The obvious social play for OpenAI is to embed collaborative features within ChatGPT, leveraging its utility. Instead, the company launched Sora, a separate entertainment app. This focus on niche content creation over core product utility is a questionable strategy for building a lasting social network.

AI video tools like Sora optimize for high production value, but popular internet content often succeeds due to its message and authenticity, not its polish. The assumption that better visuals create better engagement is a risky product bet, as it iterates on an axis that users may not value.

Ben Thompson argues that ChatGPT succeeded because the creator was also the consumer, receiving immediate, personalized value. In contrast, AI video is created for an audience. He questions whether Sora's easily-made content is compelling enough for anyone other than the creator to watch, posing a major consumption hurdle.

Learning from Instagram's evolution towards passive consumption, the Sora team intentionally designs its social feed to inspire creation, not just scrolling. This fundamentally changes the platform's incentives and is proving successful, with high rates of daily active creation and posting.

If features like the 'like' button were addictive like nicotine, any app with them would create dependency. The failure of countless social media clones proves this false. The truly addictive element is the high-quality, user-generated content, not the platform's UI mechanics.

Sora's rapid decline after a viral launch reveals a critical lesson for media platforms. Because its videos were exportable, its best content was reposted to TikTok and Reels. There, the AI content competed against the best human content on a superior platform, making Sora's dedicated feed experience strictly inferior and unsustainable as a social destination.

Platforms like Sora 2 struggle to retain users as social destinations. The core driver of social networks—the status game tied to authentic, personal representation—is lost when content is known to be AI-generated. These apps function as powerful creator tools for existing platforms, not as new social graphs.

Unlike traditional social media's 1% creator rule, OpenAI's Sora sees 70% of its users actively creating content. This makes the platform a "lean-forward" experience, more akin to an immersive video game than a passive "lean-back" feed like Instagram.

Social apps based entirely on AI content have not yet succeeded as standalone networks. Despite massive initial downloads, users export their creations to platforms like TikTok. The reason is that purely synthetic content lowers the 'emotional stakes,' making it less compelling than human-created media.