Last week I watched my nephew generate a video of Pikachu doing backflips on the beach. Two months later, that same feature got nuked from orbit when Hollywood lawyers came knocking. Welcome to the Sora feed philosophy – where anti-addiction design meets the harsh reality of intellectual property law.
OpenAI launched their standalone iOS app in October 2025 with all the fanfare of a unicorn IPO. The numbers looked spectacular initially:
- Hit 1 million downloads faster than ChatGPT
- Reached #1 on the U.S. App Store
- 100,000 downloads on day one
- Internal employees reportedly making "new friends" through the platform
But here's where it gets interesting. By January 2026, installs dropped 45% to just 1.2 million. Consumer spending fell off a cliff. What happened?
<> The switch from opt-out to opt-in copyright policy reduced legal threats but hurt adoption, as IP-based content fueled early viral growth./>
Turns out people really enjoyed making SpongeBob and Pikachu do ridiculous things. Who could have predicted that? When OpenAI shifted from their original "ask forgiveness, not permission" copyright approach to a restrictive opt-in model, the fun police won. The viral IP-based content that drove early adoption vanished faster than a startup's runway.
The Feed That Fights Your Dopamine
Credit where it's due – OpenAI's feed philosophy genuinely tries to break the doom-scrolling addiction cycle. Their algorithm explicitly avoids optimizing for "time spent," instead prioritizing:
1. Active participation over passive scrolling
2. Natural language steering ("show me more creative remixes")
3. Content from followed users and connections
4. Safety compliance and wellbeing polls
The Character Cameo feature lets users upload videos of pets or people to generate customizable AI characters. Want your dog to star in an action movie? Done. Your cat as a space explorer? Easy. It's genuinely clever – when it's not being sued into oblivion.
Reality Check: The Competition Heats Up
While OpenAI wrestled with copyright lawyers, Google's Gemini Nano Banana and Meta AI's Vibes video tools started eating their lunch. The 45% user drop wasn't just about IP restrictions – it was about being outmaneuvered while fighting legal battles.
The segregated AI-only approach protects human creators short-term, but it also creates a content ghetto. When your platform can only show AI-generated videos, you're limiting the very network effects that make social platforms sticky.
The Safety Theater Problem
OpenAI loaded Sora with enough guardrails to make a helicopter parent proud:
- Teen limits on daily generations
- Stricter character permissions for minors
- Human moderators for bullying detection
- Parental controls via ChatGPT integration
- Proactive blocking of "harmful" content
But here's the cynical reality: over-restriction kills creativity. When users can't remix popular characters or reference cultural touchstones, the platform becomes as sterile as a corporate training video.
The technical execution is solid – natural language-instructed recommender algorithms powered by LLMs represent genuine innovation. But innovation means nothing if lawyers kill your most engaging features.
My Bet
Sora's standalone app will pivot to enterprise/educational markets within 18 months. The consumer social play is dead – killed by copyright paranoia and competition from platforms that can show all types of content, not just AI-generated videos. OpenAI will quietly fold the best features back into ChatGPT and call it "strategic consolidation." The real winners? Google and Meta, who watched OpenAI burn through goodwill and user growth while they built competing tools without the baggage.
