So far, only a small handful of students at UPrep have Sora AI, the new social media app with exclusively AI-generated content. Nevertheless, the concept for an app like this is a source of excitement for some, and a concern for others.
Sora is a text-to-video artificial intelligence model that was released and developed by OpenAI, the same company that developed ChatGPT. Since the app’s release on Sept. 30, it has amassed over 3 million downloads, 79 percent of which were from the United States, according to a Business of Apps article published on Oct. 21, 2025.
“The thing that I thought was fundamentally powerful about social media was that it’s fairly grassroots and fairly authentic. And it was just actual, authentic slices of people’s lives,” Carl Bergstrom, Professor of Biology at UW said. “Sora is kind of the opposite, right? I mean, there’s nothing authentic about Sora.”
While Bergstrom is a Professor of Biology, he is also an accomplished author who co-wrote a book called “Calling Bullsh*t: the Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World,” where he explored the root of being able to authenticate posts online by yourself.
The Puma Press investigated what it would be like to use Sora AI by asking it to: ‘make me a video of a panda hugging a baby’ or ‘make me a video of Jake Paul wrestling a pug.’ The videos generated were difficult to distinguish from human-made content, although there were telltale signs of AI. What the Puma Press found was the sound was fake and inhuman, and some of the motions were slightly uncoordinated.
“I think the purpose for Sora is to let people be creative with what they make, let people do stuff that you can’t normally do,” Brooks Vernon, a sophomore who recently downloaded Sora, said.
Since Sept. 30, Sora is available only to people who receive an invite, or like senior Avi Kunins who pays for a ChatGPT 5 subscription. Kunins enjoys using the app, but feels he lacks a sense of personal connection to the content and its creator, like he might have on other platforms. Especially due to the fact that the app is exclusive to those who cannot obtain an invitation code.
“I watch a lot of YouTube videos, and I feel like you build a connection to the YouTuber” Kunins said. “In Instagram, you do the same thing, you know the people. You feel like you know them.”
Vernon hasn’t posted anything yet, but spends his time looking at other people’s content and prompting Sora to create his own videos which usually consist of humourful and unrealistic scenes.
“I don’t think I would post anything, just because I don’t know how the people on Sora would react to it,” Vernon said.
Vernon’s fear stems not from the product itself, but from the potential backlash he feels he might receive from how some people would perceive his content.
Sora AIs usage policy prohibits users from creating any harmful content, but this doesn’t stop people from making people say things they might not want to as long as they have the rights to their image.
“Yes, there are some ways around it, sort of, but they do a good job at making sure that the ethical standards are met,” Kunins said.
Upper school English teacher Christina Serkowski fears what would happen if this content were to spread to other social media platforms.
“It is a very different thing to use the likeness of someone real and put words in their mouth. There are all kinds of ways to cause serious harm to people and disseminate video content that is completely false,” Serkowski said. “If it’s not clear to the viewer what they’re seeing, what might be true, our grounding in reality can slip away pretty quickly.”
Serkowski teaches a sci-fi elective, and has had discussions that led to an experimental change in the policy regarding the usage of AI. While she sees AI’s potential in other fields, she is seriously doubtful that its use in education is worth the serious costs.
“There’s always been new technologies that are scary or weird, but as long as we learn to use it properly, we actually work on it, then it could be a great thing,” Kunins said. ”So I think as long as we do the right things for it and take the right steps, it’s going to be a great thing.”
