By Wilson Rothman

OpenAI's Sora app is a wondrous invention. You type in words and, in just a few minutes, out comes a 10-second video that you can share.

It makes me feel more creative than I've felt in a long while. It also makes me feel very, very lonely.

When I gained access to Sora -- currently available by invite only -- I started out my playtime with random, crazy prompts: "Rick and Morty" in claymation. Jesus and Elvis, painted on velvet, down at the bar. (Hey, it's a country song!) Martin Luther King Jr. on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. (Copyright guardrails mean Sora won't let you prompt "Star Trek," but just see what happens when you type "1960s vintage starship.")

Some fun, mostly meh.

So I decided to surrender some of my privacy, sharing my face and voice to make what OpenAI calls a "cameo." I was immediately hooked.

There I was, dribbling basketballs like a Globetrotter, diving through inter-dimensional portals, riding on the back of a galloping dinosaur in an explosive train heist. Me, a mild-mannered, bespectacled newspaperman, suddenly able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

I wasn't alone in my fascination. OpenAI's head of Sora posted on X Wednesday that the app had hit 1 million downloads in less than five days, faster than its ChatGPT chatbot reached that milestone. ( News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.)

I've been thinking about the samizdat from David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." The secretly shared videotape was so satisfying that people literally died watching it, so frozen in their bliss that they forgot about their own human needs.

I used to think the closest we got to that was TikTok, an unending (yes, "infinite") feed of brain candy, algorithmically tuned to each individual to maximize satisfaction. After a week with Sora, I've realized that TikTok, with its millions of people, places and things, can't get you to the ultimate payoff that AI video-generation tools can: a whole lot more you.

Despite the "social" in social media, we always think of ourselves as the main character. We like other people's posts in the hope they like ours. Until now, there's been a limitation: You actually had to get a good picture or video to win praise.

You spend thousands on travel, then you (or your patient loved ones) spend hours shooting you in front of fountains, glaciers, mountains and ancient ruins, usually surrounded by other people trying to do the same. On a family trip to Key West, the southernmost point of the continental U.S. was so mobbed; we could only take a picture of the mob. Ditto Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue.

OpenAI saves us the trips. This tool can put me, myself and I in every video, every situation, no matter how realistic or surreal. You can even share your creations with others on the Sora app, with a TikTok-like interface.

The question is: Who wants to watch someone else in all those scenarios? My dad group chat is full of creative, funny guys, and believe me, they've been making some hilarious Sora videos. But after four or five from each, the yuks start to run out.

It's true, you can add friends' cameos, or allow others to spin up videos that include yours. Appearing in videos with friends can be fun, but eventually even that gets tiring -- or just weird. Maybe I need to wait until more of my friends are on the app.

Still, I keep making ones starring just me, and laughing hard at my silly little misadventures. I stopped sharing most of them, because I know who the target customer really is.

Generative AI already has the power to put us in little boxes, isolated from one another. Why wait for a friend to answer your text when ChatGPT will cheerfully answer right away? Why go through the trouble of making a new friend when you can turn to digital companions embedded in apps like Instagram or X?

These new forms of entertainment are becoming the lake to our Narcissus: You can gaze into your phone and see yourself staring back, having all kinds of thrills, spills and chills.

This reminded me of another writer, Philip K. Dick, whose short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" became the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Total Recall." The premise is that you can "remember" a vacation you never took. You could relax on a beach, win a Super Bowl or become an interplanetary spy.

With Sora, you can do exactly that, in 10-second increments. Soon, your phone might be filled with hundreds of fond memories of things that never happened and places you never went, moments you can sit back and "relive" when there's nobody else around except your AI pals.

Who needs the real world?

Write to Wilson Rothman at wilson.rothman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 10, 2025 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.