‘AI decline’ from Sora 2 poses ‘existential’ threat
By Sam Blum | Published: 2025-10-30 20:33:00 | Source: Inc.com
Could AI-generated videos of celebrities upend the old guard of the creator economy? That’s the question posed in the recent lawsuit filed by video messaging app Cameo against OpenAI – the latest legal action taken against the AI tyrant this year.
The latest version of OpenAI’s video creation app Sora 2 includes a feature that allows users to create synthetic video of themselves on demand. To promote the feature, photos of celebrities, such as investor Mark Cuban and creator Jake Paul, are already available on the app, enabling select Sora users to flood their friends’ inboxes with personalized greetings from the rich and famous.
For Cameo, the newest feature in Sora 2 is particularly troublesome — largely because it’s also called Cameo, says Steve Galanis, CEO of the creator economy app, which was founded in Chicago in 2017. “I’m not worried about the competition. If this model outperforms ours, I don’t like to lose, but that’s OK,” What we’re specifically fighting against is its naming. What they did, so forget the technology, forget the business model
The complaint, filed Tuesday in federal district court in California, says that by using the same name for its new feature, Sora 2 poses an “imminent, existential, and potentially lethal threat” to Cameo’s business.
Although the Sora 2’s Cameo app is still only in beta and available via invitation to users in select markets, videos of synthetic celebrities have taken social media by storm since the app was updated on September 30. The wave of fake videos has thrown Galanis into the kind of confusion that is becoming more common in the age of deepfakes and online deception. He says customer service queries for Sora 2’s Cameo that users entered into ChatGPT serve up links back to the original Cameo.
Galanis claims that the Sora 2 update caused social media users to falsely attribute synthetic celebrity videos to Cameo. “From a customer confusion perspective, as these videos go viral, people are tagging Cameo on TikTok and Instagram with these Sora videos.” Cameo’s president argues that this problem will only get worse if the product is rolled out globally. “The millions of raw, AI-driven videos that appear in our search results could be existentially important to our business.”
The complaint seeks an unspecified amount of injunctive monetary relief, and alleges a variety of offenses, including trademark dilution, trademark infringement, and unfair competition. Cameo sent a cease and desist letter to OpenAI earlier this month, but Sora’s celebrity feature is still being released under the same name, Galanis says.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has led his company to prominence in this space, with the company reportedly preparing to… $1 trillion IPO. “We will make some good decisions and some mistakes, but we will take feedback and try to fix the bugs very quickly,” Altman wrote on his personal blog earlier this month in the wake of the Sora update.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Inc.: “We are reviewing the complaint, but we do not agree that anyone can claim exclusive ownership of the word ‘cameo.'”
“They were bad actors here,” Galanis says. “The genie is not going back into the bottle. These technologies are here to stay.” “But I think when it’s presented in a really disgusting way, it turns a lot of people off,” Galanis tells Inc.
Ironically, Galanis says he sent the complaint to OpenAI’s lead producer ChatGPT to evaluate the strength of Cameo’s case. “It’s an interesting read,” he says with a smirk.
(tags for translation) veil
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