There has been a recent deluge of generative AI videos featuring uncannily fresh-faced teens waxing nostalgic about how much better the world was during the ’80s and ’90s. As the AI youths smize and show off their period-specific haircuts, the clips cut to dreamlike footage of sun-drenched cul-de-sacs and vintage cars while songs like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and tracks inspired by the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack play in the background. It’s all very weird — like bragging that you peaked in high school.
As strange as the videos are, there is a relatively easy to understand logic at work here. On one level, this content appeals to people’s fascination with the past — especially younger viewers whose lack of firsthand experience with these eras can make it easier to overlook the anachronistic details generative AI models are prone to including in their video output. But these videos are also conjuring an idealized vision of the past where everyone is beautiful, most people are white, and they all have inexplicable knowledge about how stressful life in 2025 is going to be. This kind of nostalgia is a neocon fantasy for people allergic to cracking open history books.
But it’s much harder to parse the reasoning behind some of the more absurd gen AI clips popping up that feature long-dead celebrities doing things they never actually did. There are countless videos of stars behaving in ways that don’t map onto reality: Michael Jackson stealing fried chicken, Stephen Hawking competing at the X Games, Einstein becoming a UFC champion, Bob Ross getting busted by the cops for… painting murals without a permit(?), Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana fighting in a WWE promo match. The rampant racism, ableism, and sexism depicted in the clips makes them all feel like gutter-grade Family Guy cutaway gags. But on the Sora app, this brand of garbage “comedy” seems to be the thing that everybody is into.
For some reason, Fred Rogers is often the focus of these clips where you can see him rapping with Tupac, perving on women like Marilyn Monroe, and showing off a closet full of guns. None of these deepfakes are especially convincing and most of them still have watermarks indicating that they were created with OpenAI’s Sora model. But as terrible as this slop is, it’s everywhere, and the view counts suggest that — regardless of whether it’s out of love or hate or ambivalence — 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 fairly obvious what OpenAI stands to gain from flooding the internet with Sora-generated videos. The content is another way for the company to promote its technology and normalize the idea of people clocking in at the slop factory as a way of entertaining themselves. That seems to be the endgame for the Sora app, where generating a video is as simple as typing a few sentences into a prompt box. OpenAI and its competitors all want to be perceived as wellsprings 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 people 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 they have in order to convince their gullible fans that mainlining slop from a trough is cool, actually. But when you watch enough of this stuff (which isn’t a lot), what becomes clear is how deeply unimaginative and unfunny it is. You also get the distinct sense that none of these creators have the ability to imagine things beyond “what if this dead celebrity did some buckwild shit that would have given their agents heart attacks?”
The substance of these videos speaks volumes about the current state of gen AI. But it says even more about how this technology’s output has been influenced by the gradual death of monoculture.
Though some have argued that society felt more cohesive when everyone watched the same TV shows and films — the mythical work watercooler conversation — monoculture was not without its drawbacks. That was a time when the pop cultural decision-making power was concentrated within a select pool 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 gave people a way to work around those gatekeepers.
It’s not a coincidence that many gen AI founders have leaned heavily into the idea that their products are designed to empower people and “democratize” the creation of art. That was the promise anyway. But when you scroll through the Sora app and see dozens of videos iterating on the same basic prompts like “celebrity or animal has been pulled over by the police under suspicion of drunk driving,” it’s hard not to see the platform as a place where users are encouraged to double down on familiar archetypes instead of making something truly original, or even remotely interesting.
Where is the “good” gen AI content, exactly?
Aside from the Sam Altmans of the world who stand to directly benefit from this content, it’s difficult to tell who these kinds of videos are for and what they are supposed to find funny about them. There’s an argument to be made that the nonsense of it all meant to appeal to Zoomers and the Gen Alpha kids who have claimed brainrot as a part of their identity. But the humorous element of these videos doesn’t exactly work if you don’t have an understanding of who these AI-generated people are. Without that context, the punchlines become much uglier. Fred Rogers flirting with Marilyn Monroe is now “here’s an old man being a sex pest”; Stephen Hawking is now “this guy has ALS and uses a wheelchair.”
Though AI boosters insist that this technology can generate meaningful art, the Sora app really illustrates the formulaic derivativeness that makes these types of videos easy to dismiss as slop. It all feels like content that has been engineered with social media virality in mind as opposed to creative human expression. These clips may rack up a staggering number of views online, but “number go up” is not a reliable metric to determine whether they will have any real staying power.
Insisting that gen AI videos of Jeffrey Epstein being perp walked out of a courthouse is “the future of entertainment” or reflective of young people’s taste when it comes to media is a vicious insult to their intelligence. That idea suggests that people don’t, or can’t, appreciate quality or see their own attention as something that should be worked for. We are constantly being told that this technology is getting better every day, and the “good” gen AI content is right around the corner. So where is the good stuff? How many more billions of dollars do we need to pump into this AI hype cycle before it produces something worth thinking about or remembering for more than the moment?
This all feels much more like a flashy trend meant to convince people the gen AI is worth getting excited about. The videos’ novelties feel destined to wane rather quickly because there are so many of them floating around. So far, the only promise AI has fulfilled is its scale. But that also means we tire of it more quickly because we’re constantly inundated. And once there’s a new, shiny gen AI fad for folks to fixate on, it’s easy to imagine everyone forgetting that this moment of slop ever happened.
