Sora helped me create a fake YouTube channel that got 21,400 views
By Thomas Smith | Published: 2025-10-27 09:30:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
The types of videos that do well on YouTube Shorts are frustratingly predictable: cute cats, heated arguments, crazy stunts, and lots of good old-fashioned footage of people with minor injuries.
The problem is that the real world only produces a few epic failures. Of the small number that do occur, an even smaller number are captured on video. Think of all the arguments made by plane passengers and wedding cakes that have never been recorded or published!
Enter Sora. OpenAI’s new video generator is hyper-realistic, and has been explicitly trained on billions of hours of short vertical video. This is what makes it incredibly good at creating the kinds of short, engaging videos that grab our attention and play with our emotions.
How do I know? I used Sora to create a completely fake YouTube channel, filled with AI-generated versions of the types of videos I see on YouTube Shorts and TikTok all the time.
It took me about 30 minutes to build and cost me nothing. In less than a week, it’s had 21,400 views and counting. Let’s dig.
Decline by bucket
Accessing OpenAI’s Sora social network is difficult. The platform launched as an invite-only app, and despite this hurdle, it quickly ballooned to over 5 million active users. It is growing faster than ChatGPT.
Once you’re in Sora, using Sora 2 (the actual video creation model behind it) is incredibly easy. Simply write your video concept, and Sora 2 will write the script, create about 11 seconds of hyper-realistic vertical video, and even add synchronized audio.
The app suffers from beautiful cinematic shots. In my early tests, the Google competitor Veo 3.1 – which the tech giant launched to compete with the Sora 2 – did much better at this.
But what Sora 2 succeeds at is producing short, emotionally charged vertical videos. The model was likely designed to power the video social network Sora, and it shows.
I decided to test the appeal of Sora 2’s videos by moving them to a traditional short video platform so they could compete in the real world against actual vertical clips.
To that end, I opened up Sora 2 and started randomly writing down ideas for emotionally hot videos.
I quickly found that the Sora 2 could work with very detailed or very vague ideas. In one video, she used ChatGPT to write a detailed script for a complex scenario: a woman makes a phone call in order to reconnect with her estranged mother.
The Sora 2 video gets the job done. From the subtle jumps to the swelling music (again, entirely AI-generated), it’s 11 seconds of surprisingly powerful little cinema.
For the other videos, I took a much simpler approach, letting the Sora 2 run with my primary router. The text “Two roommates are arguing, cell phone video” resulted in the following:
The entry “Man accidentally knocks over giant, beautiful wedding cake and people are shocked, realistic mobile phone video” produced this gem, my favorite Sora video yet:
In total, I created eight videos. Each took about 60 seconds to create. Using Sora 2 within the Sora app is currently free. Basically, the system generates an AI regression by the bucket. Your task is simply to give the model direction and collect its output.
The cat fails at arbitrage
You can deploy your AI directly on Sora itself. But I wasn’t content to stop there. Instead, I wanted to see how these videos would perform in the real world. So I went to YouTube and started uploading them to the YouTube Shorts section of the platform, which is basically YouTube’s version of TikTok.
Instead of starting a channel entirely from scratch, I used… Neglected, as I previously posted videos of my dog, Lance. There was no traffic to speak of, and only a few videos, most of which were uploaded to share with friends and family.
The channel looked like a perfect blank page. It wasn’t exactly new — I was worried that YouTube might flag and delete a brand new channel that started posting AI content immediately — but it wasn’t developed at all. I could thus test what would happen if an existing YouTuber suddenly started posting nothing but Sora’s cheerful nonsense.
I have uploaded all my new videos. Most importantly, I didn’t want to fool anyone, so I left Sora’s raised watermarks in place. It also fully revealed that the videos were created using artificial intelligence Edited content tag on YouTube.
It didn’t seem to matter. As I write this about a week later, my videos have already received 21,400 views. Poor little Lance’s best video has only gotten 2,600 views in the three years since it was published. My favorite Sora video – the wedding cake falling clip – has had 12,000 views and counting.
Containment is impossible
AI-generated videos won’t pose much of a threat to the traditional social media landscape if they stay put. You can go to Sora for AI-generated fails, and TikTok or YouTube Shorts for original fails.
My experience proves that this containment is unrealistic. It is very easy to transfer videos from Sora to other vertical video platforms. Despite the disclosures and watermarks, users seem to interact with the AI videos as much as they do with the real thing.
The Sora social network is also a go-to experience when it comes to running the Sora 2 model. In its new API, OpenAI gives developers direct access to Sora 2, including customizable video lengths and aspect ratios.
Videos created through the API cost $0.10 per second. They do not have distinct watermarks. It only took me about 20 minutes to program the integration in Python, and I was building fully automated AI for about $1 per video, at scale.
All of this means that YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are about to be inundated by an unstoppable deluge of these things. YouTube implicitly acknowledged this when it introduced the modified content tag over a year ago.
At the time, AI video was so unusable that YouTubers were confused as to why anyone would need to reveal the origins of AI content. Now we know.
For consumers, the message is clear. From now on, don’t trust anything you see on vertical video apps. That amazing bottle clip or that delightfully exciting Neighbors fight clip may have emerged not from real life, but from Sora 2’s bottomless bucket.
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(Tags for translation)Artificial Intelligence
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