Real or fake? How OpenAI’s Sora app ‘erodes confidence’ in everything we see online

The videos on Sora are mesmerising – think Queen Elizabeth at a pub, an alien at McDonald’s – but they are leading to an erosion of trust

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All the videos on Sora, a new short video app released by ChatGPT maker OpenAI, are AI-generated. Do they undermine our ability to discern what is real online? Photo: dpa

Published: 5:15pm, 2 Nov 2025

Scrolling through Sora can feel a bit like entering a real-life multiverse.

Michael Jackson performs stand-up; the alien from the Predator movies flips burgers at McDonald’s; a home security camera captures a moose crashing through a glass door; and Queen Elizabeth dives from the top of a table at a pub.

Such improbable realities, fantastical futures and absurdist videos are the mainstay of Sora, a new short video app released by ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The continuous stream of hyperreal, short-form videos generated by artificial intelligence is mind-bending and mesmerising at first. But it quickly triggers a new need to second-guess every piece of content as real or fake.

“The biggest risk with Sora is that it makes plausible deniability impossible to overcome, and that it erodes confidence in our ability to discern authentic from synthetic,” said Sam Gregory, an expert on deepfakes and executive director at Witness, a human rights organisation.

“Individual fakes matter, but the real damage is a fog of doubt settling over everything we see.”

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