OpenAI’s Sora Makes Disinformation Extremely Easy and Extremely Real

Hsu, Tiffany, et. al. “OpenAI’s Sora makes disinformation extremely easy and extremely real.” NY Times, 3 Oct. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/technology/sora-openai-video-disinformation.html.

This New York Times article discusses OpenAI’s app Sora, which takes a text prompt or user-uploaded media to generate realistic audio and video clips. Video and audio recordings have come to be considered reliable evidence, maintaining that reliability even through modern advancements in editing. With the realism of these generations, even experts admit to struggling to distinguish real from fake. With such believable AI content in such abundance our own eyes and ears are no longer reliable when it comes to audio or video proof. Furthermore, because of the individual algorithms that feed off of user interaction, falsified AI evidence is reinforcing already potentially misguided and extreme beliefs. Safeguards are touted as being avoidant of using famous people without permission, but has generated dead public figures without an issue. It claims to deny the creation of graphic violence or political content, but it has created images of war and used familiar political voices to narrate party-based propaganda. At the time of the article, Sora was only accessible through invitation from an existing user and didn’t require personal verification of the user or the user’s profile picture.

This article was fascinating to me because of a few different mentions. First, the entire concept that there is some sort of “invitation only” sort of bot/app, like this. It made me wonder who exactly was on that list, and why. I was also really impressed to have a name assigned to the concept of what we refer to in my house as, “that thing they said one time on ancient aliens where you don’t know what’s real and what’s not because everything’s too weird” as “liars dividend”; or the dismissal of accurate information because of the excess of fake info presented in the same light. More than just presenting the box in focus, this article also points out the flaws in the supposed safety claims and how easily they are bypassed.