of Internet virality, with its video remixing feature. This allows users to have fun by taking an original video and retooling it into something completely new.
People then watch the remixed version and the ones which came before it, tracing back to the original.
One recent blockbuster came from Erin Parrish. She depicted herself knitting with ramen noodles. That was co-opted by some of her Sora followers and reinvented into knitting with centipedes, Sour Patch candies and hair. All told, her videos have 364,000 views.
Knitting with Ramen went viral for Erin Parrish.
One of the remixers substituted bacon for ramen and helped create an echo chamber of virality.
Parrish is a 45-year-old divorced mom who recently bailed out of a failed relationship.
A native of Kansas City, she wound up with relatives in Sydney, Australia, feeling down on her luck. “I had holes in my shoes; I was lying in bed and just wanted to laugh about something,” Parrish, who goes by Erin_Nicole on Sora, told The Post.
She made a video of herself winning a black Porsche on “Price is Right,” and posted it, causing her social media to get pumped up with people congratulating her on the snagged vehicle. In a sign of things to come, despite it being watermarked, her audience failed to realize the video was AI.
Another hit was a clip inspired by one of her favorite movies: “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” depicting her walking down the street, wearing platform shoes with goldfish in them, mimicking a scene from the blaxploitation parody.
Keigo Matsumnau provided Sora prompts that resulted in a lion lit from the inside.
By going deep and detailed with his prompts, Matsumaru generates cinema-worthy offerings.
“I knew it would be good to remix,” she said. “Think of all the things you can put into clear platform shoes.”
For Parrish, Sora gives her something much more valuable than likes: “I just want my children to see me and be proud,” she added to The Post.
Keigo Matsumaru, an AI expert living in Japan, creates sequences that go beyond language. In one a butterfly flutters from a woman’s fingers and trees set off sparks into the sky.
In another, a charging lion seems lit from the inside. For as long as 15 seconds —the maximum time the Sora platform allows per video — viewers are drawn into a fantasy world that would seem believable if it wasn’t so otherworldly.
Will Cruttenden develops software for his career and spend and hour per day putting up Sora videos that have tendency to go viral. Courtesy of Will Cruttenden
A cat and his pals, in this AI creation from Will Cruttenden, are looking for juicy live goldfish.
The AI cat blows up — and so did the video.
His videos have garnered 18 million views, according to non-Sora metrics provided to The Post by a third party. Unlike most creators, Matsumaru, posting as keigo_matsumaru, doesn’t appear himself in any of his videos. He is aiming to achieve what seems cinematic.
For others, the promise of virality is the driving factor. Software developer Will Cruttenden, posting as fancyson, has 19 million views on the app already and says his method is to keep it simple, focusing on ideas that can be easily picked up and remixed.
For example, one of his best videos is a cat napping on a doorstep only to be quietly approached by a mouse placing a stick of dynamite underneath him. It is not insanely original, but it did its job by generating loads of remixes, with the mouse placing various other items under the cat to explode.
“I’m going for the likes and just coming up with what people will want to remix. Right now, I’m thinking of doing something with [what appears to be] security camera footage,” he told The Post.
As the bright AI-led future dawns, Jacob is, of course, bullish about it all.
“Remember that song ‘Video Killed the Radio Star?’ Right now I have an up-and-coming Sora creator and recording artist, Goldie Heart, recording ‘Sora Killed the TikTok Star.’ This song is going to be fire. It’ll be so funny if it goes viral.”
