OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is getting a taste of his own medicine — or maybe he just enjoys being the butt of the joke.
With the release of the company’s latest video generator Sora 2 this week, Altman’s fans have rushed to churn out absurd clips that either outright mock him, or place him in a medley of bizarre scenarios that feel broadcasted from a different reality.
The tide of Altman Sora clips is so overwhelming that there’re even entire Twitter pages dedicated to collecting these fever-dream oddities.
One AI video depicts Altman as some cartoonishly evil Hunger Games-esque overlord, speaking to a coliseum crowd while he watches contestants fight over “a single bowl of slop” at the “annual nourishment trials.”
“Keep cameras on Sector 3, let them feel the weight of scarcity, I want a replay on that throw,” machine-guns an uncanny approximation of Altman’s voice in about two seconds.
Another video shows Altman recording himself as he steals drawings from the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli’s headquarters — a poke at when it became all the rage to generate selfies that garishly imitated the style of Ghibli films using ChatGPT’s new image capabilities, along with the broader criticism that these AI models were trained on artists’ work without permission.
“Free art, baby!” a grinning Altman exclaims.
And those are the less weird ones. Others have Altman as a disembodied head singing in a toilet (a reference to the Skibidi Toilet web series), Altman dressed in a cat suit at the office, Altman as a “Grand Theft Auto” character, Altman encountering deep sea leviathans, Altman visiting a doctor who is also Sam Altman, Altman running away from a mob, Altman wearing a dress and riding a horse through New York while firing a gun that dispenses money, Altman begging for GPUs through a doorbell camera, and Altman plodding through a dreamscape ripped from “The Lorax.”
“It is way less strange to watch a feed full of memes of yourself than I thought it would be,” the real Altman reacted on Wednesday. “Not sure what to make of this.”
The trend’s a testament to the cultural power that OpenAI commands — at least in tech circles, whose purview grows ever wider.
Altman is a big reason why. He constantly tweets in a millennial, all-lowercase style. And he’s been an active participant in past trends centered on his company’s products, encouraging others to join in on the fun. During the Ghibli-fad, for example, Altman tweeted a joke about it and changed his profile picture to a depiction of himself as a young Ghibli protagonist. It’s still his photo to this day.
He’s doing the same thing here. To commemorate Sora 2’s launch, OpenAI shared a video generated with Sora that showed Altman announcing the new tool, which was widely panned for being soulless and uncanny. Then to add some levity to the occasion, he shared a humorous promotional video an engineer made with Sora that shows both of them on a slapstick quest to get to Sora’s launch on time.
All that’s to say that Altman almost certainly knew this would happen. And if he wanted to, he could’ve prevented his likeness from being spit out by his own AI. Maybe he’s starting to have second thoughts on whether the attention it generated was worth his own sanity.
Ultimately, the OpenAI chief may have bigger things to worry about, as far as Sora goes — like its ability to fake convincing videos of people committing crimes, or being an unfolding content moderation nightmare.
Certain clips even raise a specter that surely worries Altman: that copyright holders could pursue legal action against OpenAI for playing fast and loose with their intellectual property.
“I hope Nintendo doesn’t sue us,” an AI Altman says with a grimace in one video, as dozens of Pokemon bound across a field behind him.
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