Sora Losers

A Generation Gap

If you followed, earlier in the year, the debacle around the disastrous roll out of Google Gemini then you might be forgiven for thinking that AI generated pictures are all Afro Caribbean SS guards, female Popes, and Asian Founding Fathers.

But for people like me, AI image generation is actually pretty useful.

This year Substack introduced its own handy tool which allows users to create AI generated pictures to illustrate articles. And now I use that.

Just write a description in the prompt, press ‘Generate’ and sit back as a million servers across a hundred countries get your request slightly, and sometimes hilariously, wrong.

It’s free, and easy to use. And yeah, a bit hit and miss sometimes. But it’s only getting better.

Even the boundaries of AI video generation are constantly being expanded.

Search YouTube for ‘1950s style’ AI generated versions of trailers for classic movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Alien and you’ll see some of the fun you can have.

If you, like most normal people, enjoy gloriously over saturated technicolour, shonky visuals, super gravely male voiceovers, and impossibly glamorous starlets with old fashioned boobs. You’re in for a treat.

I’ve linked one below.

Again. These videos are a bit rough around the edges. (Don’t look at the fingers! Where did HE appear from? And what exactly is going on with those creepy eyes?) But this is a new technology. And the potential is clear.

And now we have Sora, the new AI generating tool from OpenAI. The company behind homework busting, dissertation scribbling app, Chat GPT.

(Yep, yet another company originally founded by progressive hate figure, the amazing engineer, entrepreneur and polymath, Elon Musk. Does the real world Iron Man never sleep?)

Sora represents a generational advance in AI generated videos, and as the internet’s smoothest, and best tech reviewer, Marquess Brownlee explains in the video below, it is currently the worst it will ever be. It can only improve over time.

But if you were hoping to get your hands on Sora, perhaps to create your very own home made porn tasteful landscape scenes, then tough luck losers.

Because though my American readers already have access to it right now.

Sora is not available in Britain or the EU. Where it is currently banned.

It seems our bosses don’t think we, the little people, can be trusted with the future.

Of course they don’t put it quite like that. According to the Guardian,

OpenAI is still working through compliance requirements with the Online Safety Act in the UK and the Digital Services Act and GDPR in the EU.

So there’s not telling when Sora, and other cutting edge AI tools will ever be approved for UK users.

My guess is never.

The UK’s draconian Online Safety Act is enforced by the communications regulator Ofcom.

I’m no expert, but if memory serves, Ofcom was originally set up in the early 2000s to do little more than stop anything too mucky, sweary, or naughty corrupting the vulnerable minds of Channel 4 viewers.

But over the last twenty years Ofcom has somehow grown, morphed, and metastasised into broadcasting’s political commissar, responsible for speech policing the entire internet.

Ever vigilant to the threat from for free thought, scepticism, dissent, and now, innovation.

Ofcom recently sent an open letter to digital service providers reminding them of the potential benefits terrifying dangers of generative AI.

And like so many leftist captured, fear-mongering institutions, it wasted no time in invoking as typical, the most extreme possible edge cases.

Immediately linking generative AI like Sora, Midjourney and Google Gemini to a litany of dead children.

It was heavy handed, sinister, manipulative, and crass.

Like using September 11th as a justification for banning going on holiday. And tall buildings.

Because

‘That’s the only way we can stop a tragedy like this EVER happening again!’

Look, I’m certainly not suggesting a free for all.

Of course, generative AI presents our overburdened society with a whole fresh set of problems. Deep fakes. Identity theft. Copyright infringement. Abuse of someone’s likeness.

All need addressing. But ultimately generative AI is a tool.

And yes tools can be harmful. As Keir Starmer’s father knows only too well.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them. We don’t shy away from using power drills because they are potentially more dangerous than screwdrivers.

And sorry conservatives, I know Artificial Intelligence is modern, new, and scary, but in this case, we need to embrace the future, seize the opportunity, learn, adapt, and change.

Or risk being left behind. Again.

Which is exactly what’s going to happen. Because of course on this issue, like pretty much all others, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is determined to lash a sinking, shrinking, self immolating UK to the regulatory mast of the innovation crushing, growth smothering, failing, flailing EU.

But don’t take my word for the sorry state of EU competitiveness. The EU’s own Mario Draghi has recently released a report pointing out that

“there is no EU company with a market capitalisation over EUR 100 billion that has been set up from scratch in the last fifty years, while all six US companies with a valuation above EUR 1 trillion have been created in this period.”

The EU is the club of do nothing, make nothing, invent nothing, innovate nothing nations. A club which Starmer is achingly desperate for Britain to rejoin.

Because his long term plan is, even now in 2024, is exactly the same as it has been since June 24th 2016.

To deny the largest democratic vote in our country’s history, (election denial is bad when the mindless MAGA plebs do it, but it’s good, virtuous and literally ‘Saving Our Democracy ’ when we do it.) overturn Brexit, and take us back into the European Union’s sclerotic, smothering, ossified embrace.

And no. This is not some Brexiteer fantasy. He’s already busy ‘negotiating’ the terms of our (latest) surrender.

As Donald Trump heads back to the White House promising to unleash, entrepreneurialism, deregulation, dynamism, and innovation. Starmer has made clear his determination to closely shadow the high regulation, low growth, precautionary principle EU, and race off in the opposite direction.

It’s like Sir Keir is a passenger on a plane that’s hurtling towards the ground, it is on fire, has no engines, and one of the wings has fallen off.

Between the EU and the US, he has the choice of either strapping on a parachute and leaping out the door into the unknown. Or sitting down in Economy, popping on a seatbelt, and hoping for the best.

Obviously Starmer has opted for the seat belt. Because in his view, it’s safer.

Regardless. That plane is going down. And Starmer is hell bent on taking us all down with it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to complete this post by writing the phrase

‘Keir Starmer on a burning airliner with only one wing’ into Substack’s AI image generator.

I promise I’ll use whatever it first comes back with, to illustrate this article.

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Thanks for reading Low Status Opinions.

Christmas is coming. 🎄I might post a ‘Best of the Year’ next week, but this is it for 2024’s original posts.

It’s been a great year on Substack.

I’m incredibly grateful to all of you have continued to support me over the last twelve months. Thanks for coming.

I need to think where I take LSO next year. I feel a crossroads coming.

In the meantime please continue to share my work. It’s literally the only way I can grow.

If you’re not already a subscriber please sign up for these posts. It’s free, unless you don’t want it to be, I have no paywalls, but I do put a lot of work into these articles.

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Thanks again for coming. And if you’re not around next week,

Merry Christmas!

ATB LSO